Gaea/World Creator workflow
polycounter lvl 3
Hi!
I'm wondering about more precise workflow of Gaea/Work Creator with UE4. I watched some tutorials and I have a feeling (maybe because of my lack of knowledge) that it creates just nice looking landscapes which are cool to render, but hard to work with. I couldn't find even one movie that shows you more than a cool view with huge mountain in the center. And most of the tutorials ends with overscaled landscape imported to engine, because they don't have a comparison to any humanoid mesh.
Tell me if i'm wrong – it's better when you have your own blockout of landscape in UE4 (or any engine) based on gameplay needs and then you start a journey with these landscape softwares. But I couldn't find any film that shows that workflow.
Replies
Well the scale shouldnt be a problem, because you can rescale depending on your project scale in ue4 right?
I think the common workflow is to generate everything in the landscape generator. You have quite alot of freedom in there where you can design it already with gameplay in mind. Not sure if you can import a mesh from ue4 and work on that. I think importing a hieght map should be possible though.
This should help you with the scale:
Whether or not you would benefit from using a terrain creation software would really depend on the needs of the project. If you describe what sort of environment your game will have, how the player moves through it, etc., it may be easier to for someone to say if you'd benefit from a tool like that.
My hunch is that if you need a realistic looking terrain - whether it is background or the playable area, you're best off using one of the terrain creation softwares. I haven't used Gaea, but I've used most of the major players and my favorite is World Creator because it is the most streamlined and artist friendly.
If you don't need a realistic looking terrain, I cant imagine any reason to use a terrain creation softare.
On another note, do you know if any of the big terrain generator packages allow the user to paint height maps directly which can then be used in the process ?
You can do that in World Creator.
I imagine could be done in others but I can only say for certain with World Creator.
World Creator 2 Fundamentals | 6.0 | Sculpting - YouTube
oh yeah thanks thats good to know.
Another question, while we are at it. What package would be a good choice for terrain generation for indie development? It should be kind of intuitive (I am Substance Designer user) so maybe a node based editor? Would be nice to hear your recommendation.
Also, do you know if any of those programs can be used as a plugin in Unity or Unreal? Similar to Substance plugin, so where it might be possible for example to get different level seeds from the terrain generation during runtime / loading times of the game.
@Finnn
I recommend World Creator because it seems to me to be the most artist friendly - meaning you do less work blind, get more immediate feedback, stuff like that.
World Machine was confusing to me - seems more appropriate for somebody with a more "techy" background. I was able to get results I wanted but for a person who learned 3d art from internet tutorials and no tech background, I always had to do a lot of research to figure things out, whereas with world creator it was easier to just push buttons and understand how its working intuitively.
The others I've tried were all fine but always had some compromise - lack of support for tiled terrains as an example. Little things that are important on a project by project basis. In the end World Creator won for me because it didn't give require any compromise on my project and required less learning time.
I believe World Creator started out as a unity plugin so you might look into that. I think they have a bridge to both Unity and Unreal. I haven't tried it.
I dunno about getting a seed to randomize the world at runtime... I'd think you'd have to have multiple height maps and do logic like that in the game engine. The terrain generators ultimately just output a heightmap and other textures.
For some sort of infinite terrain generator that you also want to look realistic and not just perlin noise, maybe you could work semi-randomly from a handful of heightmaps you made from the terrain creation software, then just breakup the heightmap with a noise mask. Or maybe use the terrain creator to make lots of macro features that can then get divvied out randomly. I'm just guessing, not something I've ever thought about before.
Thanks Alex for your helpful insight.
Procedural Terrain is something I always wanted to look into. World creator sounds like a good place to start.
Many of the filters you'd want from a terrain generator are very difficult (if not impossible) to recreate in Designer - you're far better off working with a purpose built tool. You particularly encounter problems when working with unreal due to it needing silly sized image output that designer can't support
Houdini has decent tools and you get Houdini engine support in unreal that could well prove useful
its probably worth looking into the blueprint brush actor things in unreal - ive not poked them but its plausible you might be able to mess with them at construction time
What are your needs ?
I'd be using a Landscape system like the unreal one only if there were needs to change at runtime like procedural never the same map kind of thing. - and even then..depending the platform, it's possible you can come up with procedural maps out of well designed puzzle kits
If you want to make a good looking map that does not change at runtime, out of that Gaea terrain, I recommend turning it into its own set of meshes
Yes, I tried creating landscapes in sustance designer and there are some examples that exist but its surely not as flexible.
I havent heard of the image size problem and doesnt designer support exact per pixel changes of the output image?
I dont have specific needs, I just like to think of the possibilites of procedural content generation. :) I mean its probably possible to use the substance plugins as api. meaning I create a set of noises that can be used by the engine at runtime to generate different terrains when needed. Nothing else would be done in a shader, just that its computed via substance. Not sure if there are existing (public) projects that try to use substances at realtime.
substance can only output images with power of 2 dimensions
oh you are right. never needed any crazy pixel format yet.
I've seen a few landscape substances. Also most of the terrain generation software make alot of use of fractal based processing. afaik the biggest advantages is the availability of erosion based simulations. But I guess thats also replicable through substance. But I agree that using a purpose built tool is probably alot easier and more convenient and in the end more powerful.
Here are some examples I found that use substance designer to create landscapes:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qzrXP
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0nDDxE
Magic Map Material & Maker (M4) in Blueprints - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)
this might be of interest