DEV LOG 1: LANDSCAPING AND TERRAIN
February 12, 2023PROJECT “BULK/BRANE”
DEV LOG 1:
LANDSCAPING AND TERRAIN.
The most important part of this project is its landscape. The world where our photogrammetry artefacts mysteriously appear. The geography that the player must tread to uncover these ephemeral objects. The landscape should make the players feel a sense of isolation and an alien environment but also be familiar with the Earth. The landscape for this project is not just a backdrop or a huge level for the player to run around in. I want the players to feel the deep sense of exploration, discovery and beauty that a mountain climber, hiker or scuba diver feels. Therefore, I will treat my landscape as an art canvas and the three concepts of landscape painting, the Pastoral, Picturesque and Sublime will set the guiding principles for my landscape.[1]
Pastoral: pastoral paintings celebrate how mankind has ‘conquered’ nature through various practices. In this project, the landscape is taken over by 3D objects from another reality. Structures from our civilization distorted in size will randomly appear throughout the landscape, buried in snow, hidden in jungles, standing over plains, etc. Rediscovering these objects through the eyes of someone native to this land represents our collective carelessness when it comes to respecting the boundaries and history of physical as well as digital spaces.
Picturesque: is used to describe the allure of experiencing a scene in its natural state. The landscape for this project has to be picturesque. It should make the player feel like they’re exploring and feeling the vastness of the plains and the rocky mountains. In simple words, the landscape should be “screenshot” worthy. Even the pastoral and sublime qualities of the photogrammetry scans should be picturesque.
Sublime: this means that the landscape should evoke a sense of mystery and curiosity within the players as well as a sense that something supernatural is going on in this reality. The appearance of objects from our world should have a sense of otherworldliness or mystery attached to it. The land itself should integrate the mystery within itself by having hills to climb over or caves to enter or vast areas to tread across.
MoodBoard Images
Goals:
detailed, and realistic Icelandic terrain with mountain regions and plains, snowy tops and waterbodies.
Creating the Terrain
Looking at the goals above gives me a rough idea of what kind of terrain I want. For my first prototype level. I want to work with a vast mountainous landscape. With snow-capped rocky mountains, Plains, green grass and small forests. The mountains and hilly terrain will ‘divide’ the landscape which will encourage curiosity within the players to climb the mountain to get to the other side.
The Unreal Engine workspace comes with a landscape mode, with tools specifically to sculpt and deform terrain. While these tools allow me to create a custom landscape of my choice. To make sure that my Terrain is as realistic as possible. I am going to use a powerful node-based height map generator called Gaea.
Gaea is a terrain software that builds simple geometry off of geological primitives like Mountain, Ridge, and Crater. Gaea enables users to create more natural, realistic landscapes through the use of geological primitives, in contrast to conventional Graphics applications that rely on geometric primitives like cubes and spheres. [2]
The video below shows all the nodes and their connections I used to create my Terrain in Gaea:
Nodes Used
Range and Rocky are Procedural Primitives used in Gaea they are randomly generated geological shapes. Range creates mountain ranges like topography, while rocky creates a rocky, rough plane. You can combine primitives in Gaea to create a new shape. Since my geometry had jagged and extreme edges, I use the gradient node to smoothen out the edges so that I can potentially extend the landscape without much difficulty.
A terrace is a step like natural land formation in geology. It is a product of erosion and years of geological activity. It is a very common occurrence in mountainous rocky areas. I use the Fractal Terraces node in Gaea to produce a landscape with sharp terraces that are fractal in nature.
Shear adds the pattern of stressed rocks due to compression
The Erosion node is the ultimate node in Gaea in my opinion. It simulates hydraulic erosion over the landscape. Almost all the landscape that you see on Earth undergoes hydraulic erosion due to rainfall. This adds the final necessary touch to the landscape that makes it “Earth-Like”.
Exported Maps
Height Mask
Height mask gives us height data to build our landscape
Flow Mask
Flow mask maps out flow spots or the realistic positions where water from flowing down an inclined plane would flow to.
Detail Mask
Detail mask provides data on small bumps and details in the landscape
Slope Mask
Slope mask gives data for all the inclined planes or height difference gradients.
Snow Cap Masks
Snow cap mask gives data for where and snow will be painted on mountaintops.
Base Mask
Base mask is the inverse of the slope mask and marks everything that is more or less on level ground.
Exported Masks:
After going through quite a bit of back and forth between Gaea and Unreal Engine, I came to a final look for the terrain for this prototype build of my game and its dimensions.
Prototype build terrain definition:
Height: 6,831 m
Scale: 10,000 m
Building the Landscape on Unreal Engine 5.1
Once you have a height map ready to go, creating a landscape and unreal engine is pretty straightforward because they have a ‘Landscape Mode’ which is a workspace which comes with a set of tools that allow you to create a terrain from scratch.
When you create a new landscape in this mode you can select to import from an existing height map. Importing my Gaea height map and doing some adjustments on height automatically built the terrain for me.
Creating a basic landscape material
I decided to construct a basic landscape material for my landscape to get a rough idea of where all the different layers go on the terrain. To create this basic landscape material I followed KIRK’s tutorial [3] on YouTube. You construct a landscape material through the material graph node system in Unreal Engine. Take a landscape node and connected it to the layer blend node. In the layer blend node, create five different layers (or however depending on the number of layers you have exported from Gaea). Attach a separate SetMaterialAttributes node to each layer and then connect each SetMaterialAttributes node to a Base colour node. Give each layer a unique contrasting base colour. And then when you set this material instance to your landscape. Each colour will represent its particular map and location on the landscape allowing you to see the different features before you begin with the texturing.
Creating a basic landscape blend material based on KIRK’s tutorial:
My landscape imported inside Unreal Engine with the basic landscape material instance applied:
Next Update:
Now that I have built my terrain, exported my maps from Gaea, imported my landscape to Unreal Engine 5 and created a basic landscape blend material. I am ready to start painting and filling my landscape with foliage and water bodies as well as considering the lighting and the weather system. Dev Log 2 will be about texturing and populating landscapes with foliage, rocks and water.
References
[1] Rabb, L. (n.d.). 19th century landscape - the pastoral, the picturesque and the sublime. The University of Arizona Museum of Art and Archive of Visual Arts. Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://artmuseum.arizona.edu/events/event/19th-century-landscape-the-pastoral-the-picturesque-and-the-sublime#:~:text=The%2019th%20century%20was%20the,the%20Picturesque%2C%20and%20the%20Sublime.
[2] Create with primitives. QuadSpinner Gaea Documentation. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://docs.quadspinner.com/Guide/Using-Gaea/Create-Shapes.html
[3] KIRK. (2022, May 7). How to add Gaea Height Map & Masks to UE5. YouTube. Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://youtu.be/MPArMwJ7KnQ