ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how to create landscapes and make landscape materials to apply to our terrains. Much like terrains in unreal development kit, a landscape in UE4 is an actor. It is used for the creation of vast outdoors environments based on a height map. Creating a landscape is a very easy process. The more time consuming process is to edit the landscape, to set up its materials and layers, and to make it look realistic and desirable. Creating a landscape from imported heightmap files was as easy as simply creating a new landscape actor. In UE4, the rendering mechanism uses a weight blending approach in combining landscape materials, as opposed to alpha blending. Culling allows the engine to determine when a cluster of instances is far enough from the player that ignoring it to be rendered will not be detrimental to the player’s experience.
