#3 - Landscape Experiments - Gaea to UE5

I knew I wanted a large and interesting landscape to situate my scene in. To this end, I took to UE5 and began to play around with it's landscape tools.

I experimented with landscape sizes, and using alpha brushes to stamp more complicated landmasses easily. However, very quickly I realised how much work it was going to be to create enough of a landscape by hand to achieve the result I was after. I want to give the illusion of a much greater world beyond the focal point of my scene, but creating all of that by hand was not going to work.

To help with this, I took to a tool called Gaea. Gaea is a node-based terrain generator that vastly simplifies the process of creating realistic terrain, which can then be exported as meshes or a heightmap. This was perfect for my purposes, as I could easily import a heightmap into UE5 to create a landscape.

I knew I wanted to place the scene within a valley with a river running through it, as the shape of the valley and the flow of the river naturally guides the eye along it, and the mountain ranges surrounding it would frame the whole thing nicely.

My first tests with Gaea produced very promising results:

However, upon bringing this data into Unreal Engine, I quickly realised that while the mountains were suitably vast, the open back of the valley severely limited the angles that I would be able to show the scene from.

Going back and tweaking nodes, I was able to produce this:

The area in the middle, with the river running through it was much more suitable for what I wanted. The mountains on all sides blocked visibility, and the sloping terrain leads up and around these forms in a much more compositionally pleasing way.

It is easy with Gaea to over-detail terrain, which may look good for more realistic scenes, but I knew I needed to strip some of that detail back. 

I achieved this by using the "Aperture", "Thermal Shaper" and "Recurve" nodes, seen towards the end of the graph above. These nodes together helped to blur some of the detail back together, and reshape the forms to be sharper and more exaggerated. Much closer to the look I want to achieve:

Rugged, detailed, more realistic terrain.

Sharpened, exaggerated, more stylised forms.

After bringing the landscape into Unreal, I was immediately much happier with the result than the first attempt, but I identified that something felt missing from the far end of the valley, where the camera will be facing. To resolve this, I went back to Gaea to generate a standalone "Hero Mountain" to fill the gap:

The final result was starting to get the momentum going, I was starting to mentally lay out where I would be placing the main elements of the scene, where I would be running paths off to, what sort of viewing angles I wanted to focus on, etc.

The result looks very snowy, coloured as it is, which isn't really where I'm going with it, but it looks far better clean and white than it does as a hideous green mass, trust me.

Going forward, I need to decide for sure if I'm going to use an existing concept for the building or not. At this point, I am leaning toward using an existing concept, for reasons mentioned in the previous post, but generally I think the end result will be better for it.