Introduction

This lesson was about creating landscapes using height maps in unreal engine.

a height map in unreal engine uses greyscale images to assign a height value to black or white. This means that you can use a height map to create real world terrain in unreal engine by using a black and white image of a top-down view of a landscape. Using a height map image, you can create an alpha brush, which is a height map that is edited to be used as a brush. The shape of the terrain in the height map defines the shape of the brush.

Creating Alpha Brushes in Photoshop

You can create alpha brushes easily in photoshop. To do this, I used a website that has a height map of the entire world.

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper

To create the alpha brushes, I screenshotted a square section of a zoomed in portion of the map. It is important to be zoomed in when capturing the terrain, as putting too much detail into a small brush area will make the Unreal landscape look very exaggerated and messy.

I then edited the screenshot to make the edges fade into black, so that the brush didn’t create any sections with harsh fall-off where areas of terrain abruptly stopped.

I then repeated process this with two more screenshots of the height map, and edited their channels so that the three were assigned to red, green and blue respectively.

Doing that gave me this overlay-ed image which I exported as a PNG.

From there, it was as simple as opening a new landscape in Unreal Engine, adding the alpha brush to the content browser and importing it into the colour channels of the alpha brush. When using the brush, you can toggle the separate RGB colours on and off to use the brush as one area of terrain, or a mixture of terrain to create a landscape that looks the way that you want it to.

Here is an island landscape I created quickly using my alpha brush.

Conclusion

Over all, this seems like a very useful method for creating landscapes in Unreal and I will be applying it to my ongoing unreal work.