Landscape

I wanted to make a natural environment in Unreal Engine 4 with emphasis on atmosphere and mood. After having formed a rough idea of what I wanted to make, I started to gather photographs to use as reference throughout the entire project. Creating realistic environments without any references to work from can quickly become quite problematic, and so I’ve made a habit of always having good references available before I start making something. After setting up a simple landscape in Unreal Engine 4 and shaping it a bit, I decided to generate some quick textures for the ground, and then started creating key elements of the scene, which were the trees and the water.

After finding some suitable ground textures through pages like textures.com and episcura.com, I was able to generate maps such as albedo, roughness, normal, height and ambient occlusion using Allegorithmic’s Bitmap2Material. Like any program that generates textures based on a single photograph, the maps usually won’t be very accurate. However, with some tweaks they work well as a starting point and is a good way to quickly test what works and what doesn’t. I had initially planned to do more work on the ground textures, but ended up sticking with the generated maps due to time limitations, and I was more interested in the quality of the “big picture” rather than micro details. Ultimately, I found that leaves and other geometric ground coverage were at least as important as the textures in order to create a realistically looking ground surface.