These images and videos are from an unreleased project that I had the pleasure of being a Principle Technical Artist for. They represent a work in progress toolset for creating a non-destructive landscape sculpting workflow. This project called for the creation of around a dozen large, open layout maps with randomized gameplay content. The world team had only 1.5 developers allocated to the creation and maintenance of these maps along with more localized areas that could be procedural swapped at gametime. Hand crafting every square inch of these spaces was out of the question and even doing meaningful iteration was time consuming and destructive nature of landscape sculpting.

To support the world team I looked at a number of solutions both internal and external to the unreal engine. I ended up selecting the existing Landmass plugin provided by Epic as a starting point due to its existing integration with the landscape toolset. This would also tie back to the road system solution detailed in a separate post. Unfortunately as of 5.4 the existing toolset was in fairly degraded state with only partial functionality requiring the branching of existing blueprint work to cleanup, fix and extend existing functionality.

In the case of this post the result was a re-usable blueprint stamp actor that could take an existing heightmap texture asset and project it directly to the landscape. These stamps could be scaled and translated to change or even invert the height influence in an intuitive manner. They also support basic blend modes and priorities much like a photoshop layer might.

This tool allowed developers to quickly mock up complex terrain formations and layouts in a manner of minutes before moving on to other toolsets like the road, water and PCG systems that overlayed on top. Because each stamp was its own individual actor they could be expected to be moved and adjusted at any time while maintaining the existing relationship with other layers.

At runtime all landmass actors are baked to the landscape and cooked out resulting in no added overhead.