I’m still not really sure how I’m going to schedule or format this blog but firstly I’d like to report some of my findings on building landscapes.
Last week I had the privilege of joining a part time project that involves making an Unreal game. I can’t get into the details of it just yet but right now we’re working on making some realistic terrain for the game. It’s going to be a war simulator type game, and we want it to be based off real life locations so it should be reasonably realistic.
I immediately got to work researching some terrain generation software. I came across several, such as World Machine, Houdini, etc. but I was ultimately drawn to Gaea simply because I figured the interface was clean and the technology was newer.
I also naturally had to figure out how to exactly get real world data in the first place. I looked up tutorials on YouTube and asked ChatGPT and learned that you can actually download data from USGS and NASA. Eventually I came across a GitHub link that was a master doc explaining all the different data sets out there and I settled on some free data from OpenTopography.
I downloaded the area I wanted and imported the height map as a GeoTIFF to Gaea and I think it looked quite good. However, it needs some fine tuning since the resolution of the heightmaps only go to 30m per pixel (I believe). I’ll be sure to attach pictures next blog post once I get it all sorted out within Unreal itself. We’re looking to have 3km x 3km maps for a semi-open world experience.
Anyway, that’s all I have so far as for the most recent update. Thanks for reading and I hope to write the next one soon, with some cool pictures.
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