FMP Environment: Landscapes

Landscapes are important, and not quite as time consuming to create as you may originally think!  The landscaping programs below are very small files and have totally open free versions - great for students!

It's worth noting that I am using UDK, which has a weird internal formula for its landscapes and you actually need a table to know what sizes you need.  Cry Engine is more straight forward.  My map size is 2017px x 2017px, which has 256 components = maximum detail & decent size of 8km x 8km

Weight Maps
I didn't know about weight maps until recently.  Basically these are like alpha masks over the landscape map.  These dictate the blending of layers and can be altered how you extrapolate them.  This will be a base to start off the texturing in engine according to your needs.  To clarify they can automatically apply textures to a landscape in UDK.

World Machine [VideoTutorial]
+ Very flexible and responsive, can manually create islands and shapes.
- A bit fiddly to learn
- Weight map functionality needs a macro to be downloaded

In world machine you can use custom shapes to form the terrain.
Here I made a horseshoe shape for the start of my level

Terresculpter    [Tutorial series for UDK users]
- Less flexible workflow than World Machine, as no nodes - is all destructive
+ Easy to work, has UDK sizes stored, can import, re-sample to convert to UDK sizes easily, can export weight maps easily.

I was originally creating the maps within UDK - which is ok as it has lots of very useful tool to start from scratch, but its real power will be to alter and fine tune an imported landscape to fit my needs.

1) World Machine to create unique landscapes
2) TerreSculptor to generate weight maps & re-sample/upscale height map
3) Zbrush & 3DS Max to develop further - Can possibly make caves and unique formations to fit with landscape.
4) UDK to finish and texture

There is a size difference though for in UDK (cheers Epic) which doesn't help the process.  On the plus side you can import multiple landscapes into the the same map in UDK - This means you can copy sections from one map to another manually.  This is good as I have a few bits I like already, and can transfer them if I want.

There is also a little program called GW TerraNoise, which is similar to world machine, but specializes in creating tiled terrain maps - These are freakin' excellent for alphas and grunge textures.  This has been very useful for sculpting natural details in Zbrush.