Custom Terrain Blending Tool for UE4

A student from Digital Arts and Entertainment is working on his own tool inspired by Star Wars Battlefront.

It was 2016 GDC talk by Dice about Star Wars Battlefront, which presented in-engine tools to blend together natural meshes and the environment, that inspired the artist. In this presentation DICE showcased some in-engine tools to blend together natural meshes and the environment.

What really sells the effect is the adjustment of the vertex normals of the mesh. This removes the ugly lighting seam caused by intersecting geometry. To adjust the normals of the mesh to the normals of the surrounding area, I use the DistanceFieldGradient node. This system can be a bit finnicky and took a lot of tweaking to get right, but I’m pretty happy with the result.
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You can follow the progress on the tool here.

Author: Artyom Sergeev

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Comments 2

  • garrettorious

    Are you just setting the normals to Z-up, or are you deriving something smarter from the distance field?

    0

    garrettorious

    ·7 years ago·
  • NicB

    80.lv, Somehow presenting something that has been standard practice for over a decade as a gimmick. Great job.

    Awesome job from the person who actually did the work, just a shame 80.lv caters to talentless hacks who love click-bait and one button plugin solutions for everything.

    0

    NicB

    ·7 years ago·

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