What you can do with World Machine in UE4

We’re happy to show you an exclusive work, produced by Allegorithmic’s CG and technical artist Gaëtan Lassagne.

Gaëtan Lassagne is an accomplished artist and technical specialist that works in Allegorithmic, helping the company with design, programming and optimization of its tools. He’s also a texturing teacher at Université d’Auvergne IUT Le Puy en Velay, where he helps students, preparing for a Bachelor’s Degree. In his spare time, Gaëtan experiments with different tools and creates awesome images. During one of his most recent experiments he created a huge natural landscape in Unreal Engine 4.

Building A Scene

The base of the mountain was created in World Machine. I wanted to learn it so it was a good test case to see how it goes and how fast I could get the result I wanted. The construction was pretty simple. I mixed some base shapes (generated or imported as bitmaps from Substance Designer), added different kind of relief depending on the position, generated some masks.

Then I created the base materials in Substance Designer: frozen snow (quite bright/reflective to add some contrast to the scene), ice and stone.

Once I gathered everything in Unreal Engine, I created the terrain shader using the masks and Substance plugin to directly import my substances and have the possibility to modify some parameters to get what I needed.

Setting up the Atmosphere

For the scene mood I played with different things:

– the shaders (for example, by adding a soft “cold steam” moving over the terrain)

– the particles (snow mist around the mountain or on the ground, some snow flakes)

– the scene fog: by adjusting the density/opacity/distances you can something really interesting

– the post process volume to get a custom color grading and adjust how the scene looks

Check out Krzysztof Teper talk about his world-building practices with World Machine and UE4.

Hope you guys like this thing. Make sure to ask Gaëtan questions in the comments. He’ll try to answer them when he has the time. The scene will not be developed any further, but it’s still a great way to see what you can do in short time with the modern tools.