This snowy, mountainous environment was created to showcase what you can do with the Landscape and foliage tools in Unreal Engine 4. The terrain is roughly 5km by 5km in size, consisting of tall peaks, winding valleys, frozen lakes and forests made up of thousands of trees.



The heightmap and layer masks in this scene were created using World Machine, a procedural terrain generation program that can simulate erosion, snowfall and various other effects to help produce a realistic-looking environment.

Once they’d been generated in World Machine, the textures for the terrain’s heightmap and layers were imported into the editor via UE4’s Landscape system. Then, additional sculpting and layer painting was completed using the Landscape tools to adjust certain areas.

The Landscape Mountains material, created by artist Ryan Brucks, was set up to blend between sets of rock, grass and snow textures using Landscape’s layer masks. Several material functions were also created to help the layers blend together more naturally based on texture information, and to reduce the appearance of tiling in the distance.



Clusters of trees and rocks were added using UE4’s foliage tool, which is designed to allow rapid painting of hundreds of meshes onto a surface with randomized ranges for scale, orientation and other settings. The foliage tool can also use a Landscape layer as a mask - for example, if you want certain foliage meshes to only appear on the grass layer on the Landscape, they won’t be placed on areas with rock or snow as you paint over an area.

The other advantage that the foliage system offers is that it uses instanced static meshes, which are automatically grouped into clusters. Each cluster only requires the number of draw calls for a single mesh instead of one for each, reducing rendering cost.

In this case, further optimization was achieved by setting up LODs for the tree meshes, with the least detailed LOD mesh being a flat billboard. These features enabled me to create relatively dense forests that are very cheap to render when viewed from far away.

The billboard mesh for the trees is actually a thin strip consisting of just two triangles which are stretched out to a specified width using the “SplineThicken” material function. This function enables the billboards to always face the camera while maintaining their orientation along the axis of the spline, staying upright when viewed from above. In the image above, you can see that the distant trees appear as thin lines in wireframe mode.



Finally, I wanted to provide a fun way explore Landscape Mountains, so I put together a hang glider Blueprint. The hang glider can be flown freely around the environment, gaining speed when swooping downwards and slowing down again when climbing. To add a bit of a challenge, I also added glowing rings that provide a brief speed boost when flown through. Using the rings and a bit of skilled flying, it’s possible to reach some impressive altitudes.

We hope everyone is enjoying this new sample with the release of Unreal Engine 4.4. Feel free to leave any feedback or questions in the comments here[www.unrealengine.com].

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/new-on-marketplace-landscape-mountains

When Unreal Engine 4 launched, the Marketplace debuted as a means for obtaining free content created by the team here at Epic.

Now, we’re opening up the Marketplace for early submissions of community-created content, both paid commercial content, and free samples and tutorials!

If you’re interested in submitting your work for consideration, please review the Submission Guidelines and the Business Terms, and then go to the Submission Form to get started.

In a few weeks, we’ll begin making the first bits of community-created content available on the Marketplace. The result should be a robust mix of readily-usable asset packs containing models and materials; sample scenes; sounds; and other useful components.

We’re putting particular emphasis on ensuring consistent content quality, scaling, and usability so that Marketplace assets can mixed and matched in the widest range of projects across multiple genres and visual styles.

These are still the early days of the Marketplace, so please bear with us! The submission process is managed manually by the Unreal Engine team. Someday, this will be automated and scalable. For now, though, we can only accept a small number of submissions, representing the highest-quality and the best suited to the UE4 community.

In all, we see this as a great opportunity for skilled content developers to build a new generation of creative works, utilizing the full capabilities of UE4 to target the now-enormous graphical capabilities of today’s popular devices -- ranging from smartphones and tablets to PCs and consoles. With the public UE4 community less than 6 months old and growing very rapidly, the reputations and content base built starting today will carry forward for many years to come!

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/marketplace-now-open-for-early-submissions

Korean game developer AimToG announces the release of Angels in the Sky, the world’s first commercially released Unreal Engine 4 mobile game, available now for iOS. Angels in the Sky is a 3D flight-based first-person shooter (FPS), incorporating simple yet diverse weapons accompanied by the excitement of a strategic flying shooter. The game also features a unique reverse movement mechanic, allowing players to fly backwards while shooting down enemies, providing an unpredictable and dynamic gaming experience.

Established in 2004, the team at AimToG is led by games industry experts, with developers highly experienced in 3D virtual worlds, first-person shooters, online role-playing games and global community games.

“The team here at AimToG is extremely excited and thankful to be able to work with one of the world’s most prestigious game developers, Epic Games, and use its Unreal Engine to bring the game to life,” said Hongjoon Park, president of AimToG. “Although AimToG is relatively unknown as a developer, starting with this title, we aim to change that and jump into the global market aggressively.”

“Since AimToG’s developers are familiar with Unreal Engine technology thanks to their experiences building Hell Gate: London, Viper Circle, and many other games, the expectations we have for Angels In The Sky are extraordinary,” said Ray Park, the president of Epic Games Korea. “We appreciate that AimToG is the first studio to ship a mobile game with Unreal Engine 4, and they have the full support of the Epic team.”

To view the first trailers for Angels in the Sky, visit http://youtu.be/BFSYNDZRXNM and http://youtu.be/N19p2L0-BcU

Angels in the Sky is available now at https://itunes.apple.com/app/id883477291?mt=8

Follow recent updates regarding Angels in the Sky on YouTube, the official Angels in the Sky Facebook page, and at www.playais.com.