Creating your first Brushify Landscape

Creating your first landscape with Brushify is simple.

After installing Unreal Engine and first launching the editor, you will be met with the project browser. Choose Games from the left, and choose Third Person or First Person Template. These are easiest templates to begin with.

Unreal will then startup, wait a while for it to compile shaders (this may take a while on your first startup as unreal needs to build assets. (A faster multicore cpu will compile more quickly)

We're going to go to File > Open Level and navigate to Content/Brushify/Maps/StarterLevel Open the Starter Level file.

Your editor should now look like this:

Go to the World Outliner on the right (Window > World Outliner incase it's closed)

Select these 4 actors (Cube, Landscape, LandscapeGizmo & Player Start) and hit Delete

We should now have a completely empty level with only a skydome and lighting setup. This will give us a nice starting place to create our new landscape.

Go to the top bar and click on Activate Landscape Editing Mode

This will open the landscape panel on the left. This panel allows you to edit landscape settings before creating a landscape. You should find the landscape in the origin of the level.

We're going to leave all the settings at their defaults for this tutorial. and hit Create

You'll now have a new landscape.

Before we start doing anything, lets go back to the Editing Mode

This is a good moment to save the level.

Now that's done, Select the Landscape Actor

Open a content browser window or use the shelf.

Drag and Drop the MI_Landscape material instance onto the Landscape Material Slot

Your landscape will now go all black and shiny. This is normal, every render pass is rendering black because no materials are applied yet! Next we need to fill the landscape with some textured paint layers.

Go back to Landscape Editing Mode again.

Click on Paint

Scroll down and click the small + next to Grass Paint layer (or any other layer you'd like to fill the landscape with).

You'll be prompted to save the layer info file, I usually save that in the level folder in a subfolder. This keeps things neat and modular incase in the future you decide to transfer your map to a different project.

Once it's created it's also worth immediately right clicking and hitting save, just to make sure it's saved to the disk.

Your landscape will now have a grass material applied:

To be sure though, we can also right click the grass layer and click Fill. This will make double sure that the grass is really applied throughout the entire landscape.

You can now repeat this process with other paint layers. Simply add the layer info file in the same way. Set the Tool Strength to 1 to make your brush harder (this works similar to the Opacity brush setting in Photoshop)

You can now start painting down different paint layers

You can also switch to the Sculpt Tab

And we can start to sculpt some hills in the landscape.

With Brushify everything is done automatically, slopes get a cliff texture, procedural rocks and grass automatically spawn.

You can now use the Unreal Engine sculpting tools to create more complex heightmaps. Tip: Try to keep playable landscape as smooth as possible, this will help the Procedural Mesh system to scatter meshes with less errors, and it will be smoother for the player to walk on. A smooth landscape will still look good thanks to the automatic texturing built into Brushify, so a lot of jagged/high resolution detail is not necessary.

Watch the video Tutorial here: