Creating terrain brushes in Blender

By now it's pretty well known that Epic made the terrain for Unreal's levels using an external modeling tool. Back in those day modeling software was either really user unfriendly, prohibitively expensive or both. However nowadays Blender is the modeling tool of choice for many. With it being relatively small, light on resources (for simple scenes, highly complex scenes will naturally require more powerful hardware), versatile, highly expandable and most importantly: totally free!

Introduction

With Blender powerful and versatile tool also comes complexity. Its daunting UI is often criticized for being overwhelming and illogical by those that collide with the steep learning curve. This tutorial aims to solve that by giving step-by-step instructions while encouraging the reader to experiment on their own. It won't be constantly telling you exactly what buttons to press and instead links to official documentation about the tools and features used with the goal being that after following this tutorial the reader can not only make the exact kind of terrain shown here but also create different terrain and brushes for their specific mapping needs. This tutorial uses the default key-mapping settings.

This tutorial assumes the reader has some basic knowledge of using Blender. Specifically being aware of the various object interaction modes, knowing how to select things, being familiar with 3D navigation and basic transformations (selecting, moving, rotating and scaling). If you never touched Blender play around with these in the default scene (what Blender opens with) until you think you go the hang of them. Once you do move on to the next step.

Setting up Blender

By default Blender is designed for real-world scale modeling. Meaning that is uses real-life measuring systems rather than the artificial Unreal Units (UU) we are all familiar with. This creates problems with scaling as 1 UU is (by default) 1 Meter(!) in Blender. Furthermore Blender is by default setup for high-poly high precision modeling. Creating a very near near-clipping plane (things be be rendered very close to the camera) and a very short far-clipping plane (distant geometry will disappear quickly) to ensure a high amount of precision in the z-buffer. So just modeling at a larger scale will prove difficult by default.

Application Template

Fortunately is Blender very versatile so by changing a few settings you can make it function perfectly fine in native Unreal Units. For convenience is an Application Template provided below with all these changes applied. In addition it sets the Walk Navigation settings to closely match Unreal's player scale and movement speed (hold down Shift). This allows for some very basic play testing within Blender, mostly useful to get a sense of scale of the terrain before importing. It must noted that the gravity is a set value that can't be changed. Because we are modeling in such a large scale does this result in the gravity appearing extremely low.

File:Blender Unreal (UE1) Mapping Template.zip

Installation

To install the template, click on the Blender logo in the very top left of the screen → Install Application Template → navigate to the downloaded .zip file → Install Template from File.

To use the template go to File (right of the Blender logo we just clicked) → New → Unreal (UE1) Mapping.