Cutting a hole in a landscape?

[miatribe]

Cutting a hole in a landscape?

How do we go about cutting a hole in a landscape?

Why? What if I want to add a static mesh such as a cave or pool or whatever.

I know how to do it on a terrain. Is this something that will come latter? (being Landscape is new and not yet fully implemented?) Or can i just not work out how to do it?

[ambershee]

I believe it's not implemented yet, but I may be wrong.

[Chosker]

for now you can only remove a component. according to the documentation that will make a hole on it, but I haven't tested it so I don't know how big a component is, ie. if removing one will be suitable for a cave hole, or if it will take away a large portion of land. if the case is the latter, I guess you can add a smaller landscape on the hole, with smaller components, then remove a component from the small one, and repeat until the hole is small enough. handling the seams wouldn't be easy though

[joshua.fontany]

Hey that's a cool idea. I had an idea about transparent textures (since the full Material editor can be used now) and a trigger volume to move the pawn past the blocking layer.... but I'm not looking at caves/underground spaces in my Landscape project for quite a while, so it hasn't come up as a problem yet.

[Chosker]

well the trigger would cause a very small but noticeable 'teleport' effect, where you'd instantly move to the inside of the cave.
i'm not even sure a landscape supports transparent materials anyway, but I'd say they don't.

[Ryan Commodore]

Cutting a hole in a landscape?

The new landscape tool is not so mature yet.
We just have to wait until Epic finishes the new landscape system.

[ustolemygmrtag]

This is the new documentation on the Landscape System. You will see that you can cut very large portions out of the LandScape. But I do not think this is exactly what you are looking for. The Landscape system is still in its infancy, and will have allot of limitations until they can get all the bugs worked out. Just give them a few more months. Then it will probably be supported then.

Here is a question to the more experienced UDK Dev. Suppose you cut out a section, and wanted to add another Landscape that was the same size as the cutout hole, will you be able to use the new LS as the section by adding it via the Editor? Probably not, but worth a shot. You never know.

[Hitpawz]

I've been messing around trying to get a cave using the landscape but it's not exactly feasable at this point in time. Hopefully in the future there will be something that we can use for this.

I created two landscapes in the same location. I lowered one to be more like a jagged bowl and I raised the other to be the roof of the cave. I made the material for the landscape 2-sided and this is actually working wonderfully to acheive the desired look. The roof of the cave looks great and can be easily molded into all sorts of awesome styles.

However, the problem is that this landscape that you're looking at the backfaces of, even though it does have a material present, will not accept any lighting accept on the top of the landscape (or above ground). The floor looks perfect, but the ceiling is basically black.

So I tried instead to rotate the top landscape 180 so that it's physically flipped and the only way to do this was to type in the rotation values into the properties. The landscape flips over fine, but it still renders the normals facing upwards so the underside will not accept lighting. If I turn off 2-sided on the material, even though it's upside down, the textures still only appear when looking at it from the top. So it appears it has something native built into it that doesn't allow a landscape to be properly flipped over to simulate the roof of a cave.

I would like to point out that before lightmass is built, both the floor and the roof of the cave light beautifully and everything looks amazing. Perhaps using only dynamic lights is a feasable option, but I know this is very heavy on the system with UDK's lighting.

We're going to have to wait for another entirely new feature set to landscape before we can really make a convincing cave system. I'm hoping that Epic will view this as something that the engine could seriously use as we've all seen it done in other engines and pretty much most of us really like the idea of being able to do it. I personally have found a great use for a cave system within my game, but I need these tools to support it before I can explore the option.

EDIT: Well I actually got some decent results even with lightmass being ran. I forgot to check the options on the landscape and you can choose "Use Two Side Lighting" in the lightmass properties. It bugged on the one I had rotated and rotated back and was clipping out huge panels of it, but once I created a new one and rand lightmass, it seems to light somewhat ok. I don't want to say it's perfect because the roof doesn't seem to receive the same amount of detail, but it at least doesn't look inverted or solid black anymore so it's some progress.

[Chosker]

yes I've been asking for it for a while: to let us rotate landscapes. right now if you rotate a landscape the lighting is bugged but worst of all, collision and LOD calclulations are waaaaay off

[painseeker_liveson]

Well here's a very simple solution, why dont u just right click and draw while editing your heightmap with d paint brush! I mean this my be way too simple or maybe not wht ur looking for at all but hey,