Stylized Zelda Landscape! Large Scale PCG Tutorial with Gaea Maps in Unreal Engine

Step-by-step guide to creating a stylized Zelda-inspired landscape using Procedural Content Generation (PCG), driven by texture and height maps generated in Gaea. I also cover how to use world partitioning to efficiently spawn an enormous landscape of dense foliage.

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[mebessusn]

Would absolutely LOVE some Gaea tutorials. I was thinking about picking it up myself here soon to start building environments.

[KingTimmahB]

This is exactly what I needed as my creative shell begins to crack. Thank you!!

[markhamdickson]

Literally the first thing I ever did in Unreal Editor. :D great tutorial and really clear. Good natural teacher. I noticed my flowers were not showing up, paused the video. Hit play to find out you did that in next step and I had learned to do it and had already done it correctly. Thanks for the video! Definately gunna watch and do more.

[polyalex_]

Would Love to see Gaea Tut! Please!! love your videos! keep up the work!

[matthewprince]

EDIT: So I was able to get it to work but it's weird. DO NOT CREATE NEW LEVEL FROM FILE. Right click when you make your levels folder and create new level from there. also make sure that the file sizes are correct. 5:07 for reference.

So something is Broken in this. I'm sure it has to do with Unreal Going to 5.4.x+ but basically when you load the height map it shows you four boxes. if you hit play the height map is loaded. in order to see it you need to go to Window, World Partition and select World Partition Editor, Right Click the box you are in and Click load selected region. However this has another issue, when you load the grass even though it's named EXACTLY correctly nothing "loads automatically" you have to end up painting everything.

My guess on this is it has something to do with the Procedurally Generated content since they are constantly revising it and have added biome support now. Would love for this to get figured out since I spent 25 bucks on an asset pack that is basically useless now.

[pwnisher]

Dude! This is so good! Thank you for this knowledge! Hands down, best PCG tuts on YT! You do a REALLY great job of explaining everything. I'm legit super excited watching this. Thank you thank you thank you!

[robertwilson]

Great video! I did notice you cut the Taro plans out of the final PCG. I've seen several of your videos and you explain everything in such an easy to follow manner. You give the viewer time to make the changes before jumping to the very next item as well which is nice.

[johnsarthole]

I came back to this because my head hurt trying to remember how to make the partitioning actually happen - so you have my gratitude

One thing worth adding is that the scale of the PCG volume can be passed on to actors placed by the PCG graph.
I'd suggest that best practice is to set the size of the volume in it's brush settings rather than using actor scale

[UnrealEngineLearn]

Been needing something like this for awhile! Had no idea about partitioned PCGs. Thank you so much for making this!

[VaporLockLabs]

Thank you for such an excellent, organized, and clean tutorial. Your platform is unbelievably detailed and intuitive! So nice to have a solid walkthrough on PCG!

[FolkvangStudios]

Just finished this up. I was merging other aspects of your other PCG videos into this one as well, along with more texture filtering logic so Dry Grass only grows on mud and dry textures. I used a Union node which no videos seem to ever utilize. Most of it is "Difference" nodes and those can make some hefty long code as you filter out things.

Now I just need to prevent anything from spawning under my houses and roads. THe roads part I think I got with splines, but houses, maybe a texture layer but that'd be a lot of added work.

[RodEllison]

Fantastic video! A great intro to both World Partitioning, and setting up PGC partitioned content. And yes, would love to see some Gaea2 training for isolating the core masks for most layers.

[pdubulous]

Fantastic tutorial. The World Partition chapter at the end is particularly hard to come by. Well done and love the extra real-world tips.

[SnowtoadVRDev]

Great tutorial. Love the fact that you include the little things as well. Things like shortcut keys. Thank you.

[ksweet]

It would be awesome if you did a video covering how to make the additional layers in Gaea. I am trying to create a landscape and can't see to wrap my head around how I would need, or how I could generate more than one layer. However, awesome video! I love that you actual explain what you're doing, and why. Makes it feel like an actual tutorial. Keep up the good work!

[AuthorChaos]

If anyone runs into an issue where the PCG grass is all white, the solution that worked for me was enabling virtual texture support on your project.

[draadhaai]

I cannot express how incredibly useful this was. A step by step for generating more optimal landscapes was one of the things missing from my UE experience. Thanks for making this tutorial possible. I happened to have the assets already so I did generate the landscape with you.
Do keep in mind, I have a 4060 Ti and my number of points to spawn ran terrible at 0.5, so I lowered it to a very nice 0.25 instead, which still gave a nice landscape to toy around with.

Few questions/tips: In the beginning you don't seem to mention which UE project template to use. I opted for 3rd person just so I could walk around easily as well. You seem to have gone for No Template? Also, because I used 3rd person I noticed the grass and other elements still had collision, so I disabled that.

With the scaling you provided my 3rd person character feels rather small though, but that is easily adjusted. Once again, thanks for the incredible tutorial! Well worth the time!

[ianguglielmi-white]

I have been hoping someone would talk about PCG+Gaea in Unreal for about a year now. I am so ready to jump in this!

[stanislavvakulich]

Thanks for the tutorial! Would definitely prefer to have a video on how to use Gaea

[KBFNGG]

Extremely great tutorial. Really happy that you also introduced the partitioning part of PCG. I have two questions:
- Can we control the grid size of pcg partitions?
- Would the techniques shown in this video also applied if the landscape was a static mesh instead of a landscape? I'm not sure how one would mimic getting the grass and cliff masks.