Chapter 6. Terrain

Unreal Engine 3 supports a flexible terrain system that provides a wide variety of visual styles and uses. Many different landscapes can be realized and various themes can be achieved utilizing a heightmap based system that can visually depict hills, valleys, mountains, rivers, roads, and more. It can also depict a multi-layer terrain material system that supports real-world texture files such as dirt, rock, sand, and mud.

A multi-layer decoration system provides additional flexibility and realism by rendering foliage such as grass, weeds, bushes, flowers, and even small rocks and debris.

Terrain is typically created using one of the two techniques: hand-painting directly on the terrain mesh to create the hills and valleys, or importing externally created terrain height maps. Additionally, height map information can be acquired from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) information. Material layers that represent dirt, grass, and rocks can be created using terrain alpha maps that...