Tileable 3D Meshes - Terrain Modules

I am working on a game which has terrain pieces, like flat grass, flat grass with straight river, flat grass with river corner. And each piece can be used multiple times to create different landscapes, however I cannot for the life of me work out how to make a realistic looking terrain piece / height map with the detail I need that is also tileable, almost tileable like a texture but with actual depth.

Think of how UE4 is really good with modular building blocks, well I am trying to do that but with organic terrain pieces and I just need a little bit of advice or guidance.

I have been trying to get ZBrush or 3DCoat to work with this idea by sculpting a terrain mesh and then trying to match the edges up but its no use. I have tried the Curve tool on ZBrush with little success.

Any ideas guys?!

Hi,

tryed read few times to understand your idea/question and still don’t sure i got it. Can you clarify or simplify your question?

For example:

  1. do you ask how just mix flat textures on your terrain pieces dinamicly?
  2. do you ask about how make realistic terrain/landscape generation in UE4 from scratch?
  3. do you ask how import 3D model terrain pieces correctly from ZBrush or 3DCoat into UE4?

Maybe few screenshots of what your result should be clear your question or try separate questions.

Ok so I will try to explain what I am after better.

I am trying to work out how I can make square meshes that can fit together seamlessly at almost every orientation. But the meshes I am making have a lot of detail on them.

Here is an image of the tiles repeatedly used.

probably i got your question idea and can spell it like this:

how make tile sets for 3D world and tile mixing rules

for example image from old warcraft 3 http://xgm.guru/files/100/50750/Alpha-tail[1].png.160x120r.png it shows tileset and rules of mixing, tiles with higher indexes lay on tiles with lower indexes

but regarding to UE4 i think you can make Dynamic Material Instances A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums and because it can use blueprints, you can specify rules and conditions to change material depending on what lay around

i don’t sure if Dynamic Material Instance blueprint can have events to trigger material changes when closest tile around changes, but i sure you can first fill your map with square tiles and then just iterate over every tile to make proper mixing because at this point you will know every surround tile and of course it would be much less operation rather then triggering changes every time you place single tile at runtime, but maybe you find how make changes at runtime just to simplify