UE4 Landscapes how to make caves

Hi all,

I am planning the landscape for my game. I plan to use UE4s landscape actor to make it, but I have realised that with this it isn’t really possible to make caves. The only way I can think of to do it is to make a hole in the landscape with the landscape visibility tool to act as the cave entrance, and then adding 2 more smaller landscapes, one for the cave roof and one for the cave walls and floor. I could use ue4s sculpt tools to shape them as I wish, and then position them so they line up. This would probably be quite difficult to do, especially as I want lots of caves.

Is there any other way I could do it?

Thanks!

your best bet for caves is to use static meshes. you could still use the landscape for the floor, but for walls and roof static meshes are best.

ive only ever seen one example that possible used a landscape for a cave but it modified the engine to a point that ive never seen anyone else attempt it.

anyway theres a ton of cave assets, environments, and examples on the marketplace. check out soul cave pretty sure that ones free.

This tutorial has a decent description of the method you mentioned at first. Maybe you have already seen it.


Another method would indeed be a static mesh as ThompsonN13 mentioned. You could make a hole in the landscape and fill it with the mesh, or you could make your mountains, or part of your mountains a static mesh as well for an easy integration with your cave. Though this might be time consuming.
the only other method I can think of (never tried it, not sure if it is entirely possible) is to make the cave entirely with the landscape tool.

I think just punching a hole on the landscape and filling it up with a static mesh is the easiest way.

Thanks! This is very helpful. I will probably go for a combination of these methods.

Thanks! I will try something like this out.

If you’re looking to learn different ways you can do it, this video will help.

If you want to make a cave in the landscape using the landscape visibility tool.

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Thanks! These all seem like valid methods.

Hello! I tried to find tutorials on creating a cave in UE and found 1-2 (useful ones) but still have questions… I think the best method is to make a hole in the landscape and inside create the cave. But…

 1. How low under the landscape can I go?
 2. What if I want to make HUGE cave 200-500m under my terrain?
 3. Should I make my main terrain with high elevation or it can be with low elevation too?

My main concern is I can have problems if I put something under the default UE’s grid level. In the same time I have seen games where you can go inside deep caves so it is possible.

Please excuse the late reply but I would like to offer my solution in case there is anybody out there still looking for a somewhat reasonable way to do this.

I have been creating sub levels with their own landscapes. Each cave’s landscape is located underneath it’s corresponding entrance on the persistent level landscape.

Each cave landscape is associated with a level streaming volume which encompasses the sublevel landscape and the entrance on the persistent level landscape. I try to position the entrance to be roughly in the center of it’s sub level landscape. This way, by the time the player reaches the entrance, they have been inside the streaming volume long enough for the sub level landscape to completely load.

Each cave entrance has a box collision inside that when the player collides with it, causes them to teleport inside the sublevel cave landscape.

As long as you have turned off world bounds in the world settings panel, there should be no kill zone on the zed axis…this allows the sub level landscapes to exist well below the persistant level landscapes…for example I have so far implemented 2 seperate sub level landscapes MORE THAN -8000 units below the original persistant landscape.

I have provided a screenshot example of one of the sublevel landscapes which is currently about -7500 units below the original persistant landscape.

hope this helps, please ask for further clarification if needed but please understand I am only 2.5 months old with Unreal experience so I may not be a huge help although I will try.

Edit, I am also just using the sublevel landscape as a floor for the cave and then using static meshes to create the walls and whatnot

If you want to, you CAN use a flipped landscape as the ceiling and a regular one as the bottom of the cave.

Personally, I don’t like the way you say you have it setup, but there’s probably nothing actually wrong with it.

Regarldess of ue4 version, some sort of custom load/unload is needed.
Be it a streaming volume, or just a manual load when passing into the entrance.

The only benefit to using the landacape (note that in ue4 the landacape tools will work opposite to what you tink if you flip the landscape) is that you can sculpt on the fly for a quick and dirty start, make it into a mesh, and take it to a DCC to refine it.
Also, it supports foliage painting, which means you can pepper glowmoss and other plants/things onto the ceiling and have them adjust position along with the landscape, until you are done and you convert to mesh anyway.
*** baking/making an impostor won’t work on a flipped landacape. You have to undo its rotation to generate the mesh, and then flip the mesh again ***

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I have re thought my entire approach to caves.

My new way of doing things is to use voxel worlds and tunnel out the cave and then place the voxel world where it’s needed in my landscape.

I like your idea of flipping a landscape upside down and using as a ceiling it would cut out the need for a lot of static meshes… However, right now, the voxel world solution seems to be my best bet

Probably is, but check performance. Depending on what plugin thing it is, it can be either much better than landscapes, or much worse.