First Steps with Voxel Landscapes

The very first step when working with Voxel Landscapes is to place a Voxel Landscape Actor in the level. Make sure its transform is all reset to its defaults so your landscape isn't offset. You'll notice that placing this actor hasn't actually made any terrain show up yet. Instead, this actor just controls rendering and collision settings.

In order for anything to actually render, brushes need to be present in the scene. Brushes are actors that tell the Voxel Landscape that some kind of shape needs to be generated and rendered in a particular place. The terrain will be generated anywhere that has a brush, and it will not be generated where there aren't any brushes.

The plugin supports height brushes and volumetric brushes. Both of these can be read from a static data source (heightmap assets for height, voxelized meshes for volumetrics), but they can also be generated from a graph. Ideally, height brushes should be used whenever possible, as they are cheaper to generate.

In this case, the goal is to generate a base terrain with a height brush. To do so, create a Voxel Height Graph in the content browser, and open the created asset. A graph with a single Output Height node will open.

This graph will run as part of the Voxel Landscape once it's placed in the level, but it won't actually do anything unless it has a set of bounds assigned.

To assign bounds, drag out from the Bounds pin and place a Make Box 2D node. Right-click in an empty spot and search for the Make Box From Radius node. Place it, split its output by right-clicking the pin, and then connect the two output pins to the Make Box 2D input pins. Drag out from the Radius input pin and click Promote to parameter. This makes it configurable from the details panel on placed actors. Do the same for the Material pin on the output node.

To make the terrain more than just a flat plane, drag out from the Height pin and place an Advanced Noise 2D node. Attach Get Position2D to its position pin.

With this done, minimize the graph editor and drag the graph from the content browser into the level. Set the radius value in the details panel to something like 5000, and you'll see a terrain appear. The brush only generates in an area the size of its bounds around its position.

The height of the terrain can be adjusted by simply moving the brush up and down in the level.

Right now, the terrain will be black, but any material can be assigned to the material parameter, and it will immediately show up on the terrain.

Graphs will automatically blend together when placed around each other.