In this first installment I imported a 10km x 10km landscape created from Lidar data available on the defra website. The data was processed in #Houdini but this work has been documented elsewhere. I will cover the details of Houdini at a later date.
I then sculpt the lakes and use the Unreal Water plugin to create the first roughcut impressions of water bodies. The landscape uses World Partition and Substrate materials and Displacement AND Nanite which are all experimental at the moment and explain why i have had many of the problems that i have had over the years I'm sure :) Perseverance has however paid off.
Finally I added some materials to the landscapes. I should mention at this point my huge appreciation of Undini who just took my understanding of materials in Unreal to a new level. BIG thanks to #Undini. Sadly he appears not to have made any new videos recently but we live in hope :)
I had a LOT of problems with the water plugin over the years, the spline versions seem to damage the landscape material. This can sometimes be repaired using a full build but not always... so I'm using the custom actor which is a simple plane. This sometimes means I have to build up the surrounding landscape to hide the edges of the plane that protrude beyond the lake but that's ok.