UDK's artist-driven terrain system lets you place and customize vegetation, structures and countless points of interest throughout your game world.
- Terrain building and editing tool
- Uses a dynamically deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes.
- Terrain is considered an actor in UDK, and therefore its shape is easily controlled via a height map in a paintbrush-like manner. Painting and sculpting geography is a simple task handled with the sweep of the mouse.
- Artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering
- For example, you can place grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes and snow atop peaks.
- Grass and other foliage can be added either as a material or as decorations called DecoLayers. Materials allow foliage to be instantly added to entire map sections while DecoLayers offer deeper placement control.
- Advanced controls over lighting and collision
- Lightmaps, shadowmaps and collision properties can be edited in detail in order to make the terrain look and perform realistically.