Desert Dunes Environment

Please watch the following 2 videos to see what you can achieve and how you can use this pack:

Dunes Overview Video, Dunes Auto-Material Layers Test Video

This UE5 pack is designed to help you create in less than 5 minutes, a huge open-world desert dunes scene. Everything is well optimized for huge worlds (the example map is a 64 square km dunes desert, 8k resolution). Desert Dunes Environment comes with a very powerful and highly customizable auto-material with 8 layers. It also contains desert-specific effects (sand-dust effect and heat-haze effect).

As a bonus, beside the Demo Level, you get another 6 Dunes Heightmaps at 8k resolution, each with a surface area of 64 square km. To use the heightmaps, you will need to export them as PNG 16 Bit on your hard disk and then, reimport them into your project from the landscape mode tab. To export the heightmaps as PNG 16 Bit, you will need to install the FREE plugins Export PNG or ILIAD. After that you can right click on a heightmap and choose - export as PNG 16 Bit. Both FREE plugins can be found on the Unreal Marketplace.

The auto-material will adapt to any landscape you have, it doesn't matter if you import a heightmap, sculpt the landscape with alpha brushes or use the classic sculpting tool from Unreal Engine 5.

This product supports Lumen for Unreal Engine 5.0 + . If You want to use the pack at it's full potential, I recommend using Lumen. In order to enable Lumen in your project (if it is not already enabled) you should go to Project Settings/Engine/Rendering and make sure you have the following setup:

Dynamic Global Illumination Method - LUMEN

Reflection Method - LUMEN

Shadow Map Method - Virtual Shadow Maps

The sandstorm and heat-haze effects are in fact materials applied on a plane in front of the player and because of this, the effects are very cheap from the GPU resources consumption point of view. Because of this method, the effects can be used on huge maps without having a performance impact proportional to the landscape size. So if you want to use the sandstorm or heat-haze effect with your own character, all you have to do is to add a plane component to your character (disable cast shadows for the plane) for each effect and apply it to the plane one of the effects materials. Use as model, the character from this pack, just to be sure you are doing everything right. The sandstorm material should be placed first at about 40-80 units in front of the player and the heat-haze plane/material should be placed at about 500 - 700 units in front of the player. If you don't respect the distances, it is not a problem but, in this case, you will have to tweak the materials parameters a little bit to look good.

All the materials are highly customizable. Altogether, there are many parameters that you can tweak to personalize the final look of the dunes. You will be able to modify parameters like sandstorm effect strength, seed, intensity, speed, heat haze intensity, tiling, speed, landscape textures tiling amount, wind blowing effect and much more.

It is designed for huge open-world games but can also be used for small environments.

Attention: This product is using World Partition to keep everything optimized. When you first open the demo map, the landscape regions will not be loaded and this is why you can not see the landscape inside the editor. In order to see the landscape, you will have to go to the World Partition Tab and select all the regions after that right click on the selection and press Load Regions from Selection. You have to do this only once per project. This is how Unreal Engine works...