I’ve made this tutorial to help people who are wondering about how to better their landscapes and create a more immersive landscape. I’ll be running over only the smooth terrain process today as well as meshes which will follow the smooth terrain segment, enjoy!
Smooth Terrain Landscaping
Smooth terrain is an amazingly useful tool to use for landscape creation, in this part of the post I’ll show you how to realistically create and model your landscape, as well as other parts that you can use to help you improve the landscape as a whole!
So, to begin with, an open up a baseplate template and open your terrain tab in home which can be found here:
Once you’ve opened terrain I’d recommend next going to the region tool which can be found here:
With this tool you can mark out a flat area of your choosing using the resize tool and you should end up with something similar to this (keep in mind you can change the size to whatever you want) :
Once you’ve completed that go to fill in the edit section of the terrain editor and choose a terrain of your choosing, for this example I’ll be choosing grass. After that it should look something similar to this:
Now to create a more varied and interesting surface I’d recommend going in with a growing tool and setting it to a fairly small size and strength similar to this:
Once you’ve completed this make sure you have the same terrain as your original style selected and simply go in and give the tile some texture and definition, once you’re finished it should look something like this (With your own personal flare if you’d like)
With this, you want to go over to the paint tool and put the settings onto the smallest possible size, from there go over areas of the landscape in different unique terrain to help give some variation to the landscape. Mine turned out something like this:
From here comes the very important part; grass. Now the grass is very important for a realistic landscape as it gives the realistic feel of a real environment. I like to do my grass by layering different colours and sizes, here’s a free mesh of the grass I use: Grass Mesh Note: this is not my original model. Anyway, back to the grass layering, I’d recommend choosing a colour of your choosing, for this example, I chose grime 127, 142, 100:
Now to achieve the realistic look what you want to do is to duplicate the grass and separated just like this:
From this point, you want to go to the colour slider and change the brightness of the grasses to different degrees, in my example they ended up looking like this:
With these new colours, we can begin layering the grasses over the terrain, using different sizes and transparency we can achieve something like this:
Now that we’ve layered the grass we can add other elements such as trees and shrubs.
Now for the tree placement we want to try and create a random looking set of trees, I recommend resizing and rotating all your trees differently as to avoid them looking unnatural, for my style I’m going for there needs to be enough space to observe the nature so I go for a fairly sparse density of trees as can be seen here:
From here we can then add smaller shrubs to enhance the landscape. Make sure you place shrubs in appropriate locations, like roots and mushrooms under trees while placing stumps in the open, from that I made this.
Now even though it’s not building related there are some great ways to make your builds feel more realistic, for example, particle emitters. I used a soft yellow emitter with these settings to create an ambience
With this I’d recommend adding a nice skybox to suit the landscape or style, and then to add whatever cosmetic effects you like, here’s what my demo looks like:
Here’s a link to the landscape sample I made: Demo Landscape.rbxl (2.1 MB)
Hopefully, this post can help you enhance your landscape immersiveness and realisticness, If you have any questions on any of the processes feel free to message me or comment and I’ll be sure to answer, thanks for reading!
Many people want to make landscapes without smooth terrain and instead with meshes. When I make landscapes I often use lots of meshes in them, they can give a much more realistic feel and vibe around what you want to make. So here’s a guide on how to create mesh landscapes!
Meshes
I use a mesh pack of my own but I will make it available to you all so that you can make awesome landscapes of your own, and so to begin with here’s the mesh pack: Lolaphobia’s Rock Mesh Pack.
From here open up Roblox studio to a baseplate template, from here you need to open the rock mesh pack or any other landscape meshes you own, it should look something like this:
From here you’ll want to think of your theme for your build, for example, if you wanted a desert style of build you could make the rocks more orange and yellow, here are a few variants I created:
For this example, I’m going to use a lightish grey colour, I’ll begin the landscape with my large rocks, to set up the main features.
To achieve a smooth and consistent looking composition does require practice, trial and error is, in my opinion, the best way to master something, however, I have a few tips to speed up the process:
- Make sure the rocks and landscape have a flow, once your rock(s) is facing or moving one direction it needs to flow onto the next one.
- Having rocks of similar sizes helps to create a more realistic composition, big rocks can contrast with smaller ones in different circumstances.
- Make sure it doesn’t look repeated; one of the main issues with landscapes with rocks is their predictability and replicated look, combat this with different sizes and orientations.
From here you can begin the creation of the grass, and for my build, I’m going to add a small stream too. So what you want to do is to use the top of your rock meshes and colour them to the grass of your choosing. Make sure in your builds you border the full map to hide the meshes themselves, I’m keeping them for demonstration purposes.
From this point you want to make the grass, I’m using this grass here: Grass mesh From here we can get out mesh and duplicate it into 4 different meshes, from here choose the colour you want for your grass and vary it across the 4 meshes, mine ended up something like this:
From here, place the grass accordingly onto the landscape, make sure you mix different colours, sizes and heights to create a unique look all around.
From here you want to add in the trees, you want to make them look naturally scattered, so I recommend simply dragging, placing and rotating to get the look you want, here’s how mine turned out.
After this, you want to simply add some details, use small rocks and pebbles to fill in bumps and gaps and add in some shrubs to enhance the landscape.
Now to finish I always like to add a particle emitter, it helps increase the ambience of a landscape, I’d recommend modifying one to suit your landscape. For this one, I’m using these settings:
And once you’re finished with your particle emitter you are finished! You can add whatever details you like to help personalise and enhance your project or build, here’s how my demo turned out:
Thanks for checking out this tutorial, if you have any questions or feedback feel free to comment or message me. You can download the demo landscape here: MeshLandscapeDemo.rbxl (298.9 KB). I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful, the packs and assets here are completely safe and free for you to use, enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
