Location Inspiration – Part 1: Fuschlsee

Since I won’t be able to handmake the landscape and still get believable and alpine-like vibes across, my current plan is to just use the height data from a place and then adjust from there for gameplay reasons (e.g. make things more traversable, adjust flatness for placing buildings, etc).

So I took this opportunity to take a trip home, solely for project reasons of course and not at all because I was missing some good hiking action 😉.

I have a couple of locations in mind I really love- actually way too many – but let’s look at my favorites. For each one, I’ll show you some real-life pictures, the map data in Blender, and then a mockup in-game.

After starting this first post, I noticed that it takes way too much time and length to stick them all in one, so instead I will do one for each location instead 🙂.

So, lets start with…

Fuschlsee – Salzburg, Austria

The Fuschlsee is a lake by Fuschl am See, near Salzburg.
It’s a lovely little lake at which I spent a fair amount of time in my life since it is easily reachable by bus and you can swim in it during summer ( I mean, you can swim in it whenever, but brrr 🥶).

The area is quite foresty and hilly with some smaller mountains in the distance. In my opinion it’s really lovely but it doesn’t quite show off the beauty of our mountains.

Real Life Location

Blender Landscape Data

Using the GIS Blender Addon you can easily load in any maps data into Blender. It’s free and extremly easy to use.
Check it out here.

Unreal Landscape Data

Baking the Blender data to a height map texture, you can then import that into Unreal to create your landscape.

You might notice that the form of the lake is a bit off, but I just quickly hand placed it, since I haven’t figured out yet how to best get the depth value for the lake into Blender/Height Map.
Because of that, it doesn’t line up completely but it is just a quick mock up after all.

For now I won’t add a landscape material and foliage. I think I’ll save that workload once I have narrowed down which place I want to actually pick. I’d hate to waste a ton of time on… nothing really. 😄.

Sooo.. this was the first place.. once I looked into all of them more deeply I will make a choice and which one to pick and then art it out more with some lovely trees and flowers and a town.

But for today, that’s all…

Bye!! 👋