Unreal Engine’s Landscape system is a powerful tool for building large-scale terrains that can form the foundation for open-world games or expansive environments. On Day 26, you’ll dive deep into the process of creating and managing landscapes within Unreal Engine, starting from scratch and ending with sculpted terrain ready for material application and foliage integration.

The day begins with learning how to create a new landscape from the Landscape Mode panel. You’ll understand how to define resolution, scale, and coordinate grid sizes appropriate for your project—whether it’s a small playable area or a vast open-world map. Once your base landscape is in place, the focus shifts to terrain sculpting. Using a variety of sculpting brushes such as Smooth, Flatten, Erosion, Noise, and Ramp, you’ll experiment with terrain shaping techniques to create natural-looking hills, valleys, cliffs, and pathways. These tools allow you to simulate realistic geography that players can traverse and interact with.

Next, you’ll explore essential terrain optimization practices. Since large landscapes can affect performance, especially in open-world designs, you’ll learn how to use Level of Detail (LOD) and component resolution settings to balance visual fidelity with performance. Additionally, you’ll be introduced to landscape streaming, a technique for dividing the terrain into manageable sections that can be loaded and unloaded based on player location.

By the end of Day 26, your landscape will be sculpted and ready to support materials, foliage, and gameplay. You’ll have a foundational understanding of how to use the Landscape system not only for visuals but also as a critical gameplay space—supporting everything from exploration to line-of-sight design and world-building in Unreal Engine.