VIDEO OVERVIEW , VIDEO Quick Start
Lava Procedural Worlds is designed to help you create huge Lava levels in Unreal Engine 5. The pack contains not 1 but 3 lava materials, depending of what you want to achieve.
The first material is in fact a complex auto-material having 12 layers and designed for the Unreal Landscape System. This is an intelligent auto-material which, on a macro level, detects the slopes/normals of the landscape and because of this, on a large scale, lava will always flow physically accurate (from up to down).
The second material is a cheaper and simpler version of the first material. If you don't really care about the direction of the lava flow and all you need is a basic lava auto-material, this is exactly what you need. Even if it is simple and cheaper from the resources consumption point of view, it still looks pretty good.
The third material is designed for simple static meshes (not for the Unreal Landscape System) and it is ideal for indoors scenes where, for example, all you need is a pool of lava. In cases like this, all you have to do is to drag and drop the material over the pool floor static mesh and you have a nice looking lava pool.
Beside the 3 lava materials, this pack also contains materials for Heat-Haze effect and Lava Smoke effect. It also contains, not 1, but 4 Lava Heightmaps (2 at 4k resolution and 2 at 8k resolution) so you can create additional 4 lava landscapes. Of course, you can use your own heightmap as landscape and you can also use the Unreal Landscape tools to create a landscape in side Unreal Engine 5. The Lava landscape auto-materials are designed to adapt to any landscape you have. If you are using the complex auto-material, depending on your landscape heightmap and resolution, there are some minor changes you will have to make to the material. Please watch the video Quick Start to see what are the necessary modification. If you are using the simple Lava auto-material then no changes are required to the material and all you have to do to use it is to drag and drop it over the landscape
In this pack, there are also included 4 demo levels so you can easily see all the different materials.
Everything is well optimized for really huge maps. The 4 Bonus Heightmaps from this pack are 64 and 16 square km, while the 3 demo levels are 16 square km.
Documentation: If you use the Complex Lava auto-material with a new heightmap or with a landscape created by you inside Unreal or even with the 4 Bonus Lava Heightmaps I included in this pack, you will have to export the heightmaps outside Unreal. (this is because Unreal do not support importing a heightmap from your project). Unreal Engine do not have any built-in tools to export the landscapes/heightmaps, so you will have to use FREE plugins which can be found on the UE5 Marketplace: ILIAD and Export PNG. The landscape/heightmaps must be exported as PNG, 16 BIT, Greyscale textures.
The Lava Smoke 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 consumptions 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 effects 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 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 Lava Smoke 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.
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 (if it is not already enabled in your project) 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
