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Brass Orrery

Version 1.0, coming to Fab. Orrery Terrain 1.0 is not on sale yet; this guide can still change before it is.

GuideOrrery Terrain 1.0

Orrery Terrain: user guide

Orrery Terrain is a runtime-deformable terrain plugin for Unreal Engine 5.8. It streams natural ground, lets you add earthworks (plates and corridors, also driven by splines) and lets your players sculpt and paint the ground while the game runs, with round brushes, texture brushes and height stamps. It saves and loads that state, and it answers ground queries from any part of your game.

This guide describes what the plugin does today. What version 1.0 includes and leaves out is listed in Included in 1.0.

Read in this order

Section titled “Read in this order”
Chapter Contents
1. Install Put the plugin in a project and turn it on.
2. Quick start A terrain in a level and your first Play session.
3. Concepts How the terrain thinks: truth and features, render tiers, residency, determinism, units.
4. Tutorial: import a heightmap Real ground from a PNG, RAW, GeoTIFF or Landscape.
5. Tutorial: sculpt at runtime Let players raise, lower, smooth, flatten and paint, with texture brushes, stamps and splat paint (Blueprint and C++).
6. Tutorial: save and load Keep the edited ground in your game’s save slots.
7. Tutorial: materials and layers The default material, your own material and the paint layer table.
8. Tutorial: grass Grass that grows on paint layers.
9. Tutorial: plates and corridors from code Pads, roads, rail beds and canal banks, and live splines that drive them.
10. Performance and quality Settings and console variables.
11. Limits What the terrain does not do, including brush, stamp and spline limits.
12. Included in 1.0 The larger parts of 1.0 with their chapters, and what 1.0 does not include (a dedicated server, a tested Linux server).
13. FAQ Short answers to common problems.
14. Multiplayer Several players editing the same ground: setup, requests, brush masks, late join, bandwidth.
15. Foliage that follows edits, and PCG Placed foliage that follows the ground, and PCG graphs that read the terrain.
16. The editor mode Make, sculpt, paint and bake terrain in the viewport; brushes and stamps, plates, corridors, live splines and the bake commandlet.
17. When it fits What the plugin is good at, what it is not for, and how it compares with Unreal’s Landscape.

Other documents

Section titled “Other documents”

Conventions in this guide

Section titled “Conventions in this guide”
  • Units. Unreal-facing functions (Blueprint nodes and UOrreryTerrainLibrary) take centimetres. Settings with _m in the name are metres. Each chapter says which one applies.
  • Stability. Every public header is marked Stable, Experimental or Internal. This guide says when it uses an Experimental part (the grass system, the tile store, the PCG module, the net layer, texture brushes and stamps, live spline features and the brush-target extension V2). See the versioning policy.
  • Blank project. Each tutorial starts from a new, empty project with the plugin enabled.
Plugin 1.0 · Unreal Engine 5.8Found a mistake or something unclear? E-mail us