So I had the idea a while back of including an O'neill Cylinder as a backdrop for part of the game. An O'Neill Cylinder is a big tube that is given spin gravity so people can live clinging to the inside.
If you ever see the movie Interstellar, the final scene in the space station takes place in an O'Neill Cylinder. So in order to do this I needed to generate a landscape, then figure out a way to roll that landscape up like it was a piece of paper to create a tube.
Step 1 is simple. Go into photoshop and use the cloud filter effect on a blank canvas to create a gentle puffy gradient. For more pronounced mountains run the filter again. What you end up with is a heightmap. Everything black is considered sea level and grey and white pixels will set the vertices to different heights creating a cool mountainous landscape.
Before you move on, you will need to make sure that the texture is seamless vertically so when this heightmap is turrned into a model all the mountains line up.
Use the offset method to make sure everything lines up.
Next you go into blender and create a plane, and use this heightmap to create a displacement. I followed this tutorial to make that happen.
You will want to apply subdivisions and smoothing to make a really nice landscape. Next I had to roll up my landscape like I'm putting a poster in a cardboard tube.
The easiest way is to use the bend modifier tool and adjust the settings so it wraps into a cylinder.
From there it's just a matter of importing the model and the heightmap into the Unreal project.
Next I will go over how to make a material that uses 5 textures to display a planet's worth of detail.