Heightmap funky issues in engine

[anonymous_user_dd81c9bb]

Im working on some 3d aerial data I took a while back with my drone and mapping out actual locations in 3d. Here is an example data set generated from the software
?v=gdqZofRuTg4
. I took the 3d model it generated into Maya and did a bit of clean up, but ultimately I wanted to generate a height map out of it to be pulled into the engine.

From Maya:

Then I made sure in photoshop to turn it into grayscale and 16bit, then saved it out as a png.

I imported the heightmap into Unreal Engine but when looking at it, its not very smooth at all, and has these tiny spikes all over the place… see

Im trying to get it to look something similar to my actual 3d model which you can see in SketchFab here.

Any thoughts? I prefer not to use the mesh as a landscape because I think creating it with a heightmap in the engine is more performant.

[anonymous_user_923c79df]

Make sure to save it as a raw 16 file, not png
Could you probably also show the heightmap so that we can check if there are probably some mistakes in it?

[anonymous_user_dd81c9bb]

@;237453

Make sure to save it as a raw 16 file, not png
Could you probably also show the heightmap so that we can check if there are probably some mistakes in it?

The heightmap is in the bottom screen shot in my osx preview window. I also tried 16bit raw with the same spiky results

[anonymous_user_dd81c9bb]

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

[TimeSpirits]

8bit Png will work

[Visnarel]

Keep in mind that unreal seems to assume that all images are 0-1 only, meaning the lowest value that it encounters is 0 and the highest one is 1. On my project I had to take the world machine output and expand it to fit 0-1, or use photoshop to expand the levels to fit 0-1 or scale the terrain down in unreal to fit it

[anonymous_user_dd81c9bb]

@Visnarel;238496

Keep in mind that unreal seems to assume that all images are 0-1 only, meaning the lowest value that it encounters is 0 and the highest one is 1. On my project I had to take the world machine output and expand it to fit 0-1, or use photoshop to expand the levels to fit 0-1 or scale the terrain down in unreal to fit it

Thanks, how did you set this up in photoshop if you dont mind explaining.

[TimeSpirits]

Adjust levels probably. Make the brightest value 255 and the darkest 0.

[anonymous_user_dd81c9bb]

I used a custom shader in Maya that creates heightmaps then rendered the top down view as seen in the first photo, just the little spikes all over im still unable to get them to smooth out. I tried a small blur in photoshop to try to flatten these out but not sure if the engine is seeing this data differently.

[TimeSpirits]

Did you try saving as 8bit png?