Hey all. I’m actually curious if anyone else has tried doing large landscapes with unreal yet?
Here’s my first test:v=srgn31ybO_s
One thing I’ve come across is that it takes a long time to actually load a large terrain (I’m assuming because I’m not streaming anything). I’ve been trying to record this matinee sequence all day but for some reason actually recording a matinee movie seems to not want to work. I had to change the level blueprint to make this one work (and cut off the last few minutes of recording in Vegas). Interestingly enough the recorded AVI file was 51gb so I guess they’re capturing raw frames and not encoding them into the AVI file. It compressed down to 51mb pretty well though using Vegas.
Its hard in the video to get a sense of the scale, but if you look in the first maybe 20 seconds of the video on the right hand side you’ll spot some grey blocks in the air? Thats the default starting place for the third person template, so you can imagine this 8kmx8km space is actually quite big.
Another interesting thing. I’ve noticed some cracks in the terrain at the extreme edges. I’m guessing this is floating point error or some such. It isn’t around ALL the edges though, which is kind of interesting, suspect its floating point not being uniform in its coverage (perhaps the area with cracks is farther from the origin in floating point terms). So my takeaway is that its best to not do large terrains in Unreal, instead use smaller terrains and “teleport” between them as seperate maps, bit like zoning used to be in the old MMO’s.
Interesting. Have you worked with the terrain editor in the UDK? If so, is the one provided by UE4 any better? I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. Also, how’s the performance?
In my opinion it is much better than the terrain editor in UDK but just slightly in comparison to the udk landscape tool. There are some new tools like the ramp-/retopologize tool.
You really should put a character object or some other kind of prop in there so illustrate the scale. The matinee was very nice though! What is the texture size you are using for the landscape?
It uses a 4k base colour, with a detail normal map blended in. To be honest I’m not satisfied with my materials for landscapes yet. Or even the process of how I work with them. This was literally my second test and I wanted to see the performance of a -sized terrain (according to the documentation) and also my first proper matinee sequence. So its not really meant to look good so much as just work
I really should have added some buildings or something so people could judge the scale, but I wasn’t really thinking of it at the time. Its “****** big” is my estimate takes a while to run around thats for sure. Also takes an age to load up and edit sadly
This is because it is just bare terrain and you have nothing to base scale off of. When you put some trees and some random big rocks in there and that will start looking really good and scale will not be a problem. How did you make your terrain? World Machine?
A program called GeoControl 2. Using the demo, but honestly I think I might have a play around with doing one in mudbox because GC2 is kind of weird. I’m going to try GROME and L3DT at some point too. I’ve seen some nice landscapes for CryEngine using World Machine or a mix of GC2 and WorldMachine.
takes a while to run around thats for sure. Also takes an age to load up and edit sadly