You mention that a 1m squared quad is pretty good for most games, isn’t that pretty crappy resolution though if you are trying to capture detail in the landscape? I guess most games don’t care about detailed landscapes?
Hi all, just wondering if anyone can answer my question marks below… I know above 8129 it would be 16136, but do not know what would be 32 or 64 and also the other ???s… Can anyone help me on this as it could be useful to others… I know they are big but be fun to play around with due to haven much bigger systems now.
[TABLE=“border: 1, cellpadding: 1, width: 600”]
Overall size(vertices)
Quads/Section
Section/Component
Component Size
Total Component
64???x64???
???
???
???
???
32???x32???
???
???
???
???
16136x16136
???
???
???
???
8129x8129
127
4 (2x2)
254x254
1024 (32x32)
5km by 5km should be broken up into 1km by 1km landscapes. You need to use the world composition features to do this. (its really simple and learning it is quite insightful).
Your texture can use maps (normals, displacements) to make it seem more realistic. you can also bring down the scale to like 10 x 10 if you want. But yes exactly, it isn’t very accurate. Here is a pic at 1m by 1m per quad (which means verticies are 1 meter apart) (the cube is 1m by 1m btw)
now here is 10cm by 10cm quads (vertices are 10cm apart) (cube is still 1m by 1m) (brush is the same size also)
But then we have 10 times the amount of vertices (assuming you still want 1km by 1km landscapes). I honestly dont know how much of a performance impact this has on a fully running game, so I can’t say. It might be smarter to make each landscape smaller if you want more accurate landscapes. (500m by 500m?)
Note that I’m not sure how the restrictions are for the landscape so I’ll just do the math. Also, you can change some of the sizes around and get the same overall resolution (aka overall size)
Roughly those are what you want. I think a more practical approach would be to make 1kmx1km levels and then bring them all together using world composition.
actually with 10 x increased resolution - from 1m (100cm) to 10 cm you would get 100 x more vertices
(well close to 100 x - I didn’t count shared edges and such)
btw if you need more details you can always use tessellation and small spawned junk meshes - that’s how terrains in Ghost Recon Wildlands look so detailed and pretty whilr they have (I think) 1 pixel/meter (or did they use 0.5m / pixel? I forgot…)
oh right sorry, i was talking about along one side. yeah, area-wise we are looking at 10x10 more vertices
EDIT: i should also mention that i didnt build the lighting in those images, so we might be looking at some simple shading on the polygons
OMG, i will have to take the Rorschach inkblot psychological test for this, I guess I will see only quads and components. Anyway I have landscape mad in 3ds max 1,5x1,5 km and have 200x200 quads. I tried to use meshed landscape in UE but than I cant use paint on landscape and that is essential to me right now. So I have to render to texture height map but WHAT RESOLUTION? What I dont get is correlation between quads and components, if I make one component with 256 quads it is same as 2 components with 127 (although resolution is smaller by one) what does it impact on performance (lets say they are same in resolution). also 1x1 and 2x2 sections per component i really dont get it you now separate component in half so i can use 2x2 with 127 quads and have same as first two ? So what number of quads and components and sections to use now (what is better for visual and what for performance)? So i used 256x256 quads (have no idea why) with 1x1 section (also no idea) with 6x6 components (i like 6x6 :D) and got overall resolution 1531 x 1531. So if i render height map 1500 x 1500 pixepls png file it will have 31 meter on every side left like nothing happen ? or i will render 1550x1550 pixels and it will crop 19 meters on each side? can somebody tell me formula for calculating height map pixel size to solve this once and forever?
I think this is the answer to my question although i still doesnt understand relation between quads and components. So my 1500x1500 meter landscape is 1500x1500 pixels png. file?
This is my understanding. Ive literally just looked at this discussion and thought id try help.
Before you start, set your grid snapping to 1. This will make it easier to visualise my explanation - if you disagree or think its plain wrong, let me know!
So my understanding is the following: 1uu=1cm or 1 grid unit = 1cm
Lets look at the grid now that we have the grid snap settings to 1. What you should see is that the smallest squares of 1 x 1 (cm) on the grid make a bigger square of 10 x 10 (cm).
Lets refer to these 10 x 10 (cm) bigger squares as just “squares” for the sake of this explanation.
Look at the grid again and you will notice that our “squares” make another larger square of again 10 x 10. These larger sqaures are what the editor when creating terrains refers to as QUADS.
Therefore each QUAD is 100 cm x 100 cm which is therefore 1m x 1m. WHY?
We have a square of length 10cm and width 10cm. A QUAD needs 10 of these across the length and 10 of these across the width. So multiply by 10.
Now we know what the size of a QUAD is. It is (100 cm x 100 cm) OR (1m x 1m)
Lets look at the make up of the terrain.
One terrain is made up of components. A component has different sections which can be 1 x 1 or 2 x 2.
If a section is 1 x 1 and we select 63 x 63 QUADS a component will be 63m x 63m
If a section is 2 x 2 and we select 63 x 63 QUADS a component will be 126m x 126m. (basically multiplied by 2)
If we have selected 10 x 10 components then:
1 x 1 section will give a final terrain of 630m x 630m
2 x 2 section will give a final terrain of1260m x 1260m
Hope that helps!!
Point to note:
If you change your grid settings after this to 10 you will see the 1 cm x 1cm squares disappear and you only see the 10cm x 10cm squares that I refered to as “squares” in the explanantion.
Notice colours too
Terrain outline: Yellow
Component outling: Bright green
Quad outline: Dark green
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Hi, I want to share my approach to this topic. All tool that I use are free.
I’ve worked out the real-world scale of the default map sizes in Unreal engine, added these to a table and also showed my workings for this - the post is here Calculate the Size of Unreal Engine Landscapes - Motion Forge Pictures and of course, constructuve feedback is welcome.
1 pixel = 1 meter so 1000 meters is a km. so if you have a 8129x8129 a supported size you would have a 8.129 km map. km are .62 of a mile so youd have to either do a lil math or put it into a converter online but in miles comes out to 5.0511264. but why think in miles if your game engine thinks in terms of metric measurement. Metric is good because of the whole power of ten.
How do you calculate the size of the Landscape in General And then convert to KM? I need the CALCULATOR and the Theorem Equation! PLEASE
Go to Top View:
Middle click on one side of the Landscape and drag to the opposite side:
The measurement unit is in ‘cm’ (centimeters), so that’s the length of one side in centimeters. Multiply by 100 to convert to meters or 100,000 for kilometers then square (x2) the result to get the area in meters or kilometers squared, respectively.
You can make sure that this works by measuring the default cube, which is 1x1x1m:
Hope this helps, even if a bit late 
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Wow thank you I NEVER even thought about this, gosh you are super helpful thank you! Genius @0xIsho
I’m pretty sure they all way overthought all of this, and at least one or two of them did the math incorrectly. All you need to do is calculate the area of a rectangle (squares are also rectangles).
Basic geometric equation is L x W = A | Your end result will be based on whether you left it in meters or converted it to kilometers before finding the area.
Let’s assume you’ve done nothing at all to change the size of your quads (stop skipping leg day, heh), they are default 1m x 1m, or 1 square meter.
If you want to convert before calculating, take your two resolution values, such as the default map size of 505 x 505. Subtract one from each to get 504 x 504, and then divide each by 1,000, so you’d have 0.504 x 0.504. Now grab a calculator and type that in. Your ending number will be 0.254 → so 0.254 square kilometers.
If you want to convert from meters to kilometers AFTER calculating, you take your result, which in this case will be 254,016 square meters, and then you divide that by 1,000,000.
1km x 1km = 1,000m x 1,000m = 1,000,000 square meters. That’s where the million comes from, in case you were curious.
If you want that in square miles, multiply it by 0.62 → you will get about 0.157 square miles.
If you want maximum optimal map size, here it is:
Remember that resolution is adding 1 to each of the numbers, since it counts vertices, not the actual squares themselves. 8129 then becomes 8128. 8,128 meters is 8.128 kilometers.
8.128 x 8.128 = 66.064 square kilometers. That’s THE maximum optimized map size.
In miles, it’s 40.96 square miles, after rounding.
Since you can turn the number of quads all the way up to 255 x 255, and by sheer technicality, the number of components can reach 256 x 256, the maximum possible resolution is 130,560 x 130,560, for a whopping 17,045.914 square kilometers, assuming a default quad sizing. This is purely theoretical, however, since editor will not allow you to do this.
The maximum resolution that the editor will actually allow is only 8191 x 8191, for a total area of 67.092 km square.
If you’ve changed the sizing of the quads to something smaller, you’ll first need to convert that into meters or kilometers, but then the area equation for a rectangle will take you the rest of the way. Keep in mind that the resolution still cannot exceed 8191 x 8191, but you can change the X and Y values of your quads to pretty much whatever you want.
Considering that, realistically speaking, I’m really not sure there’s an upper limit to how large of a landscape you could potentially create. Depending on the values you decide upon, you’d very possibly invoke a hellish level of torture on your GPU, giving it a very sad and horrific death. Might be fun to watch, if you ever decide you hate your GPU enough to kill it this way.
For excrement and happiness, I turned the size of the quads up to 100,000,000.0 (that’s 1,000,000,000,000 square km per quad), just to see if the editor would show me the green grid (and it DID). Just trying to zoom out enough to see the whole thing brought my GPU up over 70°C, and I didn’t dare try to create it…
For context, that would effectively be an area of 6.709 x 10^19 square kilometers, which is over 11 million times the surface area of the Sun.
Try wrapping your brain around that.
I am Bron the Vile, your resident Super-Villain,
Thank you for your time.
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That is so uplifting and exciting to recieve your input @BronTheVile
I am very happy and could really use your under knowledge much deeper beneath the surface here and in other ways as well.
Thank you for your time! I wonder if you could help me with some more stuff soon! Feel free to add me on discord
yours truly
-bubblebunz
I just hope it helped you with the project you were working on. I added you on Discord, so hit me up for any other questions. I’ll do my best to assist.