Hello All, this is literally my first post here so hopefully catch some good advice.
I am a civil engineer with long history of TIN surface creation for our industry.
I want to make a UE game that shows these surfaces along with an image draped over them like google earth. I am a UE beginner, but then a surface creation/manipulation expert so am hoping I can figure this out.
I am studying UE now as it sounds like UE 5 has conquered the issue where too many polygons slows things down.
I have a few questions:
I can bring in my surfaces as meshes, such as if you pull in an fbx. Those do not behave as terrain though, as I understand it. Can “terrain” be irregular tris or only quad tris?
If terrain can only be quads, do people model ground that needs specific creases and features that quads cannot do, with meshes?
Are there threads already on this subject, which I might call “how to do terrain with specific detailed features like curb and gutter for roads”?
Not at all. They simply remove the polygons for you using a less than good algorithm. You will loose detail.
Only quad. And the verts with default scale are hard set to 1 per meter. Also 1px of heightmap = 1 meter of terrain.
Usually mesh caps that get blended back into the terrain. It really depends.
Tons. Look for desert dune details, or cliffs. The processes have been explained to death.
On that. Ignore landscapes. Ignore the engine. Work in whatever DCC you prefer. Import set meshes into the scene, with custom LODs so you loose as little detail as possible.
@MostHost_LA
Thanks for replying. I’ll read some more.
On that last part “ignore the engine”, sounds like you mean don’t use terrain, but meshes instead.
This terrain issue comes up on other gaming engines, you know the other one I mean.
I had thought about a quad terrain that followed just under my detailed ground mesh.
That was so trees and water behaved nicely, as the terrain object handles LOD super well.
Interesting UE might just be good with the mesh. I’m so green at UE that some of my thoughts do not fit the software framework so I need to learn more.
thx
Yes.
Ideally, do everything in a DCC, including placing instances of foliage.
That way you are able to move the scene to whatever engine instead of being tied down or having to figure out how to export things.
(Youll need to figure out how to import them instead, but I do think its much easier).
Oh, DCC. Looked that up and didn’t realize my whole life has been lived in DCC’s.
I did know that, just not the abbreviation.
I totally get that you have creation apps, then “assembly” apps like game engines.
The interesting thing is autodesk has a program “Infraworks” that is super good for civils to sort of merge content in prep for real, I mean unreal, gaming engines.
In the end though, I’m still wondering about the compromises with using a mesh for the ground vs a terrain.
You’ve been helpful, I just need to study a bit and these upfront course corrections save me a ton of time.
thanks,
Its something you don’t use, so there isn’t any compromise really.
The landscape painting can be done on meshes with textures, or vertex paint to some extent, but again. If you prepair outside of the engine for a clean import, being able to change things in engine or not doesn’t matter.
The grass node from landscape isnt applicable to meshes, but you can manually place or procedurally simulate instanced meshes just fine so it offsets the need for the grass node entierly.
Nav mesh is able to work on anything, meshes too, so the landscape mesh will work with it normally.
You gain around 90% ms render cost switching from a landscape tile to a properly optimized landscape mesh, so performance definitely doesn’t suffer.
The landscape system really offers nothing of value to anyone in the state it has been in for 6 or 8 years. The administration eggheads seem to have halted any of the work that was being done with it - VT included - so you definitely won’t be missing out on anything at all by not using it…
As a side note, you can also give some voxel plugins a go. In spite of being more complex, they usually perform better than landscape…