Do Edit Layers in UE5.5 Exist at Runtime, or Must They Be Collapsed/Baked?

Development Pipeline & Plugins
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Hey everyone,

The team been experimenting with the new Edit Layers feature in UE5.5 to non-destructively sculpt and flatten the landscape for roads and other geometry workflows.

It works great in the editor but we can’t find any documentation on whether these Edit Layers actually persist into the packaged game.

The understanding so far is:

  1. Edit Layers are editor-only. They don’t show up in-game unless you merge them.
  2. The “Collapse” button in the Layers panel appears to be the only way to bake a layer’s changes down into the main heightmap (or weightmap), which makes the edits permanent.
  3. This collapse operation is destructive, so you need to be sure you’re happy with your edits before collapsing.

What we have been doing is:

  • Create and edit on a separate Edit Layer while designing roads (using the flatten tool, spline-based flatten, etc.).
  • When satisfied, collapse that layer onto the base heightmap so that my changes actually appear in the packaged build.

This workflow seems logical, but I’d love confirmation or clarification:

  • Do Edit Layers have any impact at runtime (e.g., are they automatically baked when cooking or if they have some drawbacks)?
  • Or must you always collapse (bake) them yourself before cooking/publishing?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

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Steps to Reproduce

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Hi Lindsay.

Edit layers are indeed, as their name implies, editor-only. Their associated data is only available in the editor and therefore stripped when cooking.

They are meant exactly for the purpose you mentioned : allow users to work non-destructively in the editor, modifying things like roads or water bodies on their own and merging the result automatically so that what is displayed in the editor viewport is always the final, merged, landscape. As such, they should be entirely transparent to the user : there is no need for manually collapsing anything, i.e. what you see in the editor is what you get.

There is no performance downside to using them either : with or without edit layers, the final landscape ends up with the same amount of heightmaps/weightmaps and all edit layer data is removed on cook anyway. There is no additional processing to be done cook either : the final landscape data is generated in the editor, at edit-time, so using them won’t increase the cooking operational time, for example.

I hope this clarifies the situation. Please let us know if you have further questions.

Cheers,

Jonathan