Many recent tutorials for making large worlds use scaling to do so. However, I have seen reports on this forum that it causes issues. The issues that I have seen others mention include collision, performance, LOD, and animations. I couldn’t find anything in the docs about this after a few searches, but I may be missing something.
To me it seems that scaling up could be useful for large spaces where little precision is needed. However, I am more interested in scaling down to gain precision (maybe a scale of 50) in a large world using world partition tiles. I am not sure what use scaling has besides increased precision or larger landscapes.
It is my hope that some people with experience can comment on the state and effects of scaling at this point in time, so that other people and I have a recent consensus on the matter.
Does scaling cause issues? What issues and why?
Does scaling down cause the same issues as scaling up?
What is the appropriate use of scaling?
How can landscape resolution be increased (say 0.5m per pixel) if not with scaling?
You are not.
Epic deceptively and purposefully omits anything and everything that’s even remotely signifing of a problem from the documentation.
Or from any talk of any kind - down to even acknolwdging bugs on this forum or on a stream.
Sclaing landscapes has a lot of impact on a lot of things - mostly the rendering pipeline, but also the cpu as calculations are computed for it within the editor.
A proper system wouldn’t be locked down to having a vertex every so often, it would adapt the geometry based on need analytically.
The system they have in place does not do this, so you end up with 1 vertex per meter at a scale of 100.
And the situation gets better/worse if you scale up or down (scale of 50 is 1 vert every 50cm).
The link between the heightmap and the vertex is exactly 1 pixel to 4 vertex.
So yes, setting a scale of 50x/y would mean a heightmap with each pixel defining .5m
Scaling up a heightmap to go from 1m to .5m (x2) will likely generate terracing, because the data you can usually get is at best 1m.
Performance wise, 50 scale means more lod0 components present, many with useless quads, leading to extra tris in the scene, leading to worse Performance