Is the in-editor landscape tool suitable for creating a large playable environment such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
Is there such thing as an imported custom landscape or would that be far too much trouble and offer far too little complexity- things would obviously need to be constantly tweaked, and using the current landscape tool does that nicely.
Is the standard World Machine method of generating a detailed landscape actually just generating a heightmap for the UE4 landscape tool to use (make its shape from), rather than actually generating any tiles or actual geometry?
sorry for the idiocy, would love to have these things cleared up, I only ask since I see that the Unreal Tournament landscape tiles (on the new CTF map under the bridge) is actually made up of separate static meshes as opposed to pure geometry. Also it seems rare that I see a landscape that hasn’t been generated by world machine- is the reason for this that world machine offers much more detail than could normally be made just using the in editor brushes?
I’m sure someone else will have a more in depth answer… but here’s my 2 cents.
World Machine is pretty much the standard landscape generation method. You can generate heightmaps or a static mesh with it. With the heightmaps you can also generate either height or angle layers (the proper term here escapes me) that can greatly speed up the initial material painting. I don’t know about the static mesh option, but with height maps, WM does also have the ability to save it as tiles. You can do it all in-editor, but I find that at least starting with a WM generated landscape gives a much more realistic base map to start with. Even with the erosion brushes I find that my landscapes done 100% in editor end up looking too smooth overall.
I would consider a landscape from WM to be “imported custom landscape” so I’m not sure what exactly you’re asking with that part.
They often need a fair amount of tweaking to get rid of the terracing caused by the lower resolution, but you can also pull in satellite heightmaps of real world locations if that’s your thing.
For the “imported custom landscape” part, I mean- for example in the kite demo, did they import a huge static mesh generated in world machine or simply just a heightmap that told the landscape tool in UE4 what shape to be?
The kite demo uses a height map made in world machine, imported to the editor via the landscape tool. Tiled world’s are very easy to make with this method and are fully customisable once imported.
You can create pretty huge world’s that stream in using world composition. Which is also pretty easy to get a grasp on.
I’m currently working on a 50x50km map exported from world machine.
I definitely recommend checking out the unreal docs site. Lots of info there to help you get started.
Hey, I was wondering, how do you handle building the world at the end? 50km means at least 5x5 tiles with at least 4k or 8k resolution. This requires a lot of ram like 64 GB of RAM
World Machine will soak up tons of RAM if you let it. If you don’t, then it will spool stuff to HD. But then building a 50kmx50km map in World Machine under those conditions, and depending on the complexity of the graph, may take several days. I built a single 16k resolution map that started from a GeoTiff, and that alone took my rather beefy machine about 8 hours to render.
But once you chunk all that up into tiles, each of which could be 2k-ish in size, importing them into UE is no big deal. In my case it took about 2 minutes to import all of them (64 2k height maps). Using World Composition, you don’t have to have all the maps loaded at once. When I’m doing detail work, I only have 4 or 6 maps loaded at once.
I created my world using 1009x1009 res tiles. Imported at 200% or 2 metres per pixel. Which is fine for what im using. Arma 2&3 use pretty low poly landscape meshes. About 4m per pixel.
I generated it on a very old machine, with 6 layers. Took about 3 days to render. Didnt max out my measly 8gb of ram.
Like i said, its an old pc. Q6600…
It generated around 3000 tiles, and I had to import them in a few goes, about 500 at a time. If I tried to do them all at once it actually took longer or just crashed due to memory usage.