I am new to Unreal and am having trouble finding a way to import a landscape into a map I’m working on. I’d love to add the contour depths of a real-world lake into my map, but cannot find a way to accomplish this. I have a few different contour maps (png), but they do not load properly into Unreal. Any help, advice, or direction would be much appreciated.
Hey there @Karusso! Welcome to the community! So you’d need to either translate your contour data to height map data (not fun) or get height map data directly(much easier in most cases). Height maps are grayscale images very close to contour maps that will assign a pixel with a value of 1 - 255 for the depth.
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Thanks @SupportiveEntity . I have been able to create heightmaps using tutorial videos just like these; quite easily actually. The thing I can’t find ANY information on is how to take underwater contour (underwater heightmaps, if you will) maps of lakes and get them into UE5. You said it’s possible to translate contour data to heightmap data … do you have a resource or video to describe this process? Even if it’s not fun, it seems like the only option. Thanks again!
Nearly every heightmap data available out there is for above-water only. Once the data hits a flat terrain like water, it remains flat.
I was worried about that possibility. I know ARCGIS has limited water body height view, though it’d likely need a of processing to work out. How small of an area are you sampling? A lake might be tough in this case. For example it’d work out in a rough area for something the entire size of Lake Huron
But the data doesn’t get too granular. Depending on how the contour map looks it may be possible to craft one from the data with some decent hand work.
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It’s a lake much smaller than Lake Huron! It’s a lake in North Dakota. I did take a small section of the lake map contour, edited it a bit in Gimp (made into a greyscale, 16-bit), and uploaded it into UE5. It sort of worked. Each contour line created a massive thin crevasse, but the height of each section was correct. I may have to manually smooth over the contours/crevasses, but it is a painstakingly viable option.
ARCGIS doesn’t provide depth contours for inland lakes smaller than the great lakes it seems, LOL!
Actually, I take that back. I found this on the North Dakota Game and Fish website (ARCGIS): https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Fndgishub.nd.gov%2Farcgis%2Frest%2Fservices%2FApplications%2FGNF_LakeContours%2FMapServer&source=sd
This should work a lot better than what I currently have!
Oh yeah, that’s much better. I think you should be able to get a decently clear map for that, if not a little lower res for a massive landscape, but from that map you could upscale and clean it up for some smoothened detail, especially if you’re going to be populating it by hand. If it’s all good, you can mark your answer as the solution so future readers can find it! If you have any more questions for me, don’t hesitate to ask!