Is there a way to split a landscape into chunks for level streaming? I haven’t found a whole lot online… Is that even necesary for a landscape? Does a landscape take up a whole lot of resources? I am not talking about trees & such, I mean the actual landscape ground.
Yes it is necessary for large terrains and the full version of world machine will do it for you, UE4 contains world composition to import the tiles. From there you can define your streaming boundaries…
Also you’ll not want to texture all that, so use World Machine to create weightmaps for you (.Raw files)…
Could you explain a bit more about the texturing? What do you mean? What is a wheightmap?
A weightmap pretty much does the same as a splatmap, it’s vertex location data for layers (grass, rock etc.)
You export them out of world machine and then when you set up your landscape layers, you can apply ranges of weightmaps for all your specific tiles… This will automatically texture the whole entire terrain for you.!
About 3 Quarters of the way down this page it shows you the world machine layout I use:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/game-design-challenge-pc.328982/
Edit: Link to UE4 world composition page…
Hmm… My team can’t afford to buy World Machine atm, are there any other free options?
Isn’t there a way to do this anyways?
Its got something to do with the move tool in the landscape manage tab:
“move landscape components to landscape proxy…they can be streamed in/out independently”
You could probably do with L3DT instead of World Machine. L3DT is substantially cheaper license wise ($35 USD for an indie license) and you can give it a try using the free standard version. All versions allow for commercial release.
Personally I don’t have experience with World Machine but as far as L3DT goes it seems to be a great tool for quick prototyping landscapes using the design tool, plus it has a huge selection of export/import tools and formats (collada, obj, raw). You also have the option of importing GeoTiff data (ie: heightmaps generated from satellites) from websites like OpenTopography. Plus it’s been optimized for compatibility with UnrealEngine.
World Machine offers a free version as well. Depending on the size of the map you have you might be able to use the free version. Just use a smaller resolution with more tiles when exporting and you’ll still get a good resolution while acquiring the large scale map.
What size is your terrain? And what platform you are developing for?
My terrain will be 25-45 sq KM, I downloaded a piece of software called Vue, it is for landscape generation. Anyone know of a way to split up landscapes in Vue?