So, each pixel on the file is a reading of Height (z) data.
When you change the range or manipulate it you need to this consciously.
First of all, in unreal (using landscapes) 65535/2 is the approximate area where the seal level ends and land starts (its not, but it is, since the area will end up as close to z=0 as possible).
The fact you have areas as a dark black in your heightmap already means your landscape (for what I understood to be a part of land with no ocean) is underwater.
Second, you essentially lost the height of the mountain - if every pixel has a value in meters, and you alter that, then the typpy top on white is going to be 65535/2 meters above sea level - which i think ends up being higer than K2.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it can provide nicer slopes instead of stair stepping between heights - but you need to keep the height in meters in mind when you do your Z Scale math.
The same math will not usually offset the sea level because 1/2 of something is always going to be found at 1/2 no matter what you do…
It all depends on your final lowest supported target machine.
If you are doing meshes, the give and take comes in from being able to occlude and fustrum cull, but in the end, 1 drawcall for the whole thing is still just 1 drawcall, vs say 144 for 1km^2 bits.
At that point the decision has to be mande on how many tris it costs rather than how many drawcalls you can support.
I’d say it doesn’t really matter. Unless you want to have it scaled down and not 1:1 in game it really shouldn’t.
The end size is howver big you want that terrain to be - regardless of it being stretched out or not.
I calculate slope maps in Qgis to paint terrains. It works the same as any auto material except you export png(not16) tiles to use as paint layers.
Other than that just manual touchups in the DCC of choiche or at worse (and it takes a lot to set it up) in quixel mixer.
Houdini works great for deformation algorhytms and such. Though thats got noting to do with paint.
As I explained, your hardware’s ram/vram
This would largly depend on the program.
In Qgis as you noticed you have almost no limit(s).
In World Machine i think you have a maximum size.
In Blender, youd be limited by hardware.
Ill stop right there.
I have never even considered running unreal on a laptop, personally.
Since it easily melts a watercooled i9 with a water cooled 4090, I think if I ran stuff on a laptop it would be more than likely to just burst into flames.
Ofc, you arent outputting 4k, so it may not be as melting in the end.
However if you have the resources to, you should really just get a dedicated developer desktop. Even an older one with a 3090 is probbaly going to be a ton better than the laptop in terms of just about anything.
Particularly with a proper M.2 setup to write to disk for the heightmaps/files etc vs the external drive, which even with Thunderbolt is going to struggle/bottleneck.
Even if you tried you probably couldn’t.
Any gis program is strictly 2D with the 3rd dimension being data as explained above.
So there wouldn’t be any way to add in a cave from it.