Hello,
Ok I will try to use static meshes although I still have questions:
Thibk about it this way
Does putting a cube in your scene slow performance? No…
But putting in a landacape will …
But in this case the mesh would be a very large one with lots of vertices for the different slopes that it will have, so maybe this would cause problems. Although I guess we could use LODs to reduce the performance problems. And maybe with nanite in the static meshes that would be the landscape it would improve?
You can even levarage unreal by sculpting the terrain and exportong the landscape as a mesh to be optimized and worked on (though beware that 8km^2 imports at LOD0 have more verts (1 per meter) than most standard settings on DCC render comfortably - so processing times are high.
Would you recommend breaking down the meshes into 4k maps? I would have more but with proper LODs I guess it would be better since they would load faster?
Confused by this. What is it you are scaling and why do you think it would affect performance?
I mean, if instead of a landscape of 16km x 32km I would use a 8km x 16km (so divided by 2), then I guess it would be easier to import in UE and less performance costly?
Your first step is to learn how to use GrassGIS or any other gis program.
I have started using QGIS. Do you think GrassGIS is better? Any other recommendation?
The second task is for you to study and understand what the ESRI format is and why it’s important.
I have actually been reading about this format because I have 8 heightmaps that combined would form the level for my game. This heightmaps are in format .asc and I was wondering if I could stitch them together, when I found different people asking the same and also trying to export in one ESRI document. I still have a lot to read though.
Anyways, do you think I should import these tiles individually? Or should I stitch them in one gigantic 16km x 32km heightmap?
The sub step to the second point here would be to lern how to process vector shapes in the GIS program so that you can offset the value of the heightmap prior to export based on custom modifiers (adding in river beds and lakes which lidar doesn’t scan).
While I do not know how to do this yet with QGIS, I was doing so in GAEA. I guess I will have to learn how to do it in QGIS (or any other GIS program).
Once you have the tiles done, then you can start working on producing slope maps to dress them (materials) in GIS, and export the matching tile sets for the materials to use.
Once you have those, you can move the terrain to just about anything including Gdot or a different DCC. It sort of becomes trivial at this point.
So basically, when I have the heightmaps in ESRI, I can start modifying them in GAEA, Blender or something like that? I use blender for sculping buildings, characters, weapons, etc etc etc. But for the terrain maybe use GAEA that has nice nodes to automatically do stuff like rivers, erosion, blablabla? Although to export in more than 1k I would need the paid version. Any free alternative?
And with respect to using 1 material with many textures, do you mean baking it into the mesh when importing? I am familiar with texture atlases and arrays. Would this be like an array?
Thanks a lot!