I have a huge mesh (drone photogrammetry with Reality Capture) with a size of about 6x6 kilometers, about 9 billion polygons in total. The mesh (e.g. .fbx) can be split up in parts or can be one BIG file.
I want to display the mesh as landscape with the highest possible quality in VR. Therefore my questions are:
Is there a best practice to import such a huge mesh?
How can I import it into world composition?
If I cannot import it into world composition: Is it possible to automatically split the mesh into levels and display these with level streaming?
I don’t know what DCC software you are using to create a 9 billion poly mesh, but my suggestion would be to UV map it from one side ( so it looks like a cross section )
make UV’s cover the full top to bottom range
, apply a material with a gradient black bottom white top to it and Render to texture at a suitable resolution eg 6000x6000 px as a 16 bit greyscale png
This will produce a Heightmap of your mesh, the highest points white, lowest black
you could then divide the png 6x6 in photo shop
Grab each tile and save at UE4 res 1009 x 1009 px use naming x1_y1 (see docs)
You now have a set of tiles to use in world comp
You will probably have to scale the terrain in z to get the correct height range
The will be other ways but this has worked for me in the past
Paul G
Thank you for this suggestion Paul! Reality Capture was used to create this mesh. I can also export heightmaps from Reality Capture, but the quality is not as good as a mesh. Some quality is lost!
Does anyone else know how to import such a huge mesh?
Sly401’s suggestion is the best option, it will allow you to use the landscape with the built-in landscape system so that it’s optimized in the engine. You just have to convert your landscape to a heightmap first.