Hi everyone,
I’m trying to create rectangle landscapes with heightmap. I exported a RAW file from World Creator and renamed it to have .r16 extension. The file has a resolution of 1009 * 4033 and when I try to import it in unreal, I got the error “The file bit depth unknown bit depth use .r16 or .r8” and the “Heightmap Resolution” field has “invalid” selection.
Is there a way to use non square heightmap in unreal or is it just impossible?
Thank you very much!
Wats.
For non square, just draw the terrain and leave the rest flat.
Hey,
Thank you, indeed, it could work. My problem is that I will have to make an exclusion volume which is not really a problem except that I will have a lot of levels to manage.
Any other idea?
Dont use the engone for this.
Crate meshes. Make LODs. Import the mesh directly.
Hi MostHost,
Thank you for your answer but I’m sorry, I’m not sure to understand. Do you suggest to import my huge landscape as a mesh? Will it not be way less optimized ?
Thank you for your help
Less optimized - maybe - but compared to the landacape aystem anything is more oprimized, so your performance would probably be up by a ton if all you need is the terrain.
Obviously do try and follow best pracrice standards if you need to worry about perfoemance (unlike epic)…
Like cut your landscape up in a way that makes sense and give it proper LODs that dont overly compromise the structure by using adaptive algorhytms for mesh simplification avaliable in amy modern DCC…
Hey,
Thank you for the explanation and I’ll give a try for sure. And come back here to explain my process and see what’s happening with the mesh approach.
Hi MostHost.
I succeed to import my landscape as an FBX and it seems to be pretty efficient indeed.
But it brought me to another question. What about auto material like for a classical landscape?
To clarify a bit my project, I’m creating a kind of landscape generator. It’s a VR project. In a main menu you answer a few question and each of you answer will define which landscape, weather system, kind of vegetation, rocks and the construct a unique landscape. So I would love to be able to also influence the material of the terrain and that’s why Landscape Auto material where very useful.
Untill now I worked with square landscapes or rectangle ones imported through the world creator to unreal bridge tool (which gives me some other bugs,…)
So can I ask you what would be your workflow to be able to use some kind of auto material on a mesh absed landscape?
Thank you very much for your time
In theory, everything is nearly identical except for you loose access to the Grass node and have to place foliage instances by using the experimental (after 10 years) procedural foliage - or in 5 use PCG.
The landscape material itself…
First of, you probably want to split it into squares anyway, so that each texture is a power of 2 and you get no issues.
Then, each component you can bring in a color map for - literally one file with different colors used to define different zones. Using primaries like for other things so you can do the math on RGB to isolate the “layer”.
You should do this in a Custom node by looking up HLSL code to do it.
With that done, you just output whatever layer you want for that specific color.
At the same time, add in a temporary RenderTarget - use it to mirror the location of player and other things with a scenecapture2d that only looks at stuff in a specific channel or gameplay tag (whatever you engine version allows for here).
Place the RT accurately based on the terrain piece your player is on and wpo. Dont use the terrain UVs for it.
The RT won’t necessarily be used on the landscape (unless you want to runtime change the layers or something), but you need a debug visualizer of some sort.
The RT is then used with the same WPO UVs into foliage (grass) as the driving factor for opacity - so that you can have the grass go away from under things or move and deform as needed by interaction.
You can also use the RT on water, snow, and anything else reactive you can think of. It just gives you the data.
And to have good data probably look up flow maps and use that theory as the output for the RT.
Oh thank you very much for all these informations. There are a lot of knowledges here that I haven’t learn yet but they sound very interesting. I’m now working on a prototype and so I’ll test a few different approches.
My project is a straight forward train travel on the “right” side of the landscape. I’ll keep a traditionnal landscape for the close distance, then meshes for the distant one with LOD’s so I can try to understand how things works.
Thank you again.