Knowledge Base: Introduction to Mesh Terrain

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
1

Introduction to the new experimental Mesh Terrain plugin and its core features.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/knowledge-base/nK7J/unreal-engine-introduction-to-mesh-terrain

2

Dude! Thx!

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3

Looks very interesting!

I have a few questions:

  1. How is performance compared to a height-based landscape?

  2. How is VRAM consumption compared?

  3. Does it work with non-WP levels?

  4. Which UE version is it expected to be production ready?

Thanks.

4

I too have a question: how will RVT integration deal with overhangs?

5

1-2. We tested a Landscape vs MeshPartition comparison level, on several platforms, including Switch1. MeshPartition was doing equal or better.

3. Its meant to work with World Partition. Currently the system doesn’t block you to add it in non-WP levels but we dont recommand it. We will add guardrails later on.

  1. Too soon to tell.
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6

Work in progress.

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7

Thanks - one more question.

Will it be possible to export the landscape as mesh tiles and import into older versions?

8

To convert an existing landscape into MeshPartition?
You can export your landscape heightmap and other landscape layers as textures and apply it to a MeshPartition grid using a TextureModifier.

9

I was thinking the other way around - export the MeshPartition tiles as fbx and import those to an older version.

(edit) And one more question sorry - will it be possible to access the vertex and collision data from a c++ plugin?

10

An older version being a landscape terrain? And the reason would be for a mobile version of the same terrain? Because MeshPartition will run on mobile that might not be needed to convert.

11

For the other way around, keep in mind Mesh Partition is unlocking full 3D so not all geometry can be converted to heightfields.

The produced actors (Compiled Sections) have static meshes and collision components accessible. But part of the strength of the system is to adapt to multiple target platforms to avoid any manual optimization work (example: targeting both PS5 and Switch); so it may be more interesting to leverage it rather than defaulting to “simple meshes”.

An other possibility would be to use “Transformers” for this export, this could be a good anchor point.

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12

I’m locked on 5.7 - I have written a tool that converts the height based landscape into mesh tiles and will be using meshes for my landscape (have tested earlier on 5.4 and it gave a good boost to frame-rate, plus works with WPO so tessellating them solves that problem.

But I really like the look of your new system and was thinking about finishing the landscape (It’s 144km2 so is taking a long time) using that and then converting it and importing into my 5.7 project.

I’m happy to do the conversion myself if need be - as long as I can access the vertex data.

13

I’m Indie and will just be focusing on PC - just to make it easy on myself :slight_smile: