Landscape height maps? or Different Assets do make a world?

Development World Creation
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1

So my question is this. Do Pro Studios even use Height maps for large worlds, or are they laterally just piecing together meshes to create a huge world?

I ask this because getting a large world to Import in unreal using World Machine, crashes seemingly all the time. And yes I realize you work only in sections of the map, but I don’t even get to the rendered out landscape to edit it. I run a pretty decent machine. 64gb Ram, 2080ti, Threadripper 2950X. Using UE5.

Just finding it Difficult to create a large “Landscape” with Height maps. They are after all a mesh so, I do also get that it eats resources as well. And I realize nanite is not something for landscapes, but is for , say, Megascans meshes, so there isn’t really a way other than Lods to help with how much resolution you see in streaming distances on the landscape. I was watching “New World Building Features | Inside Unreal” and it seemed that the whole landscape they were showcasing was all just meshes basically just put together to create that world. Which was interesting to me. Especially with the whole nanite idea. Am I way off base here or maybe I was just seeing things?

2

Using meshes for landscapes is common - a combination of both is also common. Did you try splitting up the landscape into tiles with WorldMachine?

3

Yes, sorry this is with using tiles, though I will be honest I am not 100% sure what settings I should be using when exporting tiles. I haven’t really found that “General Rule of Thumb” out there for WM to Unreal. so say I have a 100 km x 100 km Landscape, 2017 x 2017 res, 7x7 tiles are what I would use for settings in the tile settings inside WM. Its really the tiles part that confuses me I guess. Why 7x7 or why 20x20, etc.

4

There’s often a “sweet spot” with the sizes, I found a 6kmx6km landscape was for some reason more efficient that others - but that was UE4. I’m actually thinking the crashes you are getting could be a bug in UE5 - it may pay to search for other topics relating to the crash.