Landscape with only 1 component

Dears,

I’m creating a new landscape from a Height map.

I’m following this manual Landscape Technical Guide | Unreal Engine Documentation

There is mentioning: less components best performance, but is not mentioning the cons doing this.

So I have option to create the 512x515 landscape with only 1 component instead 25.

What would be the impact if I create the landscape with only one component? I tried and I can feel is the same as 25 components, no strange behaviour and the sculpt is working same in both. So I don’t undertand the benefits of doing more than 1 component.

  1. Can anyone explain the cons of doing less components?
  2. Also, I will increase this landscape x10 with scale up, it will be any issue doing this?

Thanks you.

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There are a lot of considerations. I could literally write 10 pages on it.

In essence:

First. you have sheer size.
1 component is small. 10 component of the same size give you 10x the size.

Then you have LOD balancing - it’s easier on smaller components, but more components = more draw-calls. More draw-calls on a massive map = low FPS.
That said, the largest component possible is impossible to balance correctly for performance.

Then you have adaptation considerations for world composition.
Assume you have an area of 100KM to put into the game. Will you be better off with 100100 tiles of 1km or with approx 1212 tiles of 8km?

Anyway, back to your questions at hand.
Yes you will have issues if you scale the landscape.
You will get spikes and artifacts everywhere including on paint. You are only supposed to touch the Z scale.
And, at best, reduce the scale of X and Y to get more resolution.

There are no Pros or Cons to just having “less components”. It is entirely situational as to what you are attempting to do.
Can your project afford more draw-calls to have more components? Can your project afford loss of detail with less components?
It’s literally a balancing game - of which you have no idea until you have a somewhat finalized scene - or experience.

I would suggest you pick the least amount of components for the overall size in meters you are trying to map, within reason, attempting to keep it to an even number.
below 4km in size per tile, you can pretty much balance any of the component sizes except the largest, so you are less constrained.

I really appreciate your help! I understand better the situation.

Just let me ask you for some dummy questions:

  1. What are the possible issues scaling the landscape? just tell me two of major issues please as I for now don’t see any issue.
  2. About the spikes and artifacts I really don’t see this with only one component, tried to paint with 1 component or a lot of components and the result is the same.
  3. If I reduce the X and Y the resolution number remains the same, it seems nothing change doing this…

Thank for your support

The scaling stretches the resolution so you get big or gigantic squares instead of oblique lines.
The lod cannot be balanced as you are always seeing it at a size of 10+ on screen.

if you reduce x and y or increase the actual size of landscape in Meters changes.