Hi fellas. Experienced developer of software and other things, but brand new to game design (other than using valves Hammer for level design) I want to create a new landscape that’s 16x16km. I’d love to use something like World Machine but I don’t think I can create to that scale using the freely available version. $150 is a little steep for me at the moment. I tried to just create a huge landscape according to the optimal settings on the wiki and just went with the top one, but trying to rebuild the lighting after 1 hour was still 0% I’ve done some modelling in Blender before so I know rendering light etc can be incredibly taxing. What are the best practices for creating large land scapes like the one I want to make? Thanks. Also is World Machine basic capable of a 16x16km World? Thanks.
Worlds that large potentially should use dynamic lighting.
A 16km world size is essentially meaningless without specifying the desired detail level of the heightmap.
For example, a 256 heightmap can be set with vertex spacing to give 16km of area, so can a 2017 heightmap, so can an 8k heightmap.
TerreSculptor Standard Edition is free for commercial use and supports up to 2048x2048 heightmaps.
Professional Edition supports up to 65536.
you could import a real world location instead of making your own terrain. theres tutorials on doing this on yotuube and its not limited. you can probably do an entire continent if you want to and if u got some NASA computer. i followed the one called “Importing real world location to UE4” and I ended up with capetown south africa. its 8X8km. you could do that for free with that editor you could only get a trial version of.