Hi, I have a question about LiDAR data. I have successfully imported some LiDAR data of a selection of landscape in to UE5 utilising the LiDAR Point Cloud Support Plugin. The point cloud was a .zyx file type. I can see the pointcloud when I drag it in to the viewport from the content drawer and all seems fine. My question is how do I “turn” this into a landscape, so it acts as a landscape and appears in the landscape editor? Is this possible or would I need to figure out how to change the data in to a heightmap in external software and import that way? Any help appreciated.
Hi VirtualPasts, Welcome to the Forums.
Interesting problem/question.
I’ve never seen/heard of converting Point Clouds to Landscapes (or Meshes) in-engine.
My first thought is to place the pointcloud in the level and then use the landscape sculpting tools to match it. (Tedious / Not Scalable idea)
A second (random/unfounded) thought: I wonder if there is a way to place a small mesh at each point, and then voxelize/expand/smooth with the built-in modeling tools. (You’d end up with a dense/messy mesh, not a landscape though)
Converting the point-cloud to a heightmap sounds like a great idea.
I found this project - It looks like he was able to use Xnormal to convert the data.
Let us know how it goes!
Hi, thanks for the welcome and the input. The landscape data needs to be fairly accurate as it’s for some digital reconstructions I’m working on for a research project, so the heightmap conversion sounds like my best option. Thanks for clearing that up, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing an obvious and easy way to do it within UE5 first. Thanks for the link to the project using Xnormal, I’ll certainly give that a try. I was trying to convert the data in QGIS but it just doesn’t want to play ball with the dataset.
I’ll be sure to post an update on progress and if/how I achieve it.
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Update: After spending hours trying to figure this one out, I think I have finally cracked it, and as often the case with these things, it turned out to be a fairly simple process, it was just finding that process that took the time. I imported the .XYZ data in to QGIS and then merged the layers. After this I simply exported that layer as a rendered GeoTIFF. Clicking on export as rendered image was important. I then loaded this GeoTIFF in to GIMP and exported that as a .png file which UE5 reads as a heightmap and bingo ! an imported landscape. I hope this helps others.
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Nice! Thanks for following up. QGIS looks like a beautiful piece of software. (In the same way that Audacity is beautiful for sound files)
I dub thee ‘Cartographer of the Future’
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