Is there a way to “snap” or sculpt Unreal Engine’s Landscape to match the curvature, and geometry of a static mesh such as an imported topography/landscape like you see here? Sort of like shrink-wrapping it. I’m trying to get the general shape as close as possible using UE’s landscape.
Thank you!
Normally people do the opposite because the landscape system doesn’t really work…
But yea, throw the mesh in blender, output a heightmap from it by creating a exr texture.
In short:
Add mesh. Make new material. Color ramp world height from 0 black to 1 white.
Place a camera in orthogonal view above the landscape.
Render to export as OpenEXR in half float mode which should be 16bit (May need to try full float too).
Open the file in any program that natively supports 16bit after making sure you set the program to 16 bit mode - examples are Krita and Gimp definitely not photoshop.
Then save in png16 format.
And you can subsequently import it into the engine.
Why not Photoshop?
When you say people do the opposite do you mean like the Landscape system doesn’t work well for projects like this that have hard edges?
Photoshop does not work with 16 bit. Their idea of 16 is actually 15+1 leading to corrupted data / visible terracing.
And people use meshes because the landscape system is bad in all ways. From how it works to performance. Its a pice of tech thats been stuck in the early 2000s for 20 years…
That’s weird! Good note on Photoshop, so thank you for that.
I think in 5.4 there supposedly will be some updates for it which should be good. It lacks the precision that some projects need for creating hard edges (for paths or bordered planters for example), which I find annoying. However, I also find the mesh workflow for landscapes just as bad because you end up having to create so many meshes with terrible topology (if it comes from CAD originally) and it’s very inflexible should you ever want to adjust anything.
Just out of curiosity - when using terrain mesh, what is the best workflow to paint materials on it? Would EasyMapper be a good option?
Depends on what resolution you need and the size of the terrain.
I find quixel mixer was pretty decent - but im not sure of its current state or the licensing of things you make with it as of new year.
Substance painter is somewhat decent even it got bought and is being killed by Adobe.
Aside from this.
More bormally i just geberate splat maps based on slope values in Qgis and use them as a packed (4 channel) texture- which essentially replaces your labdscape layer paint.
