I’m making a 16 x 16 km map with 2 m vertex spacing (working in a Landscape system). Can’t make it work with Mesh Terrain. I can create the mesh partition rectangle if I check Save and Unload, but trying to load it all in the World Partition Editor quickly eats up the 64 GB of RAM I have. Loading just a bit seems to work until I load too much, and then Unreal just becomes unresponsive and I can’t even move the window. This doesn’t seem to be about running out of memory.
I tried to Import Heightmap. Works until I try to load a region, then I get a Registering actors message and Unreal goes unresponsive.
I thought of exporting the landscape as an OBJ and importing as a mesh, to use in Mesh Partition. The resulting mesh file was 16 GB, and I couldn’t import it as a mesh.
I am trying this in Empty Open World levels after realizing I can’t make a level using the Content Drawer (that caused worse problems). I didn’t change the World Partition setup - should I have?
Is my approach wrong? What should I do? Should I use Landscape generally, and add small areas of Mesh Terrain where I need overhangs? Or is the old workflow still better everywhere for such a large map (though I’m surprised how large 8k seems to be as we’re routinely handling 4k textures now)?
Should I make a low-resolution rectangle and tesselate it using a modifier? Would that be better even for the same outcome resolution?
One thing is that I would really like to see the whole level, at least somehow, in the editor while working with it (as with a Landscape), and occasionally most of the level would be visible in the game as well. In my understanding, the finalized nanite representation would have efficient LODs, but the intermediate editor representation doesn’t.
As far as I can tell, such large maps can’t be handled the same way that small maps are in tutorials and documentation, and I was unable to find any insights on this.
Seems I can make a 2k x 2x map IF I do it in a fresh project. In another map that already contains other levels where I tried making various mesh terrains, no luck. 4k x 4k in a fresh project also freezes Unreal, even as if there’s no evident excessive memory use (Unreal 5.8.0 shows up in Task Manager as using ~17 GB). There’s no disk or network activity, but 16 - 25 % CPU. Could be that Unreal is doing something in a single thread, but it’s certainly hugely slower than making a smaller map, much more than the difference in size would suggest.
Use Landscape for the main terrain and only add Mesh Terrain where you need overhangs or cliffs. Also, check your World Partition cell size and avoid loading the entire map at once, as that’s likely what’s causing the editor to hang.
Not only is MeshTerrain another one of those “works great if you make a single scene to farm youtube clicks” features, but they also somehow broke landscape LODs and WorldPartition with 5.8 - still present in 5.8.2. To be precise, cells cant be unloaded anymore after re-opening the editor once and the LOD distribution works in the preview but not at runtime as there is no reduction in complexity.
Im so tired boss. I’ll go back to 5.2 or so and just fully ignore all updates and news from epic from now on. Those people just cannot be serious.
Guys, calm down. This is a very new feature, and read it from my lips : “It is experimental!” NOT for use in production. What do you expect? A smoothly running tool? IMHO this is again a master break through in leveldesign. Just have some fun, patience and faith with it. But moaning around and being a smartass is way more easier than bringing in some constructive, helpful information.for the devs.
Fine, you can go back to 4.25…feel free to do so…if giveing up is your thing…its surely not mine.