Out of video memory error for selected single landscape tiles with nothing on them

I am working on a solo large landscape for a university archaeology project in UE 4.27 and have been stuck for a couple of weeks now in a basic task of loading individual 4033x4033 tiles of a World Composition landscape because of a texture memory issue – I’ve run out of ideas to fix it so hoping someone more experienced can suggest something I could try.

I’ve created a large landscape of 6x6 tiles, each of 4033m2, so 24.198km2. There was a lot of work over weeks to create the elevations and weight maps (from Gaea) so I really don’t want to go back to the start and would much rather figure out the issue at this point.

As I was working through each tile one by one to import all elevations, weightmaps (multi-materials) and bake my LODs I hit this problem. Most of my landscape elevation tiles load in just fine, even those with multiple textures and large meshes scattered on them. However, I found that trying to work on some particular tiles just crashed the system. I can load the tiles one at a time (or even three or four) but as soon as I switch to landscape mode with these tiles loaded, I always get a ‘waiting for resources message’ and then:

‘Out of video memory trying to load a texture! Make sure your video card has the minimum required memory, try lowering the resolution and/or closing other applications that are running’.

I must have tried this a hundred times now. I’ve been through the forums looking for answers, I’ve tried closing down all other non-essential process, using the lowest possible resolutions (Material Quality – Low, Engins scaleability settings - all low + resolution scale 1%), reinstalling GPU drivers, reinstalling Unreal, increasing Windows paging file size to the maximum, replacing the landscape texture one the tile with a basic diffuse material before switching to landscape mode. The only way I have been able to switch to landscape mode with one of these tiles loaded is by deleting the tile before I switch, but then if I try to reimport a new tile into the gap created, I just get the same error. I can’t really experiment much with the landscape textures for these tiles because I can get to that step without a crash and the old edit I can make to their landscape material is to try to reimport their elevations and weightmaps which can be done in Select mode, but this also causes the same crash.

I’m just about out of ideas. I thought it might be a problem I created earlier with these tiles where I experimented with using a single weightmap image covering the entire landscape, but adding weightmaps to tile this way, while it would be much more efficient than manually doing all 36 tiles one by one, doesn’t work very well because the one single tile is stretched to fit all loaded tiles, meaning at least all the corner tiles must be loaded every time. My system is quite good but I can’t load all tiles at once!

System specs
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 WindForce OC 8GB, Intel Core i7 6800K LGA 2011-3) , Gigabyte GA-X99-Designare EX Motherboard, Corsair Vengeance LPX CMK32GX4M2A2666C16W 32GB (2x16GB) 2666MHz DDR4 , 500Gb Samsumg 750 evo SSD, Corsair HX1200i 80 Plus Platinum 1200W

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So I found a workaround, in case anyone else is stuck. There have been a few posts on similar issues here that are mostly unanswered but one suggestion was made to create a new project, copy the entire contents folder from the problem project and try that. This actually worked for me, but it also created some new problems. Rather that start dealing with all of them, I found that if I just made some material edits in Landscape paint mode in the new project and saved the changes, I could just copy the .uasset and .umap (and LOD) files for the problem tiles back into the old project. Whatever property they had that was causing them to crash that project, it was fixed by doing this and they just loaded fine afterwards. Lost more than a week of work figuring that one out!

Don’t rely on all of that.
Keep or save our your heightmaps and layer paint and keep a copy of the files safe, so as to be able to re-create at any point in time.

After working nearly 2 years on an accurate historical reconstruction I can tell you that between the trash they publish as a working release being full of bugs, their promises to remove world composition, and everything else… you probably should also steer as far away from unreal as possible.
I went to CryEngine. Never been better / never had any issue in the past 6 months…

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