Real topography

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

Hi, I’m having a Titan card based games rig built to make large open worlds and while I wait for it to be built I have a question.
I’ve grabbed a pretty large area of terrain from google using Sketchup. It contains the hight data and the aerial photos. Hopefully I’ll be using this to make a detailed model of this area. How do I import it into UE 4 so it’s the ground and not an imported asset that will just fall down into the infinite depths.

Here is a pick of the area in Sketchup with a few early assets.

Thanks

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2

You would need to create a height map of the landscape and then you could bring that into UE4 and use it with the built-in landscape system.

3

Thanks. If I created the hight map wouldn’t I lose the exactly positioned aerial image though.

4

You would use Render to Texture in 3ds Max to bake a heightmap from the terrain and then you could also bake a diffuse texture of the satellite image at the same time and it should match up as well. Though with all the stuff like buildings/trees on there it wouldn’t look that good to have that texture there. If you wanted to do it simple you could just export your mesh as it is, but you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the landscape system which uses foliage and adjusts the quality dynamically.

5

I haven’t got the money to use 3ds max. But I’m sure other software can do it.

I’ve also found this thread in the Epic games forum.

https://forums.epicgames.com/threads/607176-Tutorial-Importing-Detailed-Terrain-from-Google-Earth

So I’ll try and give it a go once I have my new computer. (Right now I have a 2009 iMac intel duo which can’t run UE 4 properly)

Thanks for your help.

6

May I ask where that is? Just curious.

7

Yeah, most 3D software have some texture baking/render to texture feature so you just need to check and see how to do the same thing in your software.