I am new to Unreal Engine. Spikes instead of hills or mountains come about despite the brush type being circular while editing after creating Landscape.
Thanks in advance.
Hey there @TankutZeytinoglu! Welcome to the community! I’ve seen this issue before and it can stem from a number of things. Often the issue is either that graphics drivers jumbling up the vertexes of the landscape when the memory changes. Sometimes this could be because VRAM is being topped off (which is not the case in your example).
What are your specs and which version of the engine is this in?
First, let’s back up your project and then we’ll try something.
After editing the landscape this way, can we try saving and closing the project and relaunching? If it looks normal afterwards, we will know our culprit a bit better.
$ lspci | grep -i --color ‘vga|3d|2d’ gives this output :
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation TigerLake-H GT1 [UHD Graphics] (rev 01)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device 43d3 (rev 11)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA107M [GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile] (rev a1)
Unreal Engine version is 5.3.0
My OS is Debian 12 (bookworm)
“After editing the landscape this way, can we try saving and closing the project and relaunching? If it looks normal afterwards, we will know our culprit a bit better.”
I tried it yet the result didn’t changed.
Thanks
So, thats a corrupted heightmap.
Not sure what is causing it or how since the engine is literally doing it for you but…
Before you loose your mind figuring things out, try to use one of the reccomended landscape sizes to see if it works on those (google “ue4 landscape reccomended size”) and it should pull up the docs with relevant info.
At the very least, try the 2x2 component setting which is more often used.
Assuming none of that will work, then there must be a problem with the linux release in the way the landscape writes the heightmap or similar.
Note that because you are on linux it could be the write to disk is failing altogether due to write permissions or file size restrictions.
A safe way to test this is to use a custom 16bit PNG with actual input data.
If you see the preview deform and work, then you know the issue isnt the file.
If editing the file causes issues anyway, then you also know that the write process is failing…
Ahhh that’s definitely going to be a fun one to work with. Do any of the tests MH recommended change the outcome? I’ve only got data on height maps information being read incorrectly or completely corrupted in this manner when there’s a GPU side problem.
If possible, can you create a new level from the default open world template that has terrain built in? If that is distorted when it comes in, it should provide more information. If its not, try editing it and see if it distorts this way as well.
Does this occur on terrain with edit layers turned off?
I mean, considering he is on linux this is 100% still possible.
Particularly with Nvidia its sometimes hard to get drivers on Windows that work right;
They had me jumping hoops at the studio through most of 2022 where the drivers would not work correctly for multi-monitor setups causing all sorts of issues with all sorts of programs (thankfully they got their act together now it seems).
Anyway I’m sure that the linux driver avaliability and consistency is iffy at best, so I can totally see the drivers being the root cauae of this as well…
Im also using linux with UE5.8.3 with the following stats on this box and get spikes with the sculpting tools in landscape mode
I battled trying to debug a semi usable UE5 project box and thought Id post my findings thus far
For stat purposes the details of the box are:
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620 (Whiskey Lake)
- GPU type: integrated GPU
- Dedicated VRAM: 0 GB
- System RAM: shared with the GPU
- Driver: Mesa Intel Vulkan driver
Horrible for what we’re trying to do with UE5 here but…
First: im greeted with a default UE5 create project screen, and i create a new project (lets say its named “MyProject”)
I immediately get error vulkan device SM6/SM5 compatibility issues - fixed via manually editing /MyProject/Config/Defaultengine.ini
changing the settings under [/Script/LinuxTargetPlatform.LinuxTargetSettings] to
+TargetedRHIs=SF_VULKAN_SM5
+TargetedRHIs=SF_VULKAN_SM6
and change the settings under [/Script/Engine.RendererSettings] to
r.DynamicGlobalIlluminationMethod=0
(the former to fix issues to jsut get it to load, the latter is to lower framerate memory usage from 150 to 45
stat gpu shows these during live editor btw
Anyways back to the point of this post the ■■■■ spikes:
So under new level landscape mode enabled sculting tool: id immediately on first click get HUGE spikes and subsequent clicks sculpting worked fine
So, i noticed in logs max_user_watches: 65536 (LINUX HARD SET CONFIG) was triggered as UE5 used up way more than that
so i ran: echo ‘fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288’ | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-unreal.conf
to reset those maxvalues and hard set them across reboots
SPIKES issue fixed
Lastly, for others with bad non gpu vram systems VolumetricClouds Cloud Tracing - View Sample Count default Scale of 1.0 lags framerate stats bad at 85. So changing this value to .44 puts it to framerate stat 38
Way smoother
Those are the major issues on a non gpu vram ive come across and smoothed over
So try that fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
Lol, meanwhile the NEXT DAY, its back so max_user_Watches was def overloaded before the change (that had to be set to above 65536 either way)
Before and After photos (with another work-around proposal):
-
Landscape new level loaded and sculpt tool selected
-
Sculpt tool spikes
-
Click an area not in the spikes and tap hold to draw say a lil hill
-
Click again - single clicks in few places doesnt matter anywhere (i think its because memory cache rendering)
-
Ctrl-Z undo to remove those spikes
The lil hill drawn during the rendering spiking remains and the spikes dont, lol we’ll fig it out
Ill be back to edit this if more info comes my way to solve this
Last night had me feeling smooth having that work so theres something between UE (i tried on 5.2 as well) height-map re-rendering
I tried the default UE5 level map it still does same thing. Apologies for the unorthodox way, ive searched for this across interwebs no solution (apologies bcuz it was smooth last night)
Ill keep all ya non gpu users posted on a solution if i fig it out
- (images removed )
UPDATE: tried landscape.DumpSelectiveLayerRender -h
rewrote the landscape file from the console (CONSOLE shows: “wrote heightmap data to
Saved/Landscape/LandscapeRender…Heightmap.png”)
Testing new project now from scratch - create spikes and that command
(shrug) sorry mods for the above attempts wasting data up in here,
Only annoying real way is to do a 180 degree view turn on landscape click, turn 180 and sculpt you land
ie., start here (note its unlit so i can see the topography heightmap data)
do the 180 and click and maybe get spikes
turn back around to where ya really want to edit
and draw some hiils for this bug test issue
notice i drew 2 hills
if i ctrl Z now itll remove that second one keeping the first, spikes gone, so the trick around this until i fig this cache issue out is to click again, because that saves your scultped cache (2nd hill in this case)
and after 3rd click i ctrl z
do the 180 to see spikes gone and i can save my landscape
best i have for this bug thus far (btw off topic in the source after hours of tracing fx’s the UE5 devs know the quirk insofar as caching states)
(post deleted by author)
Besides the steps ive listed below to try and potentially get to the bottom of this. This only happens on the viewport window of the sculpt landscape mode
You can get around this another way (besides what ive listed below), by using static built meshes and dragging dropping them into your landscape scene
I didnt want to come across like im trashing a great UE5 product by discussing spike bugs in this thread
Edit: sculpted hills and the heightmap from Uneal Engine 5.8.2 Beginner Tutorial - UE5 Starter Course 2026
