SRTM 30M tile sets

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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As the title suggests, I’m hoping to build a game using the tile sets from 30-Meter SRTM Elevation Data Downloader one by one. Problem is, apparently nobody else has ever done this, or if they have, I have yet to come across them, and instead they use OpenTopography - Find Topography Data and take a selected piece of this into l3dt and do some processing eventually importing the results into unreal engine.

I suppose my first question would be, can I actually import one tile at a time into a game, work on it, then import a second tile, work on it, and have them line up properly? I’ve tried the other method listed above and have been unable to get all the terrain to actually line up and mesh properly.

I’ve downloaded and utilized a python script that changes the tiles hgt file type to tiff then changed the tiff to png and tried bringing in a tile like that, but it looks terrible and mostly not correct, though I’m sure that fault is mine since I’m not sure how to actually do it. I’ve tinkered around a lot trying to figure it out, but I’m thinking the way I’m trying to do it, won’t provide the results I’m hoping for, and basically, I’m looking to recreate the Appalachian Mountains, along with a little bit of the entire surrounding area of the mountains, as realistically as possible.

Any suggestions on how to use these tile sets in order to be able to slowly build that mountain range? Thank you in advance for any!!

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Search for UE4 World Composition

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Hey there DK, ty so much for the SRTM 30m tileset, MUCH more walkable vs 90-game changer for me, so I look fwd to getting this all to work with WC as well.

THe WC stuff will go fine as you learn the in andouts of it, but I’m wondering, did you get the terrain ‘import’ ok, given you were experiencing issues with it not looking right ?

I know this is from 6 mo’s ago, but I"m hoping you are still around and had success you can share so others may give it a go.

Very promising.

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Hi Neighborlee, unfortunately, haven’t made any progress in this area. My business associate brought on two individuals claiming they were unreal engine game developers around December or January, and they immediately started suggesting change after change after change and insisted that we didn’t have to worry about the whole “world building” and instead wanted to work on game design documents, which looked far more like story boards in my opinion, and pushed the project back all the way through July, without getting anything actually built in the process.

I brought a guy to the table that claimed he was a level designer and knew how to work with the tile sets, back around May when I became apprehensive about the lack of actual progress being made with the project, and this guy managed to play around with 1 tile set within maya for a couple of months and still didn’t have it ready to import into the engine so I had to relieve him of his duties around the same time the other two guys decided they had wasted enough of our time I suppose and just up and quit.

I’ve had a few individuals offer to actually take all the tiles and put them all together and send the finished product, but they refuse to actually show how this is accomplished so that I may learn to do this myself since we plan on doing this over and over in sequels and I would need to know exactly how to accomplish this task in order to do it, claiming that it’s easier for them to just put 15 tiles together than it is to record the process of putting 2 tile sets together so I could see how it is done. I know how to work with just one tile set, download, import into l3dt, process it, export, and import that set of tiles into unreal, I just am not sure how to process that second tile set in l3dt and export it for use in unreal and then import that second set into unreal along side the first set that’s already there.

My line of thinking may be quite “off” or perhaps “odd” when it comes to creating the game. I want to basically put the entire area together, use streaming in order to cut down on how intensive such a large area would be resource wise, then import a character to run the world looking for holes and bugs to make sure it all works properly, then begin to apply materials, assets, etc…, once I know beyond any doubt the world foundation is set properly. I don’t see the point of working on everything else if I can’t get the actual foundation put together properly. I did however create an inventory system, mini map system, questing system, and equipment system (all four systems were created in individual projects in order for me to get JUST those individual systems working properly) during the time we were waiting for any of the individuals we had brought on board to work out. Unfortunately, I backed all the projects up to a second partition on the same hard drive, which suffered a catastrophic failure about 6 weeks ago, so I have to redo all of them. Needless to say, I invested in an external backup drive in order to not lose it next time, and I’ve setup backups to both the external drive, and two internal drives that are different drives all together so if any one of them fail, I have triplicate copies still in backup.