I’m having a hard time understanding what’s going on with the vertical scale when I import L3DT heightfields into UE4, and vice versa. For example, if I make a 2017 x 2017 terrain with mountains of a certain height in L3DT, and then export the heightfield as .r16, when I import it into Unreal with the z-scale at 100 the mountains appear at least twice as tall as in L3DT. If I set the z-scale arbitrarily to, say, 40 then they appear about right. If I then edit the heightfield using Unreal’s tools and export it to .r16 (or .png) and then import it into L3DT (leaving the “set new vertical range” option at unchecked, the default) the map goes all to hell, with very tall spikes. I can manually clamp the vertical range and get it back close to something like I expected, but the sea level is off by many meters.
I have similar issues with sea level between the two programs. If I set sea level to be 0 meters in L3DT and then import the terrain into Unreal, the landscape is imported at z = 100 for some reason (I have seen this referenced elsewhere so I know it’s intended) and the sea level doesn’t look right unless I set my water plane well below z = 0, say z = -5000 or so.
I assume there’s a way to get control over this, and I just don’t understand it well enough. I know that Unreal permits +/- 51200 uu of height. I presume that it doesn’t simply clip out of bound values, so it probably does some scaling on import. But I don’t think my heightfields are outside that default range anyway.
Thanks for any insights.