I am familiar with the concept of height maps from other systems. However, I am new to Unreal and reading the documentation on 4.13 on creating landscapes, I see it lists ‘layers’ and ‘height maps’. They appear very similar except that a layer must be 8-bits and a height map can be 16 bits and they both seem to create landscapes. It is not clear from the descriptions exactly what the differences are or when/how to use one or the other. Can anybody shed some light on this for an Unreal-newbie please?
“Landscape Layers are special textures that help to break up the look and feel of the Landscape” operative word here being Textures. your height map builds a mesh of the landscape, and the layers texture over the top (Grass,Dirt/Sand,Rock (Anything really))
Landscape: a heightmap object with built-in LOD decomposition (check ‘wireframe’ and fly around your map and you’ll see what it is)
Landscape Layer: A data layer (realized as a flat file with weights at coordinates) that represent how much of a “painted” texture is to be applied at a specific location on your Landscape