Hello guys
I was hoping on getting some opnions about wich way to go when trying to build huge landscapes in unreal engine using real world data (satellite imagery and heightmaps)
There are 3 scenearios for this in my opnion: Unreal Landscape System, Tiled Mesh (each tile has its own instanced material with smaller tiled textures. Kind like google earth), Big mesh (with one material for each mesh - far and close)
Ive tried two of them so far (landscape and Big mesh)
The base material that I`m using consist of
16k satellite image for Far Camera distance ~100km
32k satellite image for Close Camera distance~20km
8k Heighmap ~100km
What I did so far (landscape and big mesh):
1 _ Landscape system
Cut a hole in the main landscape (far 16k - 100km) to fit a second landscape (close 32k - 20km)
Since its too big, it broke things like landscape painting and editing the landscape became very slow.
To solve the landscape painting i`ve cut another hole on the second landscape that i needed to paint and replaced it with a third landscape (Landscape 3) using a smaller portion of the texture and heightmap to fit the exact spot as before. Although landscape editing and painting are still very slow
Also added a mesh plane for 100km+
It involved a lot of hardwork, photoshop and manual positioning to make it work
Pros
Landscape editing, painting or auto material capable
Loading is managed by engine
Cons
Nanite landscape breaks the mesh at certain distances (Image 1)
Any task involving landscape becomes very slow (editing, painting, pcg)
Obs.: Didn`t tried world partition yet
BIg Mesh
Same thing as before but with static mesh instead os landscape system
pros
A lot easier to acomplish using blender
Nanite works fine for every mesh
cons
No editing
No way to make collision work well. Had to replace ground with invisible mesh plane
Mesh aways loaded
My question is
Start again from the begining making a tiled mesh google earth style would be better for perfomance? I was thinking of making about 16 tiles to divide the 32k texture into 16 2k new textures or even 32 1k textures. This way would increase draw calls but the engine will handle the memory in a better way than loading the 32k
also is there a way to make tiled landscapes (using tiled satellite images and heoghtmaps) without an absurd amount of manual positioning and scaling?