World Partition, Virtual Texturing and Tiled Landscapes

I am using World Partition to import and manage a large tiled landscape build in WorldMachine. This work great in principle, and I really love this feature. However, when using Virtual Textures the import fails (or rather the engine crashes) when importing a landscape with a heightmap greater than 16k It seems that World Partition merges the whole landscape and manages it as one using its grid system (great!) but also tries to create one large virtual texture for the whole landscape (which quickly exceeds the system’s limits in terms of texture size).

I was wondering if my observation is correct and if there is an “official” way to handle these kinds of situations?

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I second this. I was really hoping for some documentation on recommended practices for large scale landscape actors (and importing their tiles) in UE5, and how they should work with the nanite workflow.

How did you load tiled landscape into World Partition? The moment you enable World Partition the “Levels” window is gone.

Also in my case, I can only enable World Partition on Project Settings but not on individual level World Settings.

You can simply import the landscape via the “Import file” option in the Create Landscape dialog, just pick a file from the tile set and the engine will detect all of them (it doesn’t seem to like if there are other file types like png in the same folder though). It will then import all of them as one big landscape, but you can selectively load and unload grid cells in the “World Partititon” dialog.

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Don’t you have issues when you import a tiled landscape ? Whenever i try, the create landscape tool mess the resolution and instead of a square i end up with a rectangle… Also if i try to select the correct résolution in the drop down menu below, the preview disappear and UE crash if i try to import this way.

Do you use raw16 type ?

No issues here. Yes, I use *.r16 files. When I select the first tile, UE5 will correctly detect the others and calculate the overall dimensions. Are your tiles already in a UE compatible size (like 4033x4033 instead of 4096x4096)?

If you like to try my files I’ve put a zip file (about 200MB) with 16 tiles (4x4 of size 4033 each) here and see if it works for you as well.

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What do you use to create r16 files?

Your tiles works fine for me Rastar, i don’t know why mine aren’t… It was fine with World composition.
i use 505 res tiles (since my world is very big) but i always end up with weird numbers.
My total res is around 36kx36k but in the import tool, the auto detect display 3 options, ≈120kx10k, ≈10kx120k, and the right one.

If i import with the auto detect unchanged (120kx10k) the tool process with no issue at all but obviously the result isn’t good, if i try to change between the 3 options to select the correct one, the preview disappear and theengine crash at import.

At first i thought it was because of a memory issue and i tried to import only 4 tiles of this big world. Well… The problem is still there even with only 4 tiles T_T. If you can try my files : Here

I’m using World Creator, so… If somebody can try it and confirm there is no issue ?

Something seems to go wrong during export of your files. Try opening them in a text editor, they only contain lots of “D1” bytes.

@6ft6 I am using World Machine (and Gaea).

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I had the long-strip tile import problem happen and had to just redo the build of my tiles to fix it.

Did someone found a way of converting a world composition map to world partition?
My world composition map is made of thousands tiles. Exporting every proxy heightmap, renaming them all “x00_y00”, “x00_y01”, etc. loading them all to move every mesh in the persistent level, would take way too much time

Hello, after some research there is a case to enable in the project setting (in world partition part) that allow you to convert a Word to a partition world by open it, a pop-up come a tell your if you want to convert it and replace or copy it.
Whenever, when I try this I crashed. Try it an tell me :blush:

After Trying to import and have the game sort all of the files out i’ve found this workflow works.

Export Level → FBX 2020
Import into New Project - When Asked to partition the level DECLINE
GO to ADD CLASS → NAME YOUR WORLD PARTITION COMMANDLET
Then put the map/level name in (no need to add the .map or .uasset / ex. L_MAIN_MAP not L_MAIN_MAP.umap

Let me know if this workaround works for you.

I don’t quite understand what do you mean by "Export Level → FBX 2020":open_mouth:?

FBX 2020 is simply the format to export in. When you export a level from unreal you must select the fbx compatibility - 2020 is the most recent one.