Landscapes vs Static Mesh Terrain

grad_t
Tue, 21 Jan 2025 15:55:04 +0000
World Creation

I’ve been trying to do some digging into best practices for creating a terrain in UE5 for use in games, but the more I read the more confused I get. At first I went with the obvious choice of the landscape editor but I ran into performance issues almost immediately, probably a lot due to things I wasn’t doing correctly. However upon further research I’ve discovered many people claiming landscapes are practically unusable if you want to make a large and performant terrain. Same story with the World Partition System, I’ve seen claims that it’s broken and to be avoided.

And so the alternative presented is to use static mesh tiles for your terrain instead, the workflow seems a lot more complex but if you’re actually serious about making a large terrain that performs well in a video game then is this really the way to go?

So I’d like to try and open a discussion on what is the best approach and practices for making a large terrain in UE5. Are landscapes with world partition a viable choice that just require the correct optimisation? Or are static mesh tiles simply the better choice, even if they require extra effort to implement?

What are your experiences with either? What concrete evidence is there to support one over the other? Is there any information available on what professional studios have used in their games?

12 posts - 5 participants