5: Create Huge Open Worlds in Unreal using Houdini and Lidar

[@Weckmuller]

I'm already watching it all again, since there are too many important lessons here. But I must confess that I'm already suffering a little bit by noticing you don't post new videos any more, and I struggle to find plain excellent content and teaching like this on other channels. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of great teachers here on KZbin, but there is something in the way you present your ideas that simply makes much more sense to me. Anyway, hope you're doing well and if you need any help figuring out new content, I would be more than willing to help out! Cheers!

[@StrongzGame]

I swear I’ve been looking for someone combining Houdini unreal!

[@666nevermore]

my beautiful man i hope you get back on this series. Literally the most well made series i ever seen, insanely great foundations of realism, never saw anything like that. Even people i was admiring on these sort of things i am kinda reconsidering at the moment compared to your very clean and reality-relatable workflow. I love you please dont disappear. I know you will never get as many views and likes as other game engine youtubers that make more easier videos but that's the nature of these series. I woud really suggest you to make a patreon and a discord, the community you will create will easily sustain you as best as they can.

[@vagabondcgi4277]

we need the displacement again in UE5 for the landscape ,great video

[@mashonoid]

Please make a patreon, I feel guilty for not paying for this kind of HQ info. Keep this up please

[@UndiniTuts]

Thanks! I'll consider it 😉

[@markrennie86]

Knowledge SHOULD be open source you absolute psychopath.

[@piterpunx]

dude, seriously, i feel like i owe you a good amount of drinks for all the tips and tricks, thank you so much

[@UndiniTuts]

You're more than welcome :)

[@Geminiwoods42]

Yes please keep making them I' m so grateful that you have worked this out and shared it. Streets ahead

[@Weckmuller]

Dude, I'm literally binge-watching all this playlist, and I'm learning so much. I'm learning stuff that I wouldn't even imagine about other topics, like keyboard shortcuts in unreal! Please don't stop posting.

[@sub_tropic]

Instead of writing out all these separate height field files and manually calculating scaling factors, you can just write a heightfield containing each mask as a separate layer to a single .bgeo , then make an HDA that only contains a file read node, import that HDA into unreal, and point it at the .bgeo . Houdini Engine will then auto generate the landscape for you - to scale and with all the layers.

[@CupMcCakers]

Smart! Makes life a little easier for the initial import I guess. Thanks for the sharing the idea 😊

[@kamazooliy]

Thank you! This solves a lot of issues Ive had with terrain transfers!

[@RMAFIRE]

You really are an artist!💥👆

[@istealpixel7371]

The man who takes away my fear of Houdini :-)

[@anlmehmetalan5547]

You sir made my day. Thank your for your excellent tutorials!

[@xjuliussx]

love your video, it explains very well and very nice exactly what we need for building large maps! you are a life savior.

[@hightechnician]

moar! :D The hero we needed and deserve. Cheers George

[@mila2max]

Thank you so much. I got Baikal lake area on mapbox.

[@andyjgough]

These tutorials are amazing. I'm new to Houdini and find these videos very easy to follow. Thank you

[@UndiniTuts]

Appreciate it!

[@beachmobjellies]

You are doing awesome and cheerful work! Thank you so much for this.

[@danielefrontini6204]

Great video as usual, thanks!!

[@clemlysergy3335]

BMT totally amped for all the future content you mention at 07:30!

[@UndiniTuts]

Thanks Clem. It's coming, my output hasn't been what it was towards the end of 2021. Things have been getting in the way but I will continue as soon as I am able.

[@lixie5627]

Hey, just wanna say thank you for great tuts, definitely hoping for more tuts like this!! =))

[@theguess7]

Awesome Tut!

[@12345ches]

Really good tutorial! I’m looking forward to see your approach on lighting and atmospheric perspective, do you have any tips on that?

[@CatherineScott1]

Just found your video, I think this will help me with Unreal because putting together multiple maps to create a larger area is what I need, I hope getting it into unreal isn't going to be a pain, lol

[@UndiniTuts]

Shouldn't be ;)

[@andre7021]

LEGEND! 🤟

[@FaitelTech]

Nice to meet you, George 🙂. I've tried to use Norway maps and everything is fine in general but I have a question. How should I determine exact tile size in kilometers? Are there any standards for datar (😬) services? Also, I'm working on Norway spruce using Houdini tree nodes, so I'm waiting for your next content regarding foliage as well.

[@UndiniTuts]

You as well! It's great to hear that you succeeded with the Norway data so far. The easiest way if the size of the tile is not listed, would be to find the same area with the labs mapbox node, and then overlay the two data sets. You will need to scale the LIDAR until it matches up closely with the mapbox data. Bear in mind that the mapbox data has a much lower level of precision, so it won't be a perfect fit (otherwise we would just use that data instead of lIDAR) Actually I lied, the easiest way would be to just find out the tile size from someone, but sadly I don't know as I've been using the English data mainly. Cool to hear about the spruce in Houdini, my tutorials will be taking a slightly more old-school approach with L-systems, but I should definitely take a look at the new tree nodes and learn to work with those at some point

[@aizen_rhyme_schemes]

Hey! Couldn't you try and find the place in Google Maps and use the measure distance tool to figure it out? I'm sure Norway has used a round number (1km, 5km) for their tiles.

[@FaitelTech]

@@aizen_rhyme_schemes that’s a good idea! Thanks, I’ll try.

[@DodgerEcho]

Thanks for the lesson, but I don't understand where you have 100km squared in one map without World Partition??? When I make a map in the World Partition in my UE5, I split it into tiles, and I sort 49 minicards with a resolution of 1009x1009 pixels each, then I scale the map to 100,000 meters when exporting, taking into account the scale of UE and for some reason it turns out to be larger than yours, it feels like it is 100000km squared, since RAM it takes up to 56GB at the same time... How can this be or is it normal?

[@kickinit333]

Thanks for the great videos. I'm using files of the Grand Canyon and when I compute the range, it always comes out to input min/max of 0/1000. It looks right, I'm just not sure why it does that. Cheers.

[@UndiniTuts]

Perhaps the bottom of your data set is at or below sea level, and the top is exactly 1KM above sea level :)

[@kickinit333]

@@UndiniTuts Thanks, I'll take a look. Cheers.

[@tadavis]

I was having the same issue and upped the Max Ray Dist in the heightfield_project til it fell into a good range

[@sobol_gryzi]

Hello! There is a very big problem after landcape scaling - landscape poligons are too big and it is impossible to modify imported landscape becouse it's all of trianagles. Is there any solution for this?

[@Geminiwoods42]

Is there a way I can keep the highest 1m resolution across the dataset? I've got the computer power to do this comfortably. If I merge the original tiles In QGis or something?

[@UndiniTuts]

Hi, you can use QGIS or Houdini to merge the tiles, but the issue is then getting that data into UE4. The highest supported resolution of a single Landscape tile is 8129x8129. So if you wanted 1m=1pixel then you'd be limited to roughly 8KMx8KM. docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/BuildingWorlds/Landscape/TechnicalGuide/ This leaves you with a few options: 1. Use World Composition ( Which I would advise you against using) 2. Use Meshes instead of Landscape ( Also not ideal) 3. Try UE5 The best choice would really be to just accept lower than ideal resolution, and to potentially consider whether that are just specific areas that require higher resolution. In which case you could import multiple Landscape at different resolutions and sizes to cover your needs. If you MUST have large 1m accuracy datasets, I'd probably consider UE5 and look at whether the technology there empowers bigger worlds. World Composition is really a last resort as it's incredibly cumbersome and unwieldy. It will not be fun, consider yourself warned!

[@X-Jinx-X]

So a random question, could you make the entire uk with accurate heightmap data and put it into UE4 and scale It down to a more playable area? Or can you only do small chunks?

[@UndiniTuts]

Hi Madelyn, It depends what level of detail you are looking for. Lidar data for the UK is incomplete, although it is quite comprehensive. But I imagine if you are scaling it down you would need less resolution? You could use the Nasa Global 30M dtm set which is based on satellite data. aquaknow.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/content/nasa-global-dtm-digital-terrain-model-30-m-spatial-resolution Or, you could save some time and buy this 86K Earth Displacement Map by Tuomas Kankola: app.gumroad.com/d/6688baf53a1154f4603b1a5fd812b6da

[@peterallely5417]

Alas, opentopography doesn’t go by grid, it’s just ‘draw a box’ and you can only select so many LiDAR points. I’ll have to figure something out

[@UndiniTuts]

How did this go for you?

[@georgeplakojohn7534]

Is it better to use 4 tiles of 4033 resolution or 1 tile of 8129 res performance wise?

[@UndiniTuts]

Why don't you tell me what you think before I give you a response :)

[@georgeplakojohn7534]

@@UndiniTuts Love your tutorials so far. In this video you took four 5k lidar tiles and exported one 4033x4033 png. If I wanted better resolution would it better for performance in UE5 to export one 8129x8129 png or four 4033x4033 png for a tiled heightmap. I assume my question is silly because the number of triangles or quads will be roughly the same, but I was trying to find an answer from someone knowledgible instead of testing it out

[@UndiniTuts]

@@georgeplakojohn7534 Usually the simplest approach is the best one. There's no need to overcomplicate things. Especially in UE5 with the new streaming system which is supposed to do most of the work for you (I have not tried it yet)

[@georgeplakojohn7534]

@@UndiniTuts Thank you sir. I am trying the endless backround terrain as we speak

[@vasilchorny]

how to add water like river or lakes to this. Its crashing

[@UndiniTuts]

Rivers and Lakes and water in general is a big subject worthy of it's own series, probably best bet is to use marketplace content for the time being.

[@ms.liragrut8222]

how to make export udim from Heighfield?

[@UndiniTuts]

Hi! I'll be covering this in a future video :)

[@peter486]

its looks to tech, and veruy hard.. great endresult but way to many buttons. you can tell that they dont care about user AI, and understanding.

[@UndiniTuts]

Houdini and unreal are both quite complex tools. Stick with them and you won't regret it. Unless you like spending time outdoors 😜