Houdini Tutorial - Lidar Data for UE5 Landscape. Part 1 - Heightmap

[@libshastra]

Total Commander! What a blast from the past!

[@tinyredkite]

Oh yeah! In all the years I didn't find the tool more convenient

[@apetrukovich]

double commander, same tool but free@@tinyredkite

[@tinyredkite]

@apetrukovich Thank you very much for the recommendation! I checked it out and it really is the same tool, so I decided to use it instead. Appreciate your comment very much!

[@wakeup2.369]

Светлана благодарю Вас!!! Очень круто!

[@tinyredkite]

Спасибо за комментарий! Я рада, что туториал был полезным!

[@PeterLeban]

Thank you for sharing the technique! I usually make a HDA with my landscape as output and it simply works :) No need to manually transform the data in Unreal.

[@tinyredkite]

I would never think of using HDA that way! Thank you very much for sharing!

[@PeterLeban]

yeah, it's something Indie Pixel did so I just ended up doing the same thing. It's much easier that way, if you reference the landscape material and name your layers it will also assign it and distribute them all@@tinyredkite

[@tinyredkite]

@@PeterLeban Awesome, I will definitely look into it. Thank you for sharing!

[@andersmadsen8052]

@@PeterLeban hi, can you add link for the video you mention, theres quite a few on that channel :)

[@PeterLeban]

@@andersmadsen8052 hm, can't find it online, maybe he removed it. I see other courses but not the one. But check Simon Verstraete's desert one for Unreal, same deal. Outputting landscape.

[@FilmByteProductions]

Amazing tutorial! Looking foward to part 2 in this series.

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you so much!

[@UndiniTuts]

Really great tutorial and outstanding result, thank you for sharing!

[@tinyredkite]

A praise coming from you is especially valuable! Thank you for your words and for the knowledge you've shared!

[@marcinchester4949]

Great content Svetlana, thanks!! Good luck with the channel😊

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you very much! Appreciate your kind words!

[@libshastra]

This is a good tutorial. I was looking for someone who could explain "scale" when you transition heightfield from Houdini to unreal. Thanks for touching on that topic.

[@tinyredkite]

You are very welcome! I'm glad you found it useful!

[@libshastra]

@@tinyredkitelook forward to part 2. Also how did you decide on the area of the heightfield? Unreal recommends keeping world size within 20 km^2, I struggle trying to scale my heightfield appropriately to fit Unreal's limits

[@tinyredkite]

I'm not sure I understand your question correctly, but still will try to answer. I decided to use area 8000*8000 meters initially, because it encompasses the area of the world I was interested in. It could really be different size, as long as it's a square. Then I settled on using 4033*4033 landscape size (I think it was UNDINI who didn't recommend the biggest size). After that it was just a question of scaling. As I show in the video, the formula is as follows: 8000/4033*100 = 198. If my initial landscape was 6 kilometers in size, the scaling would be 6000/4033*100 = 149. If your landscape is super large, maybe you just need to split it into several landscapes. Please let me know if this answers your question.

[@libshastra]

@@tinyredkiteaaah gotcha. Makes sense

[@tinyredkite]

Awesome!

[@paulturalski]

great tutorial. Im waiting for next parts ;)

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you very much! The next parts are coming out soon.

[@void9590]

Thanks for the work you've done!🐱

[@tinyredkite]

You are very welcome!

[@ThePlatypotamus]

Thank you

[@tinyredkite]

You are very welcome!

[@SuperCarzetin]

Thank you so much for this!!

[@tinyredkite]

I'm glad you liked it!

[@joshualacroix1938]

Great job!

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you very much!

[@trauma2980]

Bless you for sharing ❤

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you for appreciating that!

[@elwinvanalstmedia]

Hi Svetlana, thanks for this! I'm working on a similar project and am running into combining multiple Heightfields and getting them into UE5. When I use the Height Project node my terrain disappears and I just get a flat surface.... any idea why this is happening? My original height field isn't square. So I also need to figure out if I can work with a non-square or I have to crop the height field somehow. Any ideas?

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you! Heightfield not being a square shouldnt be the issue. Could you please point the time in the tutorial at which you have the issue? There is more than one project node there.

[@xrlearn]

Thanks. You can use mapbox node from labs tool and avoid half of this tiff assembling hassle where you can download heightfield directly into the houdini. I am struggling more with texturing part of the mapbox terrains and brining it to unreal. I hope you can make some content in texturing

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you for the tip, this was interesting to look into! I checked the documentation and a couple of videos and it looks very impressive. The only thing that is not so great - the maximum resolution of the tile is 512 pixels (according to Mapbox docs), which means that if I want 8x8 kilometers landscape at zoom level which will give me a resolution of 2 meters per pixel, I will still need to use 8 squares along each side. And the docs say: "You can join the output tiles of multiple Labs Mapbox SOPs together to form a larger piece of terrain", and then explains pretty much the same method I was using. But I definitely can see how this method can work for backgrounds, or extended, non accessible areas of the landscapes, where the resolution is not crucial at all, especially while it generates textures automatically! Also it looks like pretty much the whole world is available there, while not all the planet has the lidar data (I was using Tangram Heightmapper in such cases). As to the content in texturing - if you struggling to bring mapbox diffuse texture in Unreal - here are the steps you can try. 1. Make sure that your texture has the same size as your landscape (4033 or 8129 or whatever). 2. Inside of the landscape material editor create a LandscapeLayerCoords node and change mapping scale to the landscape size (4033 or 8129). 3. Plug the output of this node into UVs slot of the Texture Sample with the terrain texture. 3. Attach RGB output to the Base Color input. I will cover landscape layers and material setup inside Unreal in future videos.

[@xrlearn]

Thankyou for this tip. I look forward to your future landscape materials setup videos as well.

[@tinyredkite]

You are welcome!

[@STARU2U]

The voice is nice😊 I subscribe now

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you very much, it's so nice to hear that! I was actually worried about my voice (and accent), but still decided to record the first video (which was very stressful). Now I feel more comfortable. Thank you for reassurance!

[@libshastra]

I think you found a bug in Houdini's TIFF parser. I think it's processing TIFF metadata chunks as points and primitives. I'd file a bug report with sidefx

[@tinyredkite]

Thank you for the information!

[@901coryowens]

Could I commission you to help me take a selection of geotiffs I downloaded for my hometown and create a landscape with that information for unreal engine? I have never used houdini.

[@tinyredkite]

I guess we can give it a shot. Please contact me on Artstation or LinkedIn, or send me your Discord username, so I can find you.

[@waadi3ach569]

at 8:53 My heightfield project results in a large white square plane with no terrain.

[@waadi3ach569]

nvm i just increased height ray trace distance from 1k to 10k since i had many mountains

[@tinyredkite]

I'm glad that the issue is resolved!

[@ShibaInuClassical]

12:18 best moment

[@tinyredkite]

Are you referring to the nosy cat?

[@ShibaInuClassical]

@@tinyredkite yeah, cute little helper 🐱

[@tinyredkite]

That's my fluffy, always ready to help!

[@tobyschadt7032]

Thank you for the note on editing compositing preferences - you unstuck me.

[@tinyredkite]

You are very welcome!

[@user-on7en2fl2c]

Ты же русский знаешь?

[@tinyredkite]

Знаю

[@user-on7en2fl2c]

@@tinyredkite Окцент выдал)