TerreSculptor: UE4 Landscape to World Composition

[@dawsonlegaldocuments]

I'm an amateur with world composition in UE4. TerreSculptor has helped me a ton. It's very easy to use and does everything as it should. Thank you very much for your work and I'll send a donation your way. Thank you again!

[@demenzunmedia]

Thank you.

[@ghozgaming8704]

Absolutely amazing software. Thank you, from your friends down in Washington State :)

[@demenzunmedia]

You're welcome!

[@acces969]

Спасибо тебе большое за помощь и твою программу. Твое углубленное изучение движка очень помогает сообществу. Мне пришлось перейти из world partition в world composition из за нехватки ресурсов компьютера.

[@demenzunmedia]

Thanks. I wish that Epic would fix up the World Partition system. It needs to correctly support larger open worlds, on computer with less memory. With Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2, being limited to only a 16384x16384 terrain import before getting a texture error is really bad.

[@Dhanush4Raj]

Good video I need more about world composition.

[@demenzunmedia]

I have a lengthy in-depth TerreSculptor to World Composition video series coming soon. It will be about 4 to 6 parts in the series. And it should be on my channel in February or March.

[@steven3314]

@@demenzunmedia I'm wondering if the series is available any time soon?

[@demenzunmedia]

@@steven3314 - I have over 25 videos in the pipeline coming to the channel, including the series on World Composition. I don't have a firm date on when it will be available though.

[@steven3314]

@@demenzunmedia Ok, I'm using UE5 currently, so I'll wait for your UE5 tutorial instead.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@steven3314 - Ok. It will take me a month or two to get through the list of videos that I currently have in the pipeline. I am usually working ahead and scripting videos up to 10 or more ahead of when I am shooting them. So it will be a bit of time before I get the UE5 videos out.

[@OriginRow]

Worked everything but my previous material layers info are not applying which are hand painted. How can I fix it

[@richardroberts2457]

Curious about Terre Sculpter....how do you allocate more memory to resample a map 8k to a finish World Composition map of 64KM? When I attempt to RESAMPLE is notifies that I need more memory....?

[@demenzunmedia]

When working with very large heightmaps, you are limited to the maximum size of a flat array that is defined by Windows itself. The Windows APIs impose a lot of limits on what I am able to do. See the FAQ page on the website for a list of maximum dimensions for various tools. I am working on updating TerreSculptor to support larger custom arrays. The current maximum heightmap is about 46k x 46k. Once I get the custom array coding completed it will support up to 2 billion x 2 billion but will be initially limited to 64k x 64k, since I will have to add in a lot of size-checking notifications in the software. The second issue with very large heightmaps is that the Windows Image file formats do not support sizes that large (BMP,GIF,JPG,JRX,PNG,TIF). See the FAQ page. This will force a person to have to use RAW format or other formats that support very large heightmap sizes other than Image formats. So I am updating a bunch of the tools in order to get the largest size support that is possible. I expect to have most of this completed in Q1/Q2 of 2021.

[@richardroberts2457]

@@demenzunmedia Totally understand! As a possible fix...could you resample your 8K Height Map, Tile It, then Resample each Tile to 8K, and Tile those? Im sure the x0, y0 coordinates will be a mess to figure out....but would that be a good workaround?

[@demenzunmedia]

@@richardroberts2457 - If you were working with an 8k file that you wanted resampled up to 64k, to create a tiled 64k world of 8x8 tiles, then you could split the 8k heightmap into 1k tiles and resample each of those up to 8k. That would give you an 8x8 tile set of 8kx8k heightmaps. And all of the 1k tiles that you would resample would also be the proper names for UE4's importer. The only thing that may happen is you may see issues where the tiles meet, they may not be seamless on their edges due to inaccuracies in the resampled edges (resampling clamps at the edges). The tile edges would be close but they probably won't have perfectly matching edge elevations all along the full length of the edge. If you were doing this in UE4 you might have to take the smooth brush over the tile edges and match them up. The issue stems from the resample algorithm not knowing what the edge elevations of the adjacent tiles are, so it can't resample with those elevations available to the algorithm. This is one of the main reasons why I am updating TerreSculptor to support massive heightmaps, eventually up to the maximum of the installed memory. Attempting to work around lower resolutions by using a tiled terrain system introduces a lot of technical problems that have to be dealt with. It's always best to work directly in the exact resolution that you want.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@richardroberts2457 - I was thinking about it, and if you were wanting to resample an 8k heightmap to 64k for creating a tiled 8x8 set, what should work fine for a workflow and will also keep the edge seams good, it will just take some time to do, is to: use the Tile Creator to split the 8k heightmap into 8x8 1kx1k tiles, these will also be correctly named; open each of the 1k tiles up and use the Interpolate modifier with 0 Variance to increase the size by 800% in width and length; save it back out as an 8k tile; repeat for all 64 tiles. The Interpolate modifier doesn't perform kernel smoothing like the standard Resample methods do, so the edge seams should retain the same elevations at the tile seams.

[@richardroberts2457]

@@demenzunmedia Absolutely Amazing!! I will test it out this week, also I am still excited for the TerreSculpter updates! Thank you so much!

[@DonEsteban3D]

I have a small question. I know you can split your landscape inside udk4's world composition. What is the purpose to send it to TerreScuptor and tiling it there? Do you actually get some benedict from this process? Better landscape optimization or something?

[@daveg4417]

When splitting inside of UE4 you cannot resample the heightmap to a different size, it just crops or pads the heightmap. When converting a regular heightmap to world composition, for some tile sets you need a completely different size heightmap, and TerreSculptor lets you resize it to the proper dimensions.

[@bladicreator7613]

is possible to make 64KM^2 of landscape with world composition terrescultor?

[@michaelblackmer8183]

Sure is. Works great! The main thing I wish Terresculptor had (it might, I've only been using it for like two weeks) is like painting tools for the landscape (mountain ranges, etc.) and shaping continents (I found a workaround for this by using the same principals as Demenzun's video on creating a "play" area). The main tools you have are to either import a heightmap, or create a terrain using noise. Overall, it's an awesome tool, especially being free.

[@demenzunmedia]

If you want to make a 65536x65536 heightmap, that will currently fail with a Windows Array Allocation error. Windows Memory Fragmentation currently prevents TerreSculptor from creating really large heightmaps. This is a limitation in Windows. I am adding a new memory management feature to the software so that very large heightmap can be created, as big as available memory. So a 64GB system would be able to create a heightmap of 120,000 x 120,000. This updated memory management called BigArray Support will be available sometime in early 2021.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@michaelblackmer8183 - Sculpting tools are already planned for TerreSculptor and portions of the code is already completed. The initial sculpting tools will hopefully be available by Q3/Q4 2021. There is also a new tool coming in Q1/Q2 of 2021 called Island Creator that allows you to draw splines in the shape of the island continent that you want, and TerreSculptor will create an ocean around the edge for the shape that you have drawn. I am working on trying to be able to create soft edges and hard edges on the continent so that you can have such features as cliffs at the ocean edge (like the white cliffs of Dover).

[@michaelblackmer8183]

Also, sorry. I interpreted 64 square kilometers as 8 km x 8 km which is possible.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@michaelblackmer8183 - No worries. :) I still always get confused between "square kilometers" and "kilometers squared". And I often wonder how many other people make the same mistakes. The OP did say kilometers squared, which I would take to mean 64k x 64k. Unless they were just looking for 8k x 8k = 64k square km.

[@madarauchiwa6818]

Great video as always. I'm a big fan of your content. :) Also, I desperately need your advice, and you seem to be one of the few people knowing about this open worlds : When creating a big high quality open world game, what kind of computer is truely needed ? It's easy to think "well just get 1to of ram, 3 sli 2080ti and a threadripper 3990x", but I feel like people are always exaggerating everything. Lmao In your opinion, what would you recommand, and why, as a perfect starting point ? Do we really need 128gb of ram, or 64 will do ? What does it do exactly for a game developper ? How do you calculate your needs depending on a project ? Is an rtx 3090 completely overkill for a big game, or is it necessary for certain important tasks ? I know that each projects is different, but I also believe there is a minimum when creating a new Witcher 3. Haha Thank you. 🙏🏻

[@demenzunmedia]

I am currently working on a video series for World Composition that will contain technical information that most other people don't provide. If you are subscribed to the channel you should get notifications when I start uploading those videos. I am still writing scripts so the videos will start to show up on the channel in the next few weeks. When working with large open worlds what matters is how large is the total world (tile size x tile count) and how densely populated it is going to be. That will affect how much storage will be required to store all of the tile sections, and how much memory is required to load them all at once. And the number of CPU cores will determine how long it takes to build the lighting for every tile. For example, if a 4kx4k world currently requires 500MB for just the map files, then an 8x8 WorldComp (32kx32k) will require 64x that or 32GB for all of the tile maps. We are not including textures and materials and foliage since those will be shared. That is 32GB of storage, plus you will need more than 32GB of memory to load it all up at once. So this means that if you only have a Quad-Core CPU with 16GB memory, you will probably only be able to work on a small number of loaded tiles, and it will take hours to build. You should be able to determine your system requirements for your project by basically creating a complete map that is the size of one tile that you are creating, and see how large that project is - then multiply it by the WorldComp size to get close to the total requirements that you will need. So for example, if you are using 1009x1009 Tiles, and a 1k map requires 100MB (look at the files in the map folder), and you want to create an 8x8 tiles set of 1kx1k, then the system requirements for storage and memory will be about 64x100MB = 6.4GB. Basically for the development computer, the more cores and memory that you can throw at it, the better. My current UE4 development computer is a 6-Core HT with 64GB of memory. So I will be doing some benchmarking with that system to see what is possible with it for developing WorldComp, and what is simply too much for it for world sizes. One of the videos in the series on WorldComp will be just to cover the technical requirements and limitations. There will be high system requirements for the development computer, and lower system requirements for the final game play computer, because UE4 will scale the WorldComp setup for the target game play computer.

[@madarauchiwa6818]

@@demenzunmedia thank you so much for your very long answer! It's very usefull. I will give you a proper answer when I am less busy. Thanks again !!!!!

[@Dhanush4Raj]

@@demenzunmedia please tell me can we use marketplace assets/ bridge assets commercially on games I have read the user agreement of both but I can't understand those. So please reply me. this affects my game progress .I have asked to many KZbinrs But I didn't get a proper answer. I hope at least you'll reply 😭.🙏🙏🙏.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@Dhanush4Raj - You can use any of the Demenzun Media marketplace assets in commercial projects. Regarding other people's marketplace assets, unfortunately you will have to read their documentation to see what their license is. Most will be commercial, if you are unsure then contact the author of the marketplace asset. The Quixel assets can be used commercially.

[@Dhanush4Raj]

@@demenzunmedia thank you and we can use quixel assets commercially in my game right?.so I won't get any problems. Thank you very much brother!

[@joyceanblue]

Hello, another question- I have exported image textures in tiles as well from TerraSculptor to be used as a material. Any idea how I can apply different image tile to different level of terrain? i suppose one way is to use layerblend and manually paint? but kinda tedious. i am trying to map a huge google earth map on terrain.

[@demenzunmedia]

If you mean that you have individual material textures for each tile, then you simply create the Material for each tile and assign it to the Landscape Proxy in the list when you load the Levels.

[@trevor4664]

I have imported and loaded my tilted landscapes but when I go to landscape button it says "landscape actor is not loaded" so i can not edit terrain. how do i fix this?

[@demenzunmedia]

When working with World Composition you always have to load the Levels that you want to see or work on. Go to the Windows menu, select the Levels item, which will give you a dialog with a list of all of your Levels, select the Levels and right click and Load. This is really the basics of using World Composition, you should review the Epic World Composition video so that you know what all of the dialogs are for and how to navigate it.

[@trevor4664]

@@demenzunmedia yes it is loaded, i am able to view and run on landscape but when i click on landscape tool it says Landscape actor is not loaded. It is needed to do layer editing.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@trevor4664 - I have never seen that before, and it has never happened to me, it could be some bug, you might have to check with Google or the Epic Forums. I assume that all of the Landscape Streaming Proxies are loaded and listed in the level actor list, and that you have tried such things as restarting the editor.

[@shapeshifterstudios884]

🤔 I surmise this plays nice with the Voxel Plug-in?

[@demenzunmedia]

TerreSculptor is used to create or edit heightmaps, weightmaps, and masks, plus splatmaps, normalmaps, and much more. If those are useful for the voxel plugin that you are using then this software will work fine.

[@uliveulearnandregret]

I did this and all the layers are stacked ontop of eachother

[@Restart-Gaming]

World Composition has been discontinued? From what was said on discord?

[@demenzunmedia]

World Composition is not discontinued. Anyone who develops content using Unreal Engine 4 will still be using World Composition, it is not being removed from any of the current or future UE4 builds such as 4.25 and 4.26 etc. Unreal Engine 5 still has World Composition and it also has a new world layout system called World Partition. When Unreal Engine 5 goes to full public release, then information and tutorials on using its World Partition system will be made available. Anyone who is working on a current game will most likely not upgrade from UE4 to UE5 since the upgrade process is not a simple project import due to many engine changes between the versions.

[@eggZ663]

This workflow still works with World Partition just fine anyway. I just came back to this today and tried it in UE5 and it worked, good tutorial and brilliant app :)

[@DaroxxFR]

Hello, i have a problem when importing a terrain from png or tiff. it creates terrace artefacts (my images are 16 bit)

[@demenzunmedia]

The heightmap is probably not normalized then and is only using a small portion of the 16-bit value range. Try normalizing the heightmap in TerreSculptor before exporting or saving tiles.

[@DaroxxFR]

@@demenzunmedia Actually everything is good, that's just me being dumb. I didn't see that there is multiple options for the same format, i was importing with RVB option instead of classic PNG.

[@gursimransingh8726]

IS THERE ANY AY TO INCREASE DRAW DISTANCE FOR LEVEL STREAMING

[@demenzunmedia]

You create your own Streaming Distance values in the World Composition dialog.

[@pssstockarena]

Keeps throwing me "an error occured saving the tile to disk" other than that great app

[@demenzunmedia]

Hi. Can you give me a bit of information on what settings you are using so that I can try to replicate the error: heightmap size, tile size, tile number, etc. What happens if you use a basic 1024x1024 heightmap and split that into 2x2 and save it, do you still get the error? Note that the current Tile Creator is limited at this time to heightmaps of 26k x 26k maximum resolution due to Windows Bitmap size limitations, I will be updating this soon to support larger sizes.

[@pssstockarena]

@@demenzunmedia heightmap size was all messed up from my behalf. 1024x1024 worked. Thx for this great product and for Ur quick reply :)

[@demenzunmedia]

@@pssstockarena - Hi. Thanks. All of the standard dimensions from 2x2 to 26kx26k including UE4 World Composition sizes from the UDK Sizes dialog should work. If you run into a heightmap size or tile setting that throws an error, please let me know what settings you used. You can even screen capture the dialog and send an image link. The Tile Creator will be getting some major updates on the next build release, including changes to the maximum heightmap size from the Windows Bitmap maximum size limit of 26k, to the full size supported by TerreSculptor. Plus new tiling code to manage that. So any current bugs should be fixed on that update.

[@senopatict]

I use data SVN upload tortoise can not reimporting landscape dont know from fbx world machine soft so dont have LOD distribution automation system or own UE4 creating sculpting/landmass... but lock, if 1st case how to active etc.. I ever creat large terrain +-5km*5km more with sett LOD Distribution 0.8, 1.05, 1.7-2 can lighter /increase performance significant.. Landscape streaming proxy.... detail all level can not change LOD distribution (grey) how tu unlock? snipboard.io/yNLsba.jpg