Using Virtual Heightfield Mesh For Landscape Displacement In Unreal Engine 5 (Updated)

[@audunaarseth6237]

This is a great tutorial but the process itself feels overly tedious compared to the old tessellation method. Hopefully they do something about this in the future. I think I'll stick with spawning rocks onto the material instead.

[@digitalarthub]

Couldn't agree more, this feels more like a "hack" than an actual way to do displacement.

[@SSchithFoo]

I guess it has use cases like if your character is floating

[@spacepirate9882]

@@Cha4k Yes, I don't understand what the fuck Epic is doing with displacement. Assassin's Creed games used displacement on landscape for years with almost no performance hit while UE4 displacement on landscape was laggy as hell and because they were never able to make production ready displacement, they simply removed it in the "next gen engine" UE5. Now we can have real time GI and billions of triangles per mesh but landspaces are flat That's a huge step back for games when you have perfect displacement on games that are 6 or 8 years old.

[@hirkdeknirk1]

Very good tutorial but I don't like the workflow at all. In UE6 it will probably take 39 objects to map a texture onto a cube.

[@SponkyAu]

If UE5 keeps crashing with Virtual Heightfield Mesh try to change the Targeted RHIs in project settings from DirectX12 to DirectX11, This might be a problem with AMD graphic cards

[@Roojinald]

Thanks for pointing this out! I thought I did something wrong (aside from buying an AMD that is)

[@rudolfdobias3012]

I've got a problem that the VirtualHeightfieldMesh dramatically reduces the quality of landscape textures ... Anyone else having this problem? Perfect tutorial, though!

[@gcstudio9705]

I had same problem. Did you solve it?😢

[@rudolfdobias3012]

@@gcstudio9705 Partially. The key is tweaking resolution of the RVT (Enabling adaptive page table, setting high resolution and small page size worked for me.) Unfortunatelly, the VHM itself remains practically unusable if you build large landscapes / open worlds since it does not support world partitioning, collision and it creates terrible artefacts when applied to large area. Let me know if you find out something ;)

[@MasterDavicous]

For the problem with the feet being below the mesh, could you sample the position of the height texture on the mesh based on the position of the IK raycast and then move the IK target position up a certain amount depending on the pixel color? I guess this wouldn't necessarily help with the IK target's rotation unless you sampled neighboring pixels as well, but it would at least put the foot on top of the mesh.

[@schrottiyhd6776]

There is an workaround to this Collision Problem: you can acces the RVT Height in any Blueprint and get all the pixels where the foot is at get a get an average of the Height of those pixels aswell as for the Normal and place the Foot by IK ... This is more work that it is needed to be if they would have just have keept Tesselation in materials

[@arvinmoses]

Could you explain how youre getting the height data in the blueprint?

[@schrottiyhd6776]

@@arvinmoses you can draw the data you want trough material into a render target (with 1x1 or more pixels if you want) and then get in blueprint there are several functions that allow you to get a pixel sample or all pixels (get all pixels is faster if you want to get several pixels) its called something with render target ... i would recommend not using virthal height field mesh because it does not support proper collision and shadowing aswell! it also has some weird culling issues...

[@arvinmoses]

@@schrottiyhd6776 TY so much! It has to be through a render target - as in sampling the rvt wouldn't work?

[@schrottiyhd6776]

@@arvinmoses don't know, dooin it trough the render target is the only way that i know to retrive texture data in blueprint

[@arvinmoses]

@@schrottiyhd6776 TY! So it has to go through a render target. That's alright and that makes sense.

[@MustafaBerkeGureltol]

When you plug in height map into specular channel in MakeMaterialAttributes node, those maps get registered into the "Specular" input of the M_Landscape node in the end. The specularity of your object might seem a bit off if you do that. Alternate method if you're using a landscape that's either in Opaque or Masked blend mode would be to use "Opacity" channel instead since it gets ignored in those modes.

[@scottcourtney8878]

The extra UV channels can also be used to pass arbitrary data if they're not otherwise needed in the project. I've not tried using them for displacement data but have had good success in other contexts.

[@shrapnelmaster117]

I use WPO when I do this, but alternatively, you can use a channel, pass it into the virtual texture output and then discard the information from that channel when passing it to the main material node by setting it to the default value with a "set material attributes" node, or pass in whatever info you ACTUALLY want to go into that channel

[@BetaraptorLP]

Hi, i have an issue with this, first, the heightfield mesh disappears close to the camera, and also the texture is really blurry, as if it can't load in time when i turn the camera around. Can anyone help with these issues?

[@thomaswiwchar1661]

same

[@TheQ1W1]

texture in blur too((

[@cinemyscope6630]

I agree with previous commentators that this doesn't seem to be an adequate replacement for texture displacement. It feels a lot more like a workaround.

[@pawprinting]

Great job to the guy who was patient enough to make this tutorial, but thank goodness nobody ever has to do this anymore, not that I actually know anybody who EVER did. It's baffling that Epic even thought that this was going to be a viable solution and substitute for what we already had available in UE4. All the steps you have to go through with this and the time it takes to set it up is just so counterproductive. Cheers to Nanite Tess now being incorporated into the 5.4, and Nanite skeletal mesh support coming in 5.5.

[@TechForgeEmmad]

lol it Crashes as soon as I click on Hidden from editor, the VirtualHightfieldmesh instance

[@corknakovastein]

for some reason everything inside of the area we made to create the displacement becomes massive and super low res for me, while everything else outside of the created area without displacement looks hi res

[@performanceoverlooks]

same

[@slabbash4233]

hello, everything works, but for some reason the quality of the virtual mesh is terrible.. without it, I set up tiling, etc.. and everything looks great, but everything is flat, and with displacement the texture is very blurry. How can you scale it? or where to choose quality when creating a build? thanks for the help! If needed, I can send an example of what I'm talking about. I used gaea to create the terrain and I use a lot of texture layers for the terrain, rocks, sand, grass.. and nodes to eliminate the ugly tiling

[@Bingo235i]

I have the same problem :(

[@slabbash4233]

@@Bingo235i I solved the problem, in the material that you created for the virtual mesh of the landscape, increase the sliders: the first slider is just responsible for the quality of the texture, and play with the others. but even with all this, the texture is not very high quality, as if without it. I understand that with large landscape sizes there are limitations

[@Bingo235i]

@@slabbash4233 like under the rendering tab for the min max texture thing? I found that if you go in the project settings and type in virtual textures then bump up the tile size it improves the texture quality. Not sure about what the other settings do yet but going to 4096 made my project crash on launch lol.

[@camdoesstuff9632]

@@Bingo235i how did you fix your crash issue? I have the same problem right now

[@021shaw]

folowed it to a t! VHM_Height and VHM_Material are all black after the "Draw in Virtual Textures". This was a workaround try for "enable Nanite" (wich was causing the landscape to disppear). its been two years trying to displace things in Unreal and this nightmare never ends. Epic's gotta be kidding me! wtf

[@thegreatSalu]

Hey..I'm not where I've went wrong but then the area where I want displacement, is glitching into different colors..Is it just me or has anyone else had this problem?

[@Act1onJaxxs0n]

The issue may be that the RVTV_Material actor is referencing the VHM_Height instead it should be referencing VHM_Material.

[@chromativerse]

Hi, so I followed along multiple times now and each time my VirtualHeightfieldMesh has turned out extremely blurry (both texture and height). Do you (or anyone else) have any idea why?

[@harmoniac.design]

same case for me

[@Glowbox3D]

Thank your for this awesome video. I'm surprised with all of the tech in UE, that creating displacement maps isn't much much easier. This seems like an important design choice which allows much more realistic meshes. Epic clearly needs to streamline this. Also, two side notes, I'm building this for my VR world...I really hope this isn't going to push performance too far in the red by implementing this. Also, the collision thing is pretty important--feet through the floor is unacceptable in certain situations. Lastly, if you're painting foliage on your ground mesh, this doesn't work. The foliage goes on the actual landscape and barely sticks up above the new height map displacement mesh.

[@nickoftime7937]

Jesus, what an extremely badly designed and tedious process, just to get your rocks looking as they are supposed too. Come on UR devs get your **** together and get this process automated.

[@SolarTara]

it was. back in 4.7. Nanite has messed with all of this. They want us to use million poly assets to get the same look, not materials and landscapes. (Btw that choice completely destroys any game that isn't using realistic 3d scanned models... since I cant just drop in a scanned stylized brick mesh... its always traditionally been a hand painted stylized texture on a flat plane with hand painted black and white mask for hight info. Just look at any brick, stone or basically anything in Genshin impact.) Very sad

[@bedirhanctak5658]

Hello! I need your help with my project in Unreal Engine 5. As a last resort, I'm reaching out to you here. While working on the landscape part of my project, I managed to apply displacement using the "Virtual Heightfield Mesh" method. However, I'm struggling to apply an opacity mask to the same terrain. I would greatly appreciate your assistance.

[@reliquary1267]

The last engine I used heavily was UE3 so visual scripting was intimidating. This tutorial has helped not only my terrain quality but I'm also learning the scripting.

[@raulalaris]

So if I did want displacement where my character walks on what method would I use for displacement in 5.4?

[@boukhadc]

How about calculating the collision on the fly around the character position ? A bit like tesselation.

[@sasha3ddd190]

Can you please tell me if it is possible to offset the VirtualHeightfieldMesh, which becomes a little higher than the main landscape.

[@TheOneAndOnlyThumper]

The fact this doesn't work for collision means I just wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to get displacement working on my landscape. Dope.

[@esparafucio]

Building the VHM texture is crashing the editor for me in 5.3. Anyone else having similar issues?

[@hillbomb808]

I'm getting a crash every time I uncheck "hidden in editor" working on a M2 MacBook, anyone else having a similar issue or thoughts on how to fix?

[@betraid]

Is there a way in UE to convert mesh to landscape? been trying to create heightmaps but the results are awful and inacurate

[@Samuele_Lini_ARS]

Does it works with path trace render too? (at the moment displacement on landascape material doesn't works in path trace. The only way to have terrain displacement is to use a mesh and apply permanently displacement texture on it)

[@thegreendude2086]

This is actually quite inetersting, in a VR setting I wont have feet anyway

[@ing_frantisek_mohykan]

do yourself a favor, boost your volume up on the headphones, then start your video

[@lorryburger8165]

Thank you for this. I just got it set up in UE5.1, boy did it crash nearly every other step so took 5 times as long to do as it should have. Looks nice though.

[@Sorarox59]

Can we update our virtual heightfield mesh in realtime by painting on the landscape for example ? Or do we have to finish our landscape before making this ?

[@GCVos]

I've tested it and it works in realtime, though it takes a bit of time for the height mesh to update.

[@Sorarox59]

@@GCVos Yes thanks you very much ! The only remaining problem is the flickering in certain camera angle, but it seems to have no fix for the moment..

[@GCVos]

@@Sorarox59 I have found a solution for this. After adding the Absolute World Position mask, also add a constant of 100 at the end, before connecting to worldheight. It elevates the whole heightmesh, and you don't get any flickering. :)

[@Sorarox59]

@@GCVos Oh thank you I'm going yo try this :o

[@HelionDark]

good video! i noticed when you make RTVT texturs from landscape detail it automaticly scales them. VTR is awesome idea has promise but for now is less then half baked solution.

[@olaufr]

Thank you, all is said and straight to the point, excellent tutorial. I was disappointed at the end to learn there was no collision support for the virtual heightfield mesh, it seemed to be made just for that! I hope this will come soon, but not in 5.1 apparently.

[@JimmySahlin]

Anyone had their texture colours washed out? The texture samples looks the same, but the output on the HeightFieldMEsh material is washed out, almost like it's Linear.

[@JimmySahlin]

Fixed it by setting the Virtual Texture Content to include specular on both the RVT_texture and the Heightfield material, and connecting the outputs.

[@zizzonedibattipaglia6247]

@@JimmySahlin yeah but still low res compared to before

[@red4666]

which version of UE 5 is this?

[@GCVos]

Wow, thank you so much for this tutorial! I was expecting things to work poorly but the results are stunning!

[@joe-9718]

Can this generate at runtime??

[@chrishansomeanimations3147]

i cant get it to work sadly .

[@TheDanGoldstein]

Followed the steps exactly and it did work but my only issue is that the new rocky ground texture displacement doesnt look nearly as detailed or high res as it was when it was just a flat surface. I was using an 8k rocky dirt texture that was very clear and now it is far from. How can I fix this?

[@forsberg_]

I miss tessellation

[@nikolasherold]

tysm for this

[@thoughy5039]

Thank you for being so clear and smooth teaching at your videos. Hope your channel will be grow soon you're a diamond to find.

[@squishylover3]

Great video as always. Do you plan on continuing your RTS series?

[@buildgameswithjon7641]

Unfortunately because of low interest I am not planning to sorry!

[@Belarus9000]

useless for 5,3

[@Prototype0rangE]

Nice tutorial. You can add an offset value per layer to ensure that the characters feet don't penetrate. My own material allows for this as well as displacement control

[@Cryofluid]

Hi, could you explain briefly the main lines to do that? I mean, do you use Control Rig and Line trace and some connection with VH?

[@Prototype0rangE]

@@Cryofluid If I have time I can show material graph on my channel. My solution is just a material offset. As I believe the height field mesh still relies on the landscape collision. So it just a matter of having the displacement aligned to the collision... at least it works for me that way.

[@Cryofluid]

@@Prototype0rangE Well, if you share the trick on your channel, it would be awesome. I'm not sure HF is accessible to collision

[@Prototype0rangE]

@@Cryofluid Not a trick its how you control most world displacement. Displacement of any kind lacks collision without some extra effort. I had an issue with smart shader for ground alignment.

[@Cryofluid]

@@Prototype0rangE Oh I see. Indeed, maybe adding the heightmap on the world position offset (no displacement, only moving the current landscape vertices on Z axis) would be enough to have bumps of collision on main rocks

[@cosmosunited]

Hi, my Virtual Heightfield Mesh is missing from all classes. i am using the 5.0.2, is this an issue?

[@phoenixstudios7520]

Hello there, I am following your tutorial to the letter, but I encounter a problem. When I move the camera close to the landscape, the displacement disappears and the original flat texture returns. Is this something you have run across, maybe? Thanks!

[@gudeandi]

That's the downside of Displacement. It's just still a flat texture.

[@phoenixstudios7520]

@@gudeandi Yes, but the displacement (even the virtual one) shouldn't disappear when the camera comes close to the landscape. Should it?

[@Gerharddej]

@@phoenixstudios7520 kzbin.info/www/bejne/mpjMpXqFpciohq8 might help, also turn off visibility of the landscape

[@meevotv4762]

thanks man.

[@AttiasBarak]

WARNING: This is a complete waste of time, as he said at the end of the video that VHM doesn't support collation. If you aren't concerned with collation, there are million better ways to achieve the same thing. The best option is tesselation, it's way cheaper and much easier to set up.

[@3DevSoftware]

You can use the World Position Offset pin as a displacement offset on any of the materials that you use just as long as it is input into the World Height pin with the addition of the World Position -> Blue mask (Z axis) on the Runtime Virtual Texture at the end. In my opinion there is no need to use the specular pin for storing the displacement.

[@buildgameswithjon7641]

I am not sure what you mean. I tried switching the displacement maps to the WPO pins and then pulling off the WPO pin to add to the world position. It doesn't work.

[@3DevSoftware]

@@buildgameswithjon7641 Everything that happens in the material before being output to the virtual textures is just regular material shader stuff. This means there is nothing wrong with using the World Position Offset pins to carry the displacements of any materials. The world position offset displacement only has to be added to the world position z axis when you are about to output it to the height virtual texture so that the virtual heightfield mesh produces the correct elevation. Please remember that the virtual heightfield mesh is quite dumb in its operation as it does not seem to hold any information about its own elevation and certainly doesn't calculate its own vertex normal vector. At the moment you are using the Specular pin to carry around the materials displacement values. I'm just highlighting that there is nothing wrong with using the world position offset pins and not the specular. This is my current setup and it works for me. There is a scenario where you may want to output the displacement only to the unused specular output pin on the virtual texture as at the moment the world height is carrying the displacement+world position z axis. It's all a bit confusing is the virtual texture setup at the moment in Unreal. You can't extract the displacement only from the virtual textures world height value later because you can't get the landscape height before it had a displacement added, thus you can't minus the world height off the current z axis. I enjoy all your tutorials Jon. Thanks for making them :)

[@666nevermore]

@@3DevSoftware i think WPO is vector3 so when you breakmaterialattributes and take the result of that WPO u will have to mask it R to get your original scalar maps blended you putted in. What he says is that there is no correct node for that and you can use any materian I/O to pass the maps you want, WPO is as wrong as specular.

[@marcapouli7805]

Hm, I've done exactly as you did but the result is really really gross... I'll stick to UE 4 I guess, anyway I can't get more than 10 fps even with an empty scene, when I could have almost 90 with a complex scene in UE4. Maybe they want us to sell eyes and kidneys for rtx

[@MustafaAAli-uv2sx]

Thank you so much, i reduced strength of displacement to cure character going through landscape as much as possible. landscape still react to light properly. by far best method. great tutorial.

[@schrottiyhd6776]

There is an workaround to this Collision Problem: you can acces the RVT Height in any Blueprint and get all the pixels where the foot is at get a get an average of the Height of those pixels aswell as for the Normal and place the Foot by IK ... This is more work that it is needed to be if they would have just have keept Tesselation in materials

[@SooMuchSmokee]

I'm trying to make hills in some areas of my map but when I switch to my player view, it is gone and back to flat. I can only see it in editor. Can I please get some help?

[@astonyo7544]

Epic Games should make it just a little bit more complicated - it`s just not enough ;)

[@lorenfulghum2393]

Thank you so much Mr Goldbloom, this is great!!

[@jagdpanzers4406]

Nicely explained, but no way in hell I'm gonna convert all materials like this. Plus it would not work since I'd need to update the height information on runtime for things like snow trails. Not gonna switch to UE5 as long as it is not supported like in UE4

[@Voyagerr11]

My result is black, went through this tutorial several times. It worked the first time and then...

[@almondjay5228]

Great tutorial! Thanks for sharing. Does this work on Lumen and in Virtual Production nDisplay?

[@ethanwasme4307]

opacity mask input is best, i was told that there is next to no processing going on there

[@mlb2582]

Thanks for this video update! I just stopped at the creation of the material. Followed the next steps with all the settings. But the main landscape material didn't work. Now I will try to transfer the displacement values ​​through specular

[@lambe1porco]

Could this heightfield mesh be exported and then imported as a nanite mesh? Did not test this tut in unreal, that’s why I’m asking 😅

[@shrapnelmaster117]

without tesselation and the displacement controls in the material, I end up with lots of cracks in the landscape when doing any kind of displacement, does anyone have any recomendations?

[@kristianrabakov8579]

Any solution for the blurry textures?

[@simonxhe]

You can't use virtual textures in your landscape material.

[@tahun69]

great video everything worked with 5.3 even - good job ty

[@webbeveep2243]

Feels like no real way to use displacement without heavy drawbacks.

[@alienrenders]

None of this worked for me. The virtual height field material was extremely blurry. And there is displacement, but it's very rounded and over very large areas. Nothing looks right.

[@alienrenders]

Figured it out. You can't use virtual textures in your landscape material. You can only use regular textures. It works now.

[@GamerFollower]

@@alienrenders Dange mine relies on virtual textures ugh

[@alienrenders]

@@GamerFollower You can't use virtual textures connected in any way to the Runtime Virtual Texture Output. But you can use those virtual textures and other virtual textures for the material output itself. Not sure that helps, but it's a distinction that I thought is worth mentioning.

[@PikBo100]

how to paint grass on this displacement, or how to add colision to paint grass on it? i tried but its painting though ground

[@DBGajzen]

I've been working on this subject this week and this tutorial is éxactly what I need! Great vid

[@DBGajzen]

One way of working around the collision is to lerp the displacement value witt a negative version of the displacement value (multiplied by -1) using the height data as the alpha, this will push and pull the mesh in both direction minimizing the effect of the feet sticking through, I have not yet tested this but using UE4 and tesselation this was the way to push and pull the mesh, so in theory it should work!

[@buildgameswithjon7641]

I don't think VHM supports negative displacement.

[@DBGajzen]

@@buildgameswithjon7641 I got around to trying this out, indeed it doesn't support it!

[@shivendrapawar9618]

I'm not able to see run time virtual texture option in content browser. what should i do?

[@m.h.kstudio1740]

I want to see level design fron scratch please Beginning with reference

[@散人寒江]

Is VHF landscape without shadow?

[@IstyManame]

How is it perfomance wise compared to nanite texture displacement

[@touristhawk]

nanite displacement sucks atm. you can't use it large landscapes since you always need to build nanite. every change on landscape, build again.

[@IstyManame]

@@touristhawk weird, i've been using it in my 5.3 project and it doesn't seem like i need to build more than 1 time

[@touristhawk]

@@IstyManame not also performance friendly if you use it for a game since you can't use distance based teselation

[@patcruz8561]

Thanks a lot!!!! You saved me

[@scottcourtney8878]

Thanks for a concise and lucid explanation of a complex topic.

[@heloisefournier8308]

Thank you very much for your tutorial

[@et1965]

Seems a waste of time in the age of nanite.

[@saenkoandrew]

Very nice! Waite next portion)

[@arch1tect962]

Hello, i have a question. If i got 3 surface for my landscape (for example rocks, rocks+little bit snow and snow) and i want that the discplacement of the snow will be more higher than rocks, how i can make it?

[@arch1tect962]

In addition, textures start to be very blury, idk why, i cheked it with 2k texures, 4k and 8k, on 2k textures it was good but if your sight look in different angle it start make blur

[@amirulmukmin4965]

not working for me

[@eobet]

What if you don't want a landscape? What if you want to use the heightfield mesh for something animated, like an ocean that stretches to the horizon?

[@Daniel_Vital]

Then just use the height map or other tricks for that. This tutorial only exists because landscapes don't actually make displacement work because of the lack of polygons. He explained in the video

[@caminanubemusiclist2326]

mucyhas gracias men, me sirvio muchisimo

[@xaviermagnus8310]

My hero.

[@jlawson1172]

How do you calculate the size of the map 9:30?

[@officialanimode4093]

Assuming his landscape mesh was set to 250x250. He just multiplied those two together for the final resolution.

[@良い世来いよ]

8:00

[@tilkymacky]

Hey great tutorial. I tried using your method I'm able to see the displacement in terrain but no displacement in textures. Any suggestions?

[@paulownsall94]

same hwre

[@senchi3836]

There is no displacement in UE5

[@DatGuyGLK]

Why not just use World Position Offset node? Is it not a replacement for displacement ?

[@buildgameswithjon7641]

If you use the same setup I have but switch from specular to WPO it doesn't work. WPO is for displacement when the mesh has enough vertices to support the displacement. In this case the landscape is too low poly, that's why we make the virtual mesh (it's tessellated to give us more polys so that displacement looks good).

[@DatGuyGLK]

@@buildgameswithjon7641 I mean you can still just pass it to the virtual mesh trough the WPO node instead of specular.

[@buildgameswithjon7641]

@@DatGuyGLK No unfortunately you can't, I tried switching everything from the specular pin to the WPO pin and it doesn't work.

[@DatGuyGLK]

@@buildgameswithjon7641 hmm weird it works on my end

[@HuseenMurad]

The materials inside the video are too small, we can't see what to do. I hope you can zoom in on the materials so we can understand the video

[@borisstengele5389]

Thx!