UE4: Secrets to Generating FREE Real-World Heightmaps from Terrain Party for UE4

[@Tryfieldanimas]

sadly not work anymore : Application error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail

[@Smittel]

The reason the heightmaps are 1081x1081 is that the site is made for Cities Skylines iirc. Also, since most height data has a resolution of 30m, ideally you want to choose 54km, because thats the size at which theres exactly one pixel for every datapoint. You can then just use AI upscaling or something, or throw it into a terrain editor to resample it and edit it a bit more.

[@gigapede]

Can you please explain why 30m resolution = 1 pixel/data point for a 54km data map? Do you know of a formula to adjust the XYZ transformation to make a height map match the topographical data to make accurate height maps of real landscapes?

[@Smittel]

@@gigapede tbh, idk what i calculated there because its off by a factor of 1.66. since the world height data resolution is 30m for the most part (as in, its consistently 30m with certain spaces that are higher res), and the site spits out 1081x1081 pixels, 30m*1081 is 32km roughly.

[@SilentPhill]

You have no idea how happy this makes me! Wow. Just... wow.

[@Damuskinous]

I knew about this, but still wanted to say thank you for helping the knowledge sharing by creating this video.

[@ovidiumarcel7371]

Terrain Party is working as intended now, thanks for the info and have fun guys :)

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thanks for the update! Good news.

[@greenwiener]

it's not right now :/

[@tenter8457]

@@greenwiener Yup. Sadly, stopped working again.

[@Rhinoch8]

@@tenter8457 can confirm, no heights maps in the readme

[@VitorCaldeira1980]

the best method to create an awesome landscape, simple and direct! thank you

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

You're very welcome!

[@chaithethai9171]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Your videos make the learning process much more manageable!

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

You're very welcome!

[@kylanwatson1133]

I guess Im asking the wrong place but does someone know a method to log back into an instagram account? I was stupid lost my password. I love any assistance you can offer me

[@AdamGG20386]

You taught me Source for L4D2 and similar games and by golly now you have me for UE4

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thanks Adam! Happy to have you here since the beginning.

[@alexanderalikin1210]

Thank you for this high quality guide but please, switch to 1080p. If 720p feels outdated now just imagine how it's going to be in 3-5 years.

[@3ric908]

Impossible to dwnld (Mac Safari as FF) : " An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command heroku logs --tail " Btw thank you

[@gwkdad]

Well everywhere I try to get zip it only gives me a text file. Is terrain.party kaput?

[@georgetaylor8654]

Yeah same, I think its to do with the websites outdated coding.

[@ValenciaGameDen]

Yep same, even the area in the example above at the default location.

[@pawanbhandari6633]

terrain.party doesn't work sometimes for couple of months. You'll have to try after couple of months

[@ValenciaGameDen]

@@pawanbhandari6633 Cool, thanks for the heads up! I'll try til I get it!

[@glenfernandes1204]

@@pawanbhandari6633 Bro If we wait for so long we will fail in our projects. What do you sudgest we do in such a position?

[@riotechanimations]

getting Error "An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command" IDK its working currently,

[@captaingans]

I noticed you set your terrain Z scale to 50 and left X and Y at 100. If you plan on adding terrain material based procedural grass, it's not going to line up with the terrain correctly. That needs terrain with uniform scale.

[@wegotguns3325]

I wish their site still worked, any alternatives you can think of?

[@bentripn]

Thank you very much! I love your channel and when I have the funds will buy your courses to help support your efforts.

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thank you Ben!

[@TheDishadarsh]

While i am downloading heightmap from terrain.party, i am getting readme file not getting png file which is supposed to be use.. please guide me for heightmap downloading

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

UPDATE Jan. 5th, 2021: Terrain.Party seems to be back up and working now. Terrain Party has been down. Until it is fixed, try this heightmap generator: dwtkns.com/srtm/ Not as easy to use but can work until Terrain Party is back.

[@demetriusparham2135]

Whenever I try to download the specified geo location zip file, I get an error saying "site can't be reached".

[@SirJohnatan]

Lol before i came on comments section , i have tryed same spot as the video =)))

[@SirJohnatan]

@@demetriusparham2135 so do i

[@The_NSeven]

That also doesn't work... tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/ seems to work though

[@jeronimocollares320]

RIP terrain.party :(

[@bojanvirag7506]

terrain.party is not working atm :( any alternatives?

[@DamirBolic]

same question :/

[@Lord_Volkner]

Just a heads up, the export function at terrain.party is no longer functional.

[@johanhammarstrom6211]

cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/ A redditor from the Cities Skylines community fixed a new site.

[@Liam-Scott]

@@johanhammarstrom6211 It's a good start, but unfortunately not much use outside of Cities Skylines. I used Terrain.party to get height data for mountain ranges (VFX) and without the ability to increase the area of the exporter it's far too limited in terms of scale. Hopefully it's something he plans on adding in the future, if he plans on updating that is.

[@saakers]

@@johanhammarstrom6211 Thank you so much for this info! I've been searching everywhere for heightmaps of the Norwegian contryside and that's the only site that's worked

[@johanhammarstrom6211]

@@Diax1324 Sorry to hear that. Worked fine for me 6 months ago.

[@danielkovac2425]

The elevation map does not appear. What should I do

[@DANNYonPC]

Silly idea, could you use an image upscaler to increase the resolution of the height maps :p? AI has become pretty good these days

[@relyucc1345]

yea i suggest gigapixel AI it has a free trial

[@normaalewoon6740]

You can upscale your heighmap up to 8k, the limit for unreal. I've tried gigapixel AI but it leaves artefacts and a watermark in the free version. It works much better for upscaling the texture on the landscape. Height map upscaling could be used to get rid of the sharp edges caused by pixels, even in real time at local scale if unreal supported it. Unfortunately, even doing it with third party software is problematic. Bicubic upscaling should work (according to the internet) but it doesn't work in gimp. I eventually got it to work with pixinsight (worth 230 euros and meant for astrophotography), which has cubic b-spline upscaling. This gave me an amazingly smooth landscape without artefacts or detail losses. The only artefacts were unrelated to the upscaling. Rather caused by world machine, which refuses to apply anti aliasing and leaves the rivers blocky, constrained to meter sized pixels

[@datonernegen]

Wonderful, thank you!

[@StevenDiLeo]

great tips!

[@ateliernandogil4901]

How can people deslike this tutorial? this is a great tutorial.

[@tylerdjslattery]

because the website doesnt work

[@josephvanwyk2088]

Hi thanks for showing this, Question 1: How do you stream levels with Height maps? Or is it one or the other? Stream landscape levels to sculpt everything manually, or import heightmap in one level. Question 2: What do you do with the horizon when looking from the edge? Do you add a 2D "mountain" far away in the background with fog in between to create illusion of a bigger world?

[@yanni2311]

This is already rather old but since you didn't get any answer I think I can help a little with the second question. What I would do and have seen in many games is adding extremely low poly mountains with low res textures on them. And then add fod etc. In real life things that are further away tend to look more blue and blurry, the grade of this depends on the weather. You probably don't need this answer anoymore but I felt like sharing.

[@josephvanwyk2088]

@@yanni2311 Thanks, looks like no one can answer my 1st haha. I did see another video however of a heightmap landscape in U5 - that automatically had squares in it (which I assumed was streaming levels).

[@mae2309]

YEEEEESSSSSSS, GET IM THERE MY BOY...

[@erniezwei1725]

Is 1px of the heightmap = 1m in unreal by default?

[@GloriaAlMetalRN]

when i extrac the file only appear a notepad page i dont know why, i did it with many maps and the result is the same, can you help me thank you so much

[@terryadams7778]

Thank you! I have several of your tutorials & courses! Learned a lot! Terrain Party is telling me there's no heightmap data for anywhere I'm looking right now. I just get a readme file in the ZIP I download every time. Just means the site is down I take it?

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thank you Terry. Yeah, Terrain Party has been doing that for at least a week. Try this site, dwtkns.com/srtm/ not as good or easy to use but works. Hope Terrain Party gets fixed soon.

[@terryadams7778]

@@WorldofLevelDesign I've had some luck using Microsoft ICE to stitch the terrain party images together. ICE (Image Composite Editor) is free to download from Microsoft and is *Very* easy to use to stitch images together. I had to use GIMP (it's what I have) to create the 16bit PNG after that but it works well. I'm no expert - but I am a screenshotter - and ICE does seem to work well with stitching these heightmap PNG's together. It may help people.

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

@@terryadams7778 Very interesting. Thanks Terry for the update and the workflow.

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

thanks for tutorial..great tips! how to get the actual real values in meters/km in ue4 of a certain mountain for example? in your video you lower the Z to 50/75% which would be ok if you just want to use the heigtmap as reference etc but its kinda random...but what if you are looking to get not only real world locations but also its correct HEIGHT data onto ue4? im trying to use landscape for archviz and its been difficult

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

That's a tough one. Terrain Party was never meant to be used for UE4, it just happens to give heightmap data that can be used in UE4. My rule of thumb has always been, just make it as close as possible using your visual artistic eye. If it looks right then it is right.

[@FX_AnimationStudios]

@@WorldofLevelDesign Yeah that woudl be ideal if you want to just create landscapes from concept and such..oh well..the search continues :). thanks

[@KUBE.archvis]

great tutorial, thanks!

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Thanks for watching!

[@NipunShastri]

wow !! thanks a lot. Subscribed !!

[@dozar911]

I was waiting for a world machine to generate landscape from there that will be more great...and one more thing man you have spend 1 year on just landscape series bring something new like architecture, building system... want to see more of your great tutorial

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

I will be finishing off this year with few more landscape/terrain tutorials. I have auto-landscape material tutorials going up soon. But after that you're right, I will be going back to architecture and level design. Things I've missed.

[@darrenj.griffiths9507]

Useless. The downloaded heightmaps do not work!

[@xjuliussx]

But in Cesium, i see they have now the plug-in and you can imported the whole earth sufrace. How did they do it , and second, can you use sections of that and make smaller maps?

[@DANNYonPC]

Thats cool

[@gigabytegallery7305]

I tried Terrain Party, but it's not available for use in Canada, or at least where I live here in Canada

[@WebMontagKiel]

terrain.party doesn't seem to work anymore. Are there any alternatives?

[@batranu91able]

i have been trying to use terrain.party but every time i am downloading, the rar file only has a read me text. any idea why this is happening? also shader relief and topographic imagery does not work when selecting them

[@Lukymbo]

same problem

[@mikemiz7105]

Same issue here too

[@batranu91able]

@EmighettiSpaghetti yeah i found that later on, thanks for your reply

[@fracturedfantasy]

New equivalent is cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/# almost the same functionality. YW ;)

[@TheGuardian019]

Just wondering, when is the last time this site has worked for exporting height maps? I haven't been able to export anything from it for the last 2 years.

[@smittsluchianoTV]

website is dead dont use it

[@phamiliar]

If I imported a mesh from a CAD/BIM modeled in 1:1 real world dimensions will it sync with the terrain imported into Unreal? Asking to try archviz with this.

[@samuelkilik8233]

dude thanks

[@TheXenomorphGuySMSE]

website does not work. no matter what i do the zip folder just has a txt saying there was no geographical data for the location. i have tried many different places.

[@atharvakulkarni114]

Is there a tutorial which would show mw how to import shape files into UE4. Thanks

[@laszlob3683]

does this not work on Mac or why does it always say that there is no height information????? tied Yellowstone nt park Colorado Bahamas, Madagascar but all seem to write the same error and there is no zip file

[@redhood6690]

I just get an error that the heightmap couldn't be found in the README text file this is odd

[@ricsoda5108]

It did not work for me. It only exports a read me file that tells nothing was found. I even tried exporting the same exact location as in the video but it didn't work at all

[@Cynth72]

Do you have any idea why it says that it cant be downloaded? I have height coverage where I did it

[@fahood9242]

i have a problem where my landscape doesnt get created how do i fix thta

[@SteliosGiarimoustas]

Watch another video on how to import heightmaps in ue 4.

[@ArythNeon]

can you make this for Unity as well?

[@crypticham1053]

Wait what button did you press to save?

[@An0therR0gue]

As of 8th April 2021, Terrain Party has not been working since at least January 2021/December 2020. Myself and others have tried (see Reddit) dozens of times. When you download you get a zip with no images, and a text file saying try again later. With a bit of luck this with be resolved in the future.

[@kurapikanostrad4592]

I'm trying to make 3D isometric Map of a province with area of 6883.89 km². I'm really struggling in photoshop since I couldn't get better height maps and especially do struggle much in blender since I have zero knowledge in blender. :(

[@m.kstudios3795]

terrain .party doesnt work anymore...whean you tried to download the files....application Erros

[@skyline-mj1yt]

Try this website. It works kind of the same and easy to use: tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/#10.75/52.8710/-4.5376

[@m.kstudios3795]

@@skyline-mj1yt but that is not so perfect

[@unrealdevop]

Does this website not work anymore? I only get errors when trying to do this and it doesn't download anything.

[@fenrixrex2554]

Terrain party Error when trying to download I think all of these sites have disabled it none of the ones i tried works anymore

[@kenny9591]

How can i export heightmap currently terrain party is exporting nothing

[@rosdragneel220]

well this isnt working i tried like 10 locations i tried exact same location u did but rar file was empty just a readme file any other option ?

[@markoTardito-BePartOfMyWorld]

when I try to download from Terrain Party I only have a txt file..why?

[@mosin3512]

When I want to download a map, I get an error and cannot download the map. What should I do?

[@The_Master_Brain]

I only can use North America Terrain in Terrain Party?

[@WhitewashStudio]

Don’t you have to scale the height map to be actual real world dimensions 1 square pixel is 1 square meter. If you bring an 8km heightmap into ue4 at 1080 pixels it would only be 1km. Am I right or am I missing something? Thanks!

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

You are right. 1px = 1m. Sampling any km size in Terrain.Party (and it goes all the way up to 60km) will always give you 1080px or 1080m texture terrain. I mention in the video that the sampling size doesn't give you larger terrain size texture but only the amount of information within 1080px default.

[@WhitewashStudio]

WorldofLevelDesign so if you download the 8k terrain party and want a site with real world dims could you increase image size in photoshop to 8000px by 8000px and bring into ue that way. You will still need to deal with the recommended pixel ratios of ue4?

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

@@WhitewashStudio If you do resize 1080px texture to 8000px, it would work yes; you would lose a lot of fidelity of upscaling the image of course but that would work. And also yes to the UE4 texture size, the recommended 8k texture pixel size would be 8129x8129.

[@WhitewashStudio]

@@WorldofLevelDesign Thanks!

[@unomisseh]

I get an application error when trying to download from site. Anyone else get that and/or know how to fix?

[@erniezwei1725]

Sometimes the website is down for a few days. Doesn't work for me either. Just wait it out.

[@lifeline8451]

Me too

[@jeonanrodrigopopp3661]

I'm in the Brazil and terrain party has not been working

[@TakkuTK]

Website seems to be broken. No matter where in the world I try, I always only get a txt file in my download saying there was no height map data, not even in the Alaska region you used in the video. Sad.

[@gabrieltellez8148]

i dont even get a file

[@akashicrecords9672]

How you mean mountain height is too much. We want high mountains like real life not those things from Skyrim.

[@Quentin94]

Doesn't work anymore, keep getting an error

[@BOHICAGaming]

doesnt work. no matter where i try and go it only downloads read me file

[@OldSchoolDo]

@Wiralek TV +2

[@notinuse9999-c3y]

Everytime i download a map from terrainparty, when i extract it, it says no heightmap here. Why is that?

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

Website error. Has been going on for a while. Sometimes they fix it.

[@notinuse9999-c3y]

@@WorldofLevelDesign Okay thanks :)

[@UnRealSimon70]

Any reason why the map data isnt in folder when you download it only has the readme file

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

It's been ongoing problem with this website. It goes out, generating empty zip but then it comes back and works.

[@LDR0000]

@@WorldofLevelDesign I have the same problem do I just need to keep trying from time to time or...`?

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

@@LDR0000 last time this happened it was few weeks before it worked again, keep checking and hopefully it'll come back on soon

[@rogadev]

It no longer downloads images of my area. It used to, but it looks like it's toast now.

[@ShadowOps15]

Terrain.party is broken... No more exporting

[@greenflamingoentertainment8613]

was looking to see if anyone else had the issue.

[@ShadowOps15]

It seems its back online!

[@clarkoliver6296]

no matter what i do i can't get it to work for me terrain party never gives me maps

[@aramagon7011]

its not working anymore ive tried in diffrent sections of the map and nothing

[@Hibbicon]

Terrain Party crashes if you save the file.

[@samiraouinette4439]

same here

[@gabrieltellez8148]

same

[@lordofthelair6716]

this doesn't work anymore. doesn't matter where you are on the map you can't download it

[@mikeligammare5773]

I wasn't able to get any maps from that sight....

[@oniscenco]

Man, should we wait new stuff on source from you?

[@greenwiener]

terrain.party is not working?

[@J0BL1N]

Looks like I can't pull any from New Zealand bummer :c

[@FamFixx]

@Hunter592 its still broken

[@FamFixx]

@Hunter592 mmm I'm now downloading random height maps from random people lmao

[@williamminnaar6311]

Terrain Party does not work anymore!!

[@lethalbacon3350]

Bummer, I think terrain party is dead and seems like alternatives are few and far between

[@outoffocus99]

does not work

[@ПавелТельман]

Сайт не выдает снимков, никаких. будто не работает

[@racerx1777]

terrain party is broken so nothing to see here

[@justinnixon5823]

it is not working

[@bakastep3107]

This method does not work that well. It also doesn't work outside of the states.

[@Murderface666]

Terrain Party is broken

[@tgykurtulus]

useless. it is impossible to get a texture zip from the app

[@nishantnarayan2690]

why did you skip the stitching part?....

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

It took too long and it was simply a lot of cloning over and over again.

[@nishantnarayan2690]

@@WorldofLevelDesign can you please tell me how to stitch as im trying it in photoshop but the lighting of each hieght map is different , one is lighter than the other and it is creating lines in between stitching 4 height maps , please tell me how to stitch them without the lines showing

[@WorldofLevelDesign]

@@nishantnarayan2690 That one is tough. I had few heightmaps like that that didn't match. You could try using levels (Ctrl+L) to match each heightmap first before Cloning. But it may not be exact. You can try generating another set from another region, hoping they match. Unfortunately its trial and error and not exact every time. Hope it works for you.

[@nishantnarayan2690]

@@WorldofLevelDesign okay thanks man!

[@ChristinaMcKay]

@@WorldofLevelDesign there is an easier method for the levels. Using ctrl L writes the values in the pixel information, destructive. If you use the level adjustment layer, you not only can change it all the time but also can use the mask for that layer to mask out harsh lines. You can also group it to the layer you are working on so it only affects that one layer.

[@LucianoJacomeli]

terrain party stop again

[@staplermouse1]

no height map data

[@Rocky-ur2xq]

terrain party doesnt work some days

[@Urbancat1]

Terrain.party not anymore.

[@eeroojanm98]

Suomi perkele loll

[@SudheeshCKCalicut16]

When I export only text file in zip file. I tried other places but no result why.

[@youssh4975]

terrainparty is not working

[@ReactionVideoGallery]

Tried it and got errors when trying to save. Either I have a browser issue or the website is broken.