Hi,
when I import a heightmap for landscape I get a terrible looking terrain with blocky layers like minecraft.
I have all the settings as per epic’s recommendations.
I have tried loads of different heightmaps with the same result, also upped the section size and resampled this just made it look like smoother blocky layers. I have attached a screen shot, thanks in advance for any assistance.
But you don’t talk about the shader blocky or? You mean the overall look of the terrain? It looks very… flat. Is that what you wanted or is that the issue you mean?
Hi eXi thanks for the reply,
when I import a heightmap my landscape looks like a minecraft level, its driving me nuts, I use greyscale 16bit 2017,x2017 etc it just always turns out like strange layered steps rather than detail. here is another cap
cheers in advance 
Where are you getting your heightmap from, and are you doing anything to it before importing into Unreal?
If you (for instance) bring an 8 bit height map into photoshop, the colors in the height gradient will be rounded off to the nearest available integer between 0 and 255. Saving it out as a 16 bit image won’t change that.
To smooth the heightmap out in a case like this you can just blur it until the color difference between neighbouring pixels is soft enough for your liking (I’ll often zoom right into a cluster of pixels to see this).
May be the height map is not smooth? Transition between colors (gray) are maybe too sharp?
Thanks all for the reply, I figured it out.
I was exporting my height from Eon Vue. I just needed to change export from .PNG to .PSD so I could select the 16bit option. Regards.
i have the same issue with 4.16.2: importing 1009 maps works fine…i get a exspected lod0 with tesselation from my shader
with 4033 maps i get a lod3 in the viewport as default with epic settings and if i force the viewport to lod0 i get the same minecraftesque landscape. the source and format for both 1009 and 4033 maps is worldmachine…it must be the handling of the higher resolutions in ue4
for the 1009 maps i use a 8x8 8000m tiled build with scaling 99.10802775024777
for the 4033 maps i use a 4x4 8000m tiled build with scaling 49.59087527894867
based on the common formula
meters100 /number of tiles/resolution of 1 tile =scale
e.g.
8000100/4/4033= 49.59087527894867
After struggling with this myself, and not being able to find a viable solution ANYWHERE that wouldn’t cost me hundreds of dollars for Photoshop, I FINALLY found a solution that works.
GIMP 2.9.4 has a mode for outputting the exact right type of PNG that Unreal accepts without complaints. When image editing in GIMP 2.9.4, do the following:
You can then export to the right type of PNG. I know this post is late, but I’m throwing this here for any other viewers who are looking for a free and easy way that’s available to do this now.
Link to GIMP 2.9.4, which is a development build (currently):
https://download.gimp.org/mirror/pub/gimp/v2.9/
See my answer below about GIMP 2.9.4. I’ve been dealing with this same exact issue for way too long and there were NO good answers anywhere. GIMP 2.9.4 can work with 16-bit precision. If you import an 8-bit image to GIMP, you can convert to 16-bit and then apply a Gaussian blur to interpolate in-between the 8-bit values.
I’m sure you’re no longer dealing this is issue, but if you are, see my answer below. GIMP 2.9.4 (a development build, currently) can work and export in 16-bit precision format, and it’s free.
Just an FYI, none of the solutions in here worked for me on 5.0.3 unfortunately. Tried nearly every export option from Adobe CC as well as that old GIMP version posted above.
Same issue, it is still smoothable tho, it’s not like there is no vertices for it to represent the heightmap, it’s more like the heightmap has overall fewer pixel than there are vertices on the landscape but there is no interpolation happening to fill the “missing” pixels so the vertices stay the same height as the previous pixel/vertice.
Thats what I think is happening this I have the same issue using a 16384x16384 heightmap on a 8192x8192 landscape. However overall the landscape is expanded so it has probably double the res of the heightmap, according to the result after importing my heightMap at least…
Making it 16bit doesn’t change the pixel values, the steps are just like on 8bit, you need to make the change yourself but I doubt that’s the only issue tbh.
