Importing tiled landscape, how to specify the Z position (not scale)

Hi all

I’m importing a huge landscape (36km*36km) as tiled landscape, I know how to do that but I can’t figure how I can specify the Z position for my total landscape.

My landscape has an altitude range between -300m to 3580m. When I import it as tiled landscape how can I set its position to have its first cell (0,0) set to be at -300m on the Z axis ?

Any help would be appreciated

thanks and yes I know that, what I don’t know is how to do that with an imported tiled landscape… In other words where is the Z position setting for my tiled landscape (all my landscape)?
When I do ‘import tiled landscape’ I can offset tile on X and Y but not on Z .
When my 36 tiles (6*6) are imported and loaded, I cannot find a way to specify the Z position

Sorry but I’m not sure of that. I’m sure it work that way with a 'simple" landscape, but it seems that it’s not working like that when the landscape is tiled…
I’m not in editing mode after importing.
I import my tiled landscape, then I load all the tiles.

I will try to post some screenshots in few minutes…

To allow editing in both directions a landscape’s origin is in the middle of the height range. So if your imported heightmap’s black point is -300 and the white point is 3580, you should place your landscapes at a height of (3580 + 300) / 2 - 300 = 1600.

They’re just actors, so if you exit landscape editing mode after importing you can simply select them and adjust their location any way you’d like.

here the screenshots

First one is when importing ,
as you can see no ‘Z’ for the tile coordinate offset (near the red arrow)
in the circle the overall size/resolution

Second one is just after clicking import, I just select all the tiles

The third and last one is once loaded
As you can see here, I have a bunch of landscape proxies, and levelbounds.
The position of each of them is greyed so I can’t change it.
If I try to manually change the Z position of the “Landscape” actor (the first one on the top), it crashes my PC, so I assume it’s not the way to do it.

And I don’t know/find/understand how I can specify the Z position I want.

Hope the screenshots help you to help me

not just position, but also if i add material to one of the proxy it crashed, if i rename the landscape, it crashed as well.

My tiled landscape now rotated at wrong angle and i have no control to rotate it back

@Badoy : as far as I know you have to create your landscape material before importing.

Once imported you can modify your material or paint on your landscape (that I did not try yet) if you have well set your weightmaps. Painting cannot be done if you’re using a splatmap.

Another thing that does not work on importing tiled landscape, is that UE 4.6.1 does not recognize the RAW16 file if it is in only one file (“merge to single file” checked in WorldMachine)

Currently you cant.

When importing landscape using the tiled world import, it will import all terrain tiles at the default terrain position, which is +1000 units on the z axis. Or +10 meters.

Also, If i were you. In whatever height map editor you are using. Set the altitude range to a multiple of 512. It makes scaling things much easier. A landscape at a maximum altitude of say 2048, will be 400% on the z axis in UE4. Or a landscape with an altitude range of 4096, that would be 800%.

Thanks for your answer Mordynak. So just a bit of maths to figure at which altitude to place some items…

Sorry for bringing up an older topic, but I’ve wrestled with the same problem today where my landscape would import at odd places in regards to the x, y and z relative to 0,0.

After setting up the Z (512 units for every 100%) scale for the landscape, importing and loading the terrain I locked all the tiles in the persistent level. Not doing so made UE crash on me once when resizing the entire landscape.

  • Select your landscape in the World Outliner and under Details click the ‘Reset to default’ arrow.
  • Click on the landscape in the Viewport
  • Reset the scale for both the X and Y back to 100 (might take a while)
  • Reset the scale for the Z to what your number was during the import (might take a while)

Your can now specify an X, Y and Z position for your entire landscape. Mine was 8x8KM so i set the X and Y to -400000 (4KM or 400.000 CM) to get the center of the landscape at 0,0. Setting up your Z position depends on the overall height of the landscape.

I hope this is a good way of doing it since I’m still new to UE4, might help some others tackling UE and tiled maps.

Use the Landscape Selection tool and adjust the Z position manually.

Hey guys, for anyone who has this issue, go to levels tab, click the butotn on top for Level Details, voilà! set position on any axis for each heightmap, you can select all at once and set a Z value.

Using the selection tool like Jay says will bug out the brush, it will give a strange offset to the brush the higher the component offset.

No Violà. Using Level Details only moves vertices and doesn’t change the collision for some reason. Still no solution. I’m really struggling to solve this problem.

You can’t move this actors. Their transforms are locked

You can’t adjust Z position manually because tiled landscape is locked in space. You can’t move it

Just change the brightness of the heightmaps using a photo editing program before importing them. A darker heightmap will be placed lower on the z scale, a brighter one will be placed higher.

I’ve been looking at how to experiment in a faster way than waiting for a full rebuild of my terrain in world machine, which takes about an hour. So I opted for a faster approach.
I copied all of my exported terrain tiles (.r16 format) to a new folder. I then used tiled file input to import them all back into world machine in a new project. See the pic below:

The constant node is combined with the Tiled File input before passing it to the Height Output node. I’ve set the Height output to where I exported my original heightmap files, so I can reimport them to UE rather than import a whole new landscape (I’ve already assigned the streaming volumes so I don’t want to do that again!)
Now I have a setup where the build time in WorldMachine is instant, and I can reimport a tile into UE4, drop a cube onto the landscape at various points of interest so I can see its z value. Using the constant node, I can boost the landscape up to increase its z height in UE4. I can also control the elevation range on the tiled file import, so I don’t end up hitting max elevation for mountain tops when I’ve boosted the landscape. I simply reduce the max elevation in tiled file import to compensate for how much I’m boosting using the constant node.

World Machine build time for 20x20 tiles at 1009 resolution using the above setup: 1 minute 23 seconds on my PC.
To output 20x20 files at 1009 resolution from my original project takes about 1 hour.

The input is locked, but you can copy and paste with right mouse button. So just copy, paste in an text editor, change to your needs, copy from text editor and past in unreal. Thats it.
This is the format you need to paste :
(X=0,Y=0,Z=0)
with the values of your needs

Don’t know why it’s locket but one can copy and paste

Great soluce! Thank you sandermann!
You can even go easier if you place an empty actor at X=0, Y=0, Z=the value you’re aiming at, and then only copy/paste locations between actor and your landscape. Very fast to eyeball the correct level for your map.