How can I generate terrain from heightmaps at runtime?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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1

Hi everyone

I have large amounts of heightmap data from mars split into hundreds of files and I need to be able to load and generate terrain from them as the player moves over the surface. I know there is texture streaming, but it’s just too many files to handle and arrange manually. Is there a way to do this via blueprint or c++?

Thanks in advance

2

Hey dramaturco,

Take a look at World Composition as this allows you to load and piece together multiple heightmaps as landscape actors. This does not have to be generated at runtime as you can stream in/out sections of your landscapes at certain distances. This process is great for large open world environments!

Let me know if you have further questions.

Thank you,

3

Hi Andrew

Thanks for your answer.
I am aware of this feature but I’m talking about hundreds of textures that need to be arranged. I’m not sure if I have to do this manually or if I can just load all of them and it’s done. Since the textures are already in order, this should work right?

4

If your textures are in order, and you would like to keep the structures. I would make sure to create a new folder in the content browser and keep them organized in their respective folders. I would also do this is a step process and do not attempt to load them all at once. It could cause your computer to hang in an attempt to process the large amounts of information being processed.

5

Thanks a lot. I just tried this with test heightmaps and it worked fine.
Now I just have to figure out how I can convert all this data into r16 and change the resolution in order to import it.