For some reason I’m unable to sculpt terrain below a certain height. I imported a height map and am able to sculpt normally but their seems to be a plane that I can’t sculpt the terrain below. I’m trying to create a valley in my terrain but it won’t let me sculpt below this floor and when I attempt to go below this everything just flattens. I’m using Unreal 4.8.3. Also the sculpt visibility brush doesn’t work.
For the first question, you’re probably hitting the lower limit of the landscape resolution, you’ll need to increase your landscape scale. Or, if your landscape is all quite low, you could use a large component brush to raise the entire landscape, which would then allow you to sculpt down further.
Landscape uses a 16-bit heightmap, so the raw height values range from 0 to 65535. It is offset so that half the range is above the landscape origin and half below. It then divides by 128 and multiplies by the landscape scale (default 100) to get world coordinates. This by default gives a sculpting range of approx -256m to +256m with a vertical resolution of ~0.78cm. If you need more height range than that, you will need to use a higher Z scale on your landscape, but it will proportionally reduce the vertical resolution. For example doubling your Z scale so that you can get a -512 - +512 metre range will reduce your vertical resolution to ~1.56cm.
For visibility to work, you need to connect a “landscape visibility” material node to the “opacity mask” output of your material. The default world material used when you don’t have a landscape material defined doesn’t have this, so it won’t work if you don’t explicitly create and set a material on the landscape.
Necroing this thread to ask if you ever found a solution. I tried exporting my terrain in UE to a fresh heightmap. In a new file, I tried raising the landscape and changing the z axis to 200%, but there was nothing that would let me sculpt below a certain level. As you said, it’s like hitting a plane.
Reimporting the same heightmap won’t help, it’ll still be at 0, even if you move or rescale the landscape.
You can use the component brush (set to some large size) to raise the entire landscape data at once, which will then let you sculpt down more. Just be careful not to clip the peaks off the top of your mountains!
Gareth,
Thanks a ton for the reply! So, n00b question here: should I be using the sculpt brush to raise the landscape via large components? I find that I either get artifacts that make it hard to line up the square or I freeze the computer raising all 64x64 a few pixels at a time. Just making sure I’m not missing something utterly obvious and easy here. Appreciate the info!
You would have to raise it all together to avoid artifacts where components join. If you set the brush strength to some large value (you can actually type in the box larger numbers than you can drag the slider to) then a single click will raise a lot in one go.
Alternatively you can export the heightmap to png and add to it in an image editor that supports 16-bit grayscale images (e.g. Photoshop), and then reimport it through the right-click in the landscape editor.
hey i know this is pretty old but can still be an issue.
my quick tipp for a fix. you can use the “CopyPaste Landscape” tool. select your hole landscape with Section Tool.
Fill out the Gizmo to complete Landscape and paste it up (about 5.000 units, or what you need). then hole landscape goes up at onces and you can sculpt back down again.
to get the gizmo brush working, you need to select Copy/Paste and Gizmo Brush. (For Gizmo Brush the Circle is selected on standard. so you need to switch that button first, otherwise the gizmo copy paste will not work).