Terrain Sculpting completely broken after moving in World Comp

Hello,

A few weeks ago I was doing some maintenance on the terrain in my project. This involved moving the terrain tiles in World Composition.

After moving the tiles in world comp, terrain sculpting has become completely, and seemingly irreparably broken.

The brush appears to partially or fully disappear at arbitrary borders, unrelated to component size:

And when you actually attempt to sculpt the terrain, the location affected is in a location offset from the location of the brush:

This problem manifested several weeks after we updated to 4.11.2. I waited until 4.12 to see if the issue would resolve, however it has not.

What can I do to rescue my terrain, as at this point either losing the terrain or being unable to sculpt are simply catastrophic problems.

Thank you for your time.

Hi str_Luke,

  • Does this occur in a clean, blank project with no additional content or is it limited to one project?
  • Are you moving individual tiles into sublevels or are you using one large landscape in the world composition browser?
  • What steps can I take to reproduce this on my end?
  • This does not occur in a blank project. Nor does it occur in new landscapes created in the current project.
  • I’m using individual tiles as sublevels.
  • I’m not entirely sure what caused the problem, so I do not know how to reproduce it. It occurred after I moved all of the landscape tiles a significant distance in world comp. The movement of the tiles was not seamless either, despite saving all the maps after moving, once I reopened UE4 and loaded the maps again some of the tiles move to strange positions on the world comp map.

What I’ve noticed as well is that it extends down to the actual level, i.e. if I load the level alone, separate from the persistent world, it still has the same issues.

If push comes to shove, is there any more ideal way of rebuilding the tile other than exporting the height map/weight maps and manually recreating the landscape levels? The terrains have been sculpted for gameplay after their original generation so importing them all via the tiled level dialog isn’t really an option (And there are 14x17 tiles, so manually doing it in any case would be a TON of work)

Do you have a project this is occurring in you can share with me or steps I can take to reproduce this on my end?

Here’s an otherwise empty project with a copy of one of the problematic landscape tiles. I’ve confirmed that this error is still occurring in this project.

LandscaoeError.

It was saved in Unreal Engine 4.12.0

I believe I may have found the cause:

I was experimenting, while preparing to try to fix this issue. I added some older map files to the project which were part of the same landscape mesh originally, but were removed for efficiency. The old map tiles appeared to be properly functional.

After loading all of the tiles, I noticed there was a slight offset from all of the broken tiles, and all of the functional tiles. I know that in world composition, you can only move landscape levels in increments of whatever the component size is; so there is no reason the tiles should be slightly offset.

I reset the position of one of the broken tiles, and it snapped perfectly with all of the older functional tiles… and surely enough, that fixed the tile.

So it seems that whatever happened, perhaps an error or hitch in the program, caused all of the broken tiles to be moved by an incorrect amount in world composition, which ended up breaking the landscape painting.

In the version that is experiencing the error, Are the landscape tiles listed as different landscapes? If so, this would be expected. Were the landscape tiles imported or was the landscape created in the editor?

Same landscapes. The offset tiles and the old working tiles are all part of the same terrain. They were all formed at the same time by importing a large batch of tiled maps.

What were the exact steps you took to import? Where did you create the tiled landscape? If in WM, did you ensure to share edge vertices between the tiles?

The terrain was imported over a year ago originally, and has been heavily worked on since then. The tiles were created with world machine. All proper settings, including 1009 resolution and shared vertices were set.

After import, we removed and set aside 3 quarters of the terrain to the north and east as it wasn’t necessary yet.

Two months ago we split each remaining landscape tile into 2x2 grids using the component tool. The terrain continued to work properly after this.

Two weeks ago we moved the terrain in world composition. This is what broke the terrain. It appears that the terrain moved without snapping to the nearest proper component size. The offset from the world composition grid appeared to be roughly 0.4 components in the X axis, and 0.3 components in the Y axis.

It is possible than other, irregular sized levels were moved with world composition at the same time as the landscape was moved. If world comp attempted to snap the landscape to the “grid” of one of these irregular sized tiles, or simply didn’t attempt to snap at all because the last selected level was not a landscape level, it could explain how the offset occurred. Otherwise, there may have been a hitch in the program which caused it to drop the tiles, without snapping them to their proper position.

If you are willing to share, can you post a . of the landscape heightmap you imported? I’ll be happy to test this on my end and see if I can reproduce the error you are seeing.

Hi str-Luke,

We have not heard from you in several days. I am marking this as answered for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing this error, please comment with the requested information.