How do I create landscapes larger than the recommended size?

Hello all. I’m completely new to UE4 and am trying to setup my initial landscape. I’m going to paint everything in-engine without a heightmap as it will make some parts of our dev. process easier. I’m looking to make a 5km by 5km landscape - which I believe is UE4’s maximum size - but can’t quite figure out how UE4 measures the the landscape distance.

I took a look at the landscape documentation (Creating Landscapes in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation), specifically at the recommended landscape sizes. I don’t understand the link between vertices and distance. For testing I used the second option (4033x4033) and it took 10 minutes to run across, which seems very small. I’ve read that scaling landscapes can cause problems. So, if I want to create my 5x5km landscape, what do I input in the new landscape fields to achieve this?

Many thanks.

Hi AndreElija,

It’s possible to do your large landscape but this would require that you use multiple landscapes. You would need to tile these and then adjust the edges to fit together. This may be cumbersome as you cannot edit two landscapes at the same times. It would be a better route to make a large heightmap and then import the chunks of it to tile together more seamlessly.

Another thing that will be a problem you will run into later on is that there is a world bounds enabled by default. You’ll need to go into the world settings panel and uncheck the “Enable World Bounds Check” otherwise when you’re player reaches the bounds it will disable your player and control. Disabling this will give you unlimited bounds.

Some other areas of interest you may want to check into are level streaming and making use of culling volumes to help keep your game optimized.

If you have any questions feel free to ask!

Tim