Hello all! This seems simple and I’m stuck
I’m making a VR puzzle/walking sim immersive horror thing. I’ve gone back and forth having gotten terrain in and working It’s a 1k by 1k heightmap I made in houdini with an unreal material applied in houdini HDA. That’s all, but it’s really heavy either due to size or the material layers (there’s 5 or 6 with just solid vec3 colors piped right now) UE runs it fine but the landscape’s already got massive overhead and I haven’t even added edit layers or heavier materials yet. I do need to edit the terrain and I would like to put 5-7 layers of mats on it.
So instead I’ve also tried exporting geo from houdini and brought it in as a static mesh. I made the collision quickly in Zbrush-- which I don’t mind doing. I can UV/UDIM the closest ground mesh and just have a (maybe) single draw call for the ground cover. This works fine when I set the complex collider to the manual mesh and then force “complex as simple” – this seems lighter and better for VR at the moment. But then light bakes seem super low res. I’ve set higher settings (production/high) and increased the lightmap res for bakes, which helps. However now foliage instances aren’t casting shadows on the static mesh version of terrain, so I’m wondering what other terrain parameters I might be missing out on with this method that could bite me later on in production.
Could it also be scene scale? I have to really max out my lights and up the intensity and distance to massive settings to get light out. Uncertain. The way I made the heightmap in houdini was with real world topography scans remapped to make sure the height values would play nice. My player size and map size seems fine but now all lights seem super weak in both terrain attempt.
Should I be moving ahead with the heavy heightmap “standard” terrain? I only need small portions of it but every time I look into ways to slice up terrain in UE it points me to massive maps and open world stuff that slices massive maps into smaller quads. Is there a solution for small terrain for VR that I’m missing, or should I be using the world streaming stuff even with smaller maps?
I’m good with poly editing and topology so I don’t mind if it just needs some alternate meshes.
I’ve only found one topic on this and the consensus was “use the landcape it has collisions and stuff you need,” but again-- VR terrain seems like it should be lighter?