For anyone watching this in 2023 and beyond, I really recommend exporting all of this as a HDA (Houdini Digital Asset), then using Houdini Engine inside of Unreal to load the HDA. It will take a bit more processing power and RAM, but a HDA will automatically scale the landscape for you, can include the height maps automatically, and a ton more. It also allows Houdini parameters, like height map adjustments, to be changed inside Unreal in "real-time". You will have to go down a different path to learn HDA's, but It seems worth it, at least for my workflow.
I'd recommend using the knowledge gained from this series alongside the "Procedural Desert" Side-FX tutorial series. Side-FX describes HDA basics that will fill in the gaps.
I'm a hobbyist tech artist learning - day job has been software for a decade, but I'm about to dive into Houdini with the learning edition. Something I'm struggling to understand is the licensure model - do I need the $250/ yr studio version to get access to HDA/UE5 plugin functionality? I understand I'll need it for any sort of actual exporting. I'm not opposed to paying in any sense, I just don't know what to buy...
Scaling landscapes, at least for me, introduces shadow artifacting around the character when near the ground. This is happening is any 5.0 version, completely breaking large worlds. Hopefully there is a solution that isn't tiling.
@@ImeCoulter what's precluding you from tiling? I'm on the early side of the learning curve but as I understand it World Partition is pretty solid at handling large landscapes with tiling; or is it a rendering issue?
As this is the first video on this channel, constructive criticism is welcome, as well as any thoughts or suggestions for content in future videos. Thanks for watching! Please Like and Subscribe if you want to see more content like this. G
the advice at 21:00 is solid, i was working on a 4k terrain in unreal a while back and the majority of the time the frame render time was lower when using large tiles (4x4), but it also introduced unacceptable render freezes in the event a new tile was loaded in, dividing the heightmap into smaller tiles resulted in a higher frame render time overall while the freezes when loading a new tile were still not good enough for production. I found the best method was to use a single heightmap and use sublevels explicitly for level design and geometry collections, great video btw i haven't experimented with lidar data yet and you take the time to cover the reasoning behind your decisions, new sub from me.
For people who don't want to screw with Houdini, install ImageMagick, then say "magick convert -verbose inmap.tif[0] -depth 16 -type Grayscale -autolevel outmap.png" and then you can "magick identify -verbose inmap.tif" (or outmap.png) to see the details. You can resize the map in the conversion step to the size of your landscape as well.
@@mikkepalvanen I'm using the windows cmd prompt. It's originally a Unix-esqe program, so most everything is command-line. Basically, download it, unzip it, then you can copy it into your C:\Programs folder (in a subfolder) and add that to your path, if you want it to always work. Or you can make a specific directory that's all just funky command-line programs and just add that to the path (go to settings and search for environment variables). If it's not under C:\Program Files, you don't get as much virus protection, but it's easier to set up because of that. LMK if you need more specific instructions?
@@UndiniTuts I've had the trial version for ages worrying about if I need it or not. I want to generate L systems and export them to UE and Houdini is a must
for now you will need world partition for big landscapes, this video is for the older method of loading big chunks of the world which is world composition...
Really great video. I'm looking forward to following the series as a whole. Do you plan to cover using Houdini Engine for more procedural controls in the future?
This series is mainly focused on the quickest route to getting real-world terrains into Unreal and finished to a high standard. Procedural Terrain creation is another subject that I might touch on in the future, but not as part of this series.
Have you tried to use either Cesium or ArcGIS plugins within Unreal Engine and export their DTM data into Houdini directly rather then going through a third party source? If so please let me know thanks.
Unfortunately, all such videos end on an empty landscape without any material. For example, I need to know where which roads will pass. How will I know that? Do I need to fit and overlay a texture from Google maps?
@@UndiniTuts I haven't found the answer to my question yet. I was given the task to recreate a 4x4 km town with all roads, road signs and bridges. As far as I know, in UE5 you no longer need to use word composition when there is a world partition.
Can you please show how to get your data from USGS because I'm trying to bring in 1 tile and after loading the file in Houdini it's still flat. It's a GeoTIFF 1 Arc-second tile, or if there's a setting in Houdini I need to change let me know. FYI because of your videos I have upgraded to the Indie version to get all the perks, thanks
u re so right, can u create something on how we can model real scale assets like megascans but customized by us sort of alien structures, what would be the best workflow in terms of textures and them looking realistic enough with enough detail close up and far
Great tutorial, man! I have a one question only. How did you remove problem with wrong rotating and position by height in UE? Because the landscape is iported from Houdini a little bit lower than in Houdini
Correct me if I'm wrong but the cost of having an 8k landscape comes with the number of components and thus the number of shader permutations needed right? Can this not be addressed with RVT volumes? I've been led to believe that utilising RVTs for landscapes severely cuts the cost per component due to knocking out most of the associated shaders. The examples I've seen where this is supposedly the case is where all the typical stuff like layer blending goes to the RVT and the actual inputs on the final material properties come straight from the RVT rather than the graph.
Hi James, RVTs can drastically help with performance and allow more creative freedom with the terrain texturing. We will be implementing an RVT later in the series. I've had to take a hiatus as a project that I am working on is close to release.
Hi. I have this problem ''The specified resolution exceeds the maximum of 1280x720 allowed in the Non-Commercial Edition.''. What can I do to continue with your tutorials? Looking forward to your reply.
@@UndiniTuts Awesome process saved me ripping my hair out after spending all this weekend trying to get accurate Heightmap data. A stitching tutorial is really needed as I'm currently loading 1 TQ square at a time, which results in some misalignments in z-axis when brought back together in Unreal
Based on my understanding/testing, using a 8129x8192 heightmap in unreal does not produce any higher level of detail as it's still comprised of the same number of components as 4033 (1024 components for both.) The only way to increase the perceived detail further without hitting the terrible draw call penalty of >1024 components is just through scaling down in UE, which isn't a great solution for obvious reasons. Definitely agree with regards to world composition. It's a real pain to work with and the results are lacking in terms of quality. The world partition/nanite mesh-based landscape possibilities in ue5 are very interesting so far. Getting extremely high detail results without much performance penalty but not sure I'm approaching it from a sound/logical position in terms of workflow.
You can scale dow the terrain to get a higher effective resolution. By default in unreal 1 pixel is 1m, which is quite highres for open world games, and quite lowres for first person shooters. Almost every game requires you to scale.yoyr landscapes somehow
This is really useful. Quick question - when I do this in the method described in the video, on loading the game, if I drop onto the landscape from the start point or start the camera on the landscape and then walk a bit, the game freezes/seemingly crashes. Any idea what is going on there?
When im projecting the new resolution of 4033 x 4033 onto the new heightfield, it's just giving me a cropped area of the terrain. Is there anything im doing wrong?
@@UndiniTuts I am having a similar issue, and it looks like the projected element is a lot lower than my USA 10km heightmap on the Z axis. The result I am getting is a huge droppoff in the terrain for 2/3rds of the heightfield_project. Any suggestions?
Unreal Heightmaps read 16 bit grayscale images that don't go out of the 0-1 range so sadly this wouldn't work. You could remap the heightmap in Houdini first so no stretching was needed in unreal, but then you would sacrifice vertical precision in unreal as you wouldn't be using the full 0-1 range on the 16 bit image. Also, you may want a heightmap that is more than 512 meters tall, in which case stretching in unreal is also unavoidable.
Hit a snag when using the U.S 10km x 10km DEM heightfield project always comes out flat not sure why that is? (I have changed the max compositing size btw) Any ideas would be great?
The video is superb, but i'm making a war game and i want to make this for some regions of iraq and syria, but i do not find any info about lidar dtm any tip?
Hi, can you explain more why you advise shouldn't use the `world composition` ? in UE5 this is improved, can you tell us more about that and instead as you said use single one whole terrain, I want to know the advantage of using 1 terrain versus world composition. I really appreciate the response. thank you.
Unreal 5 is replacing World Composition with World Partition. They sound similar, but in practice they are very very different. World Composition was a pretty messy set of tools that required tons of SubLevels to manage the loading and unloading for big worlds. World Partition simplifies the whole problem by allowing the level to automatically assign actors into streaming grids, and uses File-Per-Actor instead of levels to contain all of the level information.
This tutorial will teach you how to use Houdini, this use case is very simple. You can also skip Houdini altogether and just get the heightmap from the website. Would you like me to tie your shoelaces as well? 😉
Nice job on getting to this point. Unfortunately you need a paid license in order to export heightfields of over 512 pixels resolution. I appreciate that this might be frustrating, but I did mention that a paid license was required. A Houdini indie license isn't too expensive as 3d software packages go.
White or Black tiff files should display fine in Houdini. As explained in the video - this is just because geotiffs have values outside of the 0-1 range that photo viewers and editors commonly expect. If you are not seeing the expected result in Houdini, it's perhaps because the resolution of your file is larger than Houdini supports by default. In which case - check out the following video :) ua-cam.com/video/itCbS70wdzs/v-deo.html
Friends, is this part where we create at least the main heightmap (and as a hopeful bonus, the other masks) possible to do in Blender? I've taken 32bit Tiff DEM's from OpenTopo but going the ghetto route of using photoshop to clamp their range with 'levels' and exporting as a 16bit PNG isn't really producing accurate results. I'd really like to have an accurate representation of the real landscape, it's true height, slope etc in Unreal. Any takers? I've Googled my face off but maybe I'm searching the wrong terms. Thanks mates.
Try to click on the viewport and press F to focus it. Alternatively the heightfield may be the wrong format. Try to download some other data and see if that works :)
My man do you know if is any possible to use that data we download and process it through another program? I do have gaya but i think the workflow for that program is different and i'm obtaining very sad results
All the USGS tif maps download as blank white image, so that doesn't work for the US. Also OpenTopography now requires a login to download any topological data, and you can only have a login if you use a '.edu' email, and you have to apply and be approved. It seems the Topo map resources are too limited for this method.
The 32 bit TIFs from USGS are not blank. The data is outside the 0-1 range so appears white at first glance. Load them into Photoshop and convert them into 16 bit with method set to Equalize Histogram. The lowest and highest values will be remapped to 0 and 1 respectively. Then save a 16 bit (Gray) PNG to import into the Unreal Engine terrain height.
Lidar data is pretty widely available. 32 bit images won't display correctly because as Michael pointed out, they extend out of the 0-1 range. Lidar is in GEOTIFF format, which Houdini reads natively and correctly. If you need a lot of lidar data to be combined, you can use QGIS, I will cover this soon.
I would love to see the eye of the Sahara, and possibly reconstruct it as the location of the lost city of Atlantis, then move onto the rest of the location in-between there and the pyramids. And try to reconstruct what it might have looked like according to the flood maps of 10,000 years ago and bring back the lush green landscapes and Forrests as described by Plato and what the Bible explained that the area looked like.
I am using USGS (USA Heightmap) and got 4 10km by 10km heightmap, they are .tif format and each file is around 230mb, also they are just completely white in any photoviewer. When I try to import any of them in Houdini it gives me a red Esclaimation on the Heightfield_File node and if I go into the info of that node it says :- Error Invalid source /obj/heightfield1/heightfield_file1/cop2net1 Error: Failed to open COP network. Any idea what I am doing wrong? Edit - I cant open the .tif in photoshop (it says its the wrong type of document) and I notcied that the compression the .tif are using is LZW (in the properties of .tif in windows) Edit 2 - Apperantly only the europen DTM is working in houdini which is btw the same format (.tif) and everything as other DTMs.
I haven't tried the US data yet, please update if you find a complete solution. Alternatively, please feel free to share the files with me and I will see if I can find a quick and dirty solution as it's likely I'll need US data at some point in the future anyway.
@@UndiniTuts Couldn't find any solution for making any height data except the Europe work in houdini. I have absolutely no clue why would that even happen since even the metadata of those height maps intersects (meaning in their properties there is no difference). If I had to point the finger at the culprit I would guess its the data itself that is curropted (which should be extrememly unlikely). But yeah you can try the link for USA Lidar Exploration in your description to get a .tif and test if it works for you.
Hey thanks a lot for this tutorial, very helpful right now. I did use a Nordic lidar heightmap following the other tutorial you posted but my when I import the landscape into UE it is just too big. I tried to scale down the original TIFF image in photoshop but the height information is all messed up during the HF remaping in Houdini so I use the original resolution and it worked but once in Unreal as the landscape is too big I just scale it down from the transform panel but now every time I save the file it take ages as well the landscape painting takes its time every time I choose a layer. Can anyone advice on a way to optimize the landscape? or is there something I am doing wrong in this process?? Any help very appreciated.
Do you know if there's a good way to get color data using this workflow? Or is the only option to create it procedurally? I'm struggling to find a good way to get high fidelity color and heightmaps. BlenderGIS gives me super high res color but rubbish resolution height, this seems to give good enough height but no color. Mapbox for Houdini seems pretty good but I'm not sure what you get in terms of resolution and accuracy there. 1m lidar scans don't seem as widely available as SRTM 30m unfortunately.
This is just a starting point! But yes the ready availability of lidar data now means that it's much easier to produce games and animations with highly realistic terrain.
It's a three hundred dollar package, and the landscape he spends half the video downloading doesn't work. That's when he switches to a magicalal landscape which we have no access or insite of. He is fast with the key strokes, doesn't explain which key's he's using and quickly loses all but the experience folks. I think this guy's heart was in the right place but he couldn't be bothered to put a little thought into his presentation. As it is almost useless even if you invest the $300 as he says the free version gives bad results.
I had to bite my tounge to avoid a snarky reply, but on reflection, I think your points stand. But to clarify, the terrain I ended up using came from the same website, I just chose some different tiles, since I had the bad fortune of downloading some during the recording which had some data missing, which is uncommon, but does happen from time to time. But as I say to my students, encountering these kinds of issues during teaching doesn't hinder, it usually aids learning, because it either: a) forces students to think for themselves to find a solution b) forces the teacher to explain their problem solving process That being said, I don't think I took the opportunity to turn it into a teachable moment here, so I apologise if that led to some frustration on your part. Best of luck figuring out terrains in Unreal!
@@CupMcCakers Thank you for the thoughtful response. I did purchase the package because I was so excited about your video. Although I was frustrated yesterday, as I had spent considerable time in painstakingly trying to follow and reproduce your results; I have been contemplating returning to your video and trying again with a different lidar tif ever since I abandoned it. I definitely see the value in what you are detailing, hence my investment in both capital and time. I'm relatively new to unreal and while I have had some success in different areas landscapes is one which continues to elude me. I'm doubling down and going to pursue your method, starting over. Thank you for the video and the effort and I look forward to pursuing your method this afternoon. I was encouraged to read that the "corrupted?" lidar files are generally a rare occurrence.
@@mattsebastian6534 glad to hear you aren't giving up. Landscapes are a complex area and there's no one right way to approach them. Brushify is a great toolset that allows you to easily use Lidar directly in Unreal as stamps you can place to construct your own terrain. It's a nice way to approach it as well. I think missing data occurs around sensitive sites and military installations sometimes.
@@CupMcCakers Thank you for the suggestion on Brushify, I will look into it. It appears the corrupted lidar .tif files ( I downloaded another one which was also corrupted). Has to do with how you unzip them. If you rely on windows to brows e into the .zip file copy the tif and then paste it, it becomes corrupted. However if you extract the .zip file into a directory and refference / copy the extracted .tif it's useable.
Just to let you know he used the tile NY12SE in the new version instead of the old one but I have now come to the conclusion that id doesn't even matter as you cant export such a great detailed terrain from houdini on the free version
All the US websites for this are terribly designed and I was only able to download .laz files. Any idea on how to convert those to .tiff or a good website for the US?
Is anyone else having a really hard time finding this lidar data? Every website I try tries to get you to install software, or redirects you somewhere else. All of the original links from this video are broken or take you no where, can't find any site to download .tiff versions of these.
Literally nothing but the uk dataset seems to work. Most countries don't even have an option or link, but the US maps seem broken somehow. Have you found any better sites since posting this? Say of East Asia, South America, anything but the UK?
Once I create the heightfield_project1 node and link this to the heightfield1 & heightfield_file1 it shows a blank surface and not the height map... Why is this happening?
Thanks for the video & pointing me to the correct direction. I just added a way to import GeoTiff files directly into UnrealEngine: ua-cam.com/video/bLk1-Ulb7Dk/v-deo.html
Fair comment, it's more of a reference to the fact that the terrain height data itself is actually "real", since it's not based on a y procedural techniques or noise, but perhaps photoreal is a misleading term to use. I might change the title since I don't want to give people the wrong impression.
@@UndiniTuts I totally get that and your videos are great, definitely doing a good job at converting people over to the Houdini workflow, I just kind of expected the end result after 30mins to include a textured terrain at a minimum based on the title - I'm well aware of the amount of work that goes into achieving a photoreal terrain, I just thought it was a little click baity (definitely plan to watch the rest of the videos though !! )
Blender seems great, although I haven't used it much and I have no idea what kind of landscape workflows are possible. I think one thing that makes this Houdini process so simple is the fact that it natively reads correct height data from TIFF files. Before, I would use QGIS to load in Lidar data and then output a 16bit heightmap from there, which most softwares (including unreal) can open with no problem. QGIS is great complementary tool in a terrain artists toolkit, so if there's enough interest, it'd be fun to explore that topic in a future video.
@@UndiniTuts I was surprised just how simple it was for you to get the correct height data in Houdini - especially calculating the ratios for unreal. Blender is fantastic though. There is an addon called blender GIS although its a little clunky and struggles with larger geotiff files. I have however just grabbed QGIS to do exactly as you described. As Houdini is expensive, a tutorial on GQIS would be fantastic, not just for myself I'm sure. Either way, looking forward to more videos.
Houdini proves to be the easiest way to import lidar data to UE. Thank you so much for sharing this really quick and well explained tutorial! I have been using Qgis-World machine and last world creator to work on heightmaps for export. This makes it so much faster to create a heightfile that UE accepts.
incredibly helpful knowledge. i thought it was kind of funny when you said the most fantastic landscapes are in the real world as if it was novel information. It really hammered that code monkey stereotype of being totally real world oblivious. thanks for the info brother!
Might be overscope, but I'd really love to see how the terrain data can be used to get something like a full river with the water plane and everything in it. Maybe a Houdini tool that you can trace the height map with, or even using map box and the OSM data for waterbodies you get from there! This has always been one of the biggest points of struggle for me, as the lidar points are too imprecise to really get a good riverbed going without further processing. Also other stuff like placing embankments based on slope and such things might be cool to touch on. Stuff where Houdini can help you with these set dressing and world building tasks. (You should totally start a cooperation with Ben Cloward)
I'm a big fan of Ben Clowards channel! Contributors like him, Tech Art Aid, Mathew Wadstein, Allar, Brushify, Simon Verstraete, Unreal Daedalus and many more who inspired me to start this channel. As I mention in my next video, scattering, roads, paths and rivers will all be subjects of future tutorials in this series as I aim to create the most exhaustive rundown of the state of Unreal Landscape Creation in UE4 as of 2021! Stay tuned! In regards to getting other information from a mapbox node, i'll have a think about your suggestion :) As for collaborations, we'll have to wait and see whether any established youtubers would be interested in working with little old me ;)
You can use QGIS too (which I might cover when I find time), however Houdini is a more general 3D package and I plan to dive into a lot more Houdini related content in future tutorials.
This is as easy as it can get..thanks for the informative series. Also, No more videos from the last few months? Looks like you got a big project or job after this series. Good luck mate..
Hi Aleksander! Thanks for engaging with the video. If you get weird line drops in height, it's possibly due to the data being missing from the LIDAR coverage in that region. This could be for any number of reasons. If this is an issue you encounter you have a few options. 1. Use lower resolution data source to fill in the gaps (I will be covering how to acquire the low res data in a coming video) 2. Use another area of Lidar data and use that to fill in the blanks (this is obviously no longer accurate to the real site, but at least it is higher detail than option 1) 3. Pick an entirely different site
Hmm, good question but never looked at it. Google reading CSV data in Houdini with Python and you'll find a really nice CSV tutorial which would be a good starting point. Don't be intimidated if you've never coded or used python, it's beginner friendly. The video is by Entagma.
Clear, concise, to the point. Easy to follow and extremely valuable info! Amazing work
For anyone watching this in 2023 and beyond, I really recommend exporting all of this as a HDA (Houdini Digital Asset), then using Houdini Engine inside of Unreal to load the HDA. It will take a bit more processing power and RAM, but a HDA will automatically scale the landscape for you, can include the height maps automatically, and a ton more. It also allows Houdini parameters, like height map adjustments, to be changed inside Unreal in "real-time".
You will have to go down a different path to learn HDA's, but It seems worth it, at least for my workflow.
I'd recommend using the knowledge gained from this series alongside the "Procedural Desert" Side-FX tutorial series. Side-FX describes HDA basics that will fill in the gaps.
I'm a hobbyist tech artist learning - day job has been software for a decade, but I'm about to dive into Houdini with the learning edition. Something I'm struggling to understand is the licensure model - do I need the $250/ yr studio version to get access to HDA/UE5 plugin functionality? I understand I'll need it for any sort of actual exporting. I'm not opposed to paying in any sense, I just don't know what to buy...
Scaling landscapes, at least for me, introduces shadow artifacting around the character when near the ground. This is happening is any 5.0 version, completely breaking large worlds. Hopefully there is a solution that isn't tiling.
@@kfrz I'm a student, so I bought the student version for cheap (75$?). It is non-commercial, however.
@@ImeCoulter what's precluding you from tiling? I'm on the early side of the learning curve but as I understand it World Partition is pretty solid at handling large landscapes with tiling; or is it a rendering issue?
As this is the first video on this channel, constructive criticism is welcome, as well as any thoughts or suggestions for content in future videos. Thanks for watching! Please Like and Subscribe if you want to see more content like this.
G
Your opening point is exactly how I've been thinking about world generation. Cheers mate.
Best heightmap video on youtube! Thank you Undini
Thank you too
the advice at 21:00 is solid, i was working on a 4k terrain in unreal a while back and the majority of the time the frame render time was lower when using large tiles (4x4), but it also introduced unacceptable render freezes in the event a new tile was loaded in, dividing the heightmap into smaller tiles resulted in a higher frame render time overall while the freezes when loading a new tile were still not good enough for production. I found the best method was to use a single heightmap and use sublevels explicitly for level design and geometry collections, great video btw i haven't experimented with lidar data yet and you take the time to cover the reasoning behind your decisions, new sub from me.
Thanks for the sub and the reasoning behind it :)
For people who don't want to screw with Houdini, install ImageMagick, then say "magick convert -verbose inmap.tif[0] -depth 16 -type Grayscale -autolevel outmap.png" and then you can "magick identify -verbose inmap.tif" (or outmap.png) to see the details. You can resize the map in the conversion step to the size of your landscape as well.
Ensure that you're somewhere you have access to write and use "-auto-level" as a correction to above. Thanks Darren, you saved me $300 bucks you hero!
Downloaded it but can't even find where there is a command prompt like that to write those. Or are you using Windows cmd prompt?
@@mikkepalvanen I'm using the windows cmd prompt. It's originally a Unix-esqe program, so most everything is command-line.
Basically, download it, unzip it, then you can copy it into your C:\Programs folder (in a subfolder) and add that to your path, if you want it to always work. Or you can make a specific directory that's all just funky command-line programs and just add that to the path (go to settings and search for environment variables). If it's not under C:\Program Files, you don't get as much virus protection, but it's easier to set up because of that.
LMK if you need more specific instructions?
TNice tutorials is just the pick up I needed, thanks man
This is the clearest explanation I've found to date. Thank you!
A lot of useful tips and clear explanation. Thanks for the tutorial and keep it up 👍
I'm glad you think so, and thank you for the encouragement!
I am SO going to have to invest in Houdini after this... big thanks again :)
Welcome to the orange side 🍊🥕🧦
@@UndiniTuts I've had the trial version for ages worrying about if I need it or not. I want to generate L systems and export them to UE and Houdini is a must
@@UndiniTuts I can feel the midiclorians already :)
Great video. Thank you. Nicely paced and thorough.
10000000000000$ series for free. Awesome.
Amazing content packed with great insight and a lot of knowledge!
Instant sub! Keep doing this
I appreciate the support ☺️
this tutorial was truly amazing. Fantastic work, thank you for sharing
never knew about expanding the file path! neat!
for now you will need world partition for big landscapes, this video is for the older method of loading big chunks of the world which is world composition...
Great workflow and Video! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for taking the time to comment, it's very encouraging!
You wouldn't download a country
Awesome content looking forward to it
I can't wait to share it with you!
Excellent tutorial, thank you.
Thank you, it works perfect!
Really great video. I'm looking forward to following the series as a whole. Do you plan to cover using Houdini Engine for more procedural controls in the future?
This series is mainly focused on the quickest route to getting real-world terrains into Unreal and finished to a high standard. Procedural Terrain creation is another subject that I might touch on in the future, but not as part of this series.
Thankyou so much bro , You really nailed it ,
Superb useful. thanks. Subscribed
for those interested, you can do math directly in the unreal scale boxes instead of using a calculator
Have you tried to use either Cesium or ArcGIS plugins within Unreal Engine and export their DTM data into Houdini directly rather then going through a third party source? If so please let me know thanks.
Unfortunately, all such videos end on an empty landscape without any material. For example, I need to know where which roads will pass. How will I know that? Do I need to fit and overlay a texture from Google maps?
You have a long journey ahead of you, you've just watched the first video in a long playlist that is still being developed. Good luck!
@@UndiniTuts I haven't found the answer to my question yet. I was given the task to recreate a 4x4 km town with all roads, road signs and bridges. As far as I know, in UE5 you no longer need to use word composition when there is a world partition.
Can you please show how to get your data from USGS because I'm trying to bring in 1 tile and after loading the file in Houdini it's still flat. It's a GeoTIFF 1 Arc-second tile, or if there's a setting in Houdini I need to change let me know. FYI because of your videos I have upgraded to the Indie version to get all the perks, thanks
I have learnt a lot
Really glad to hear it.
u re so right, can u create something on how we can model real scale assets like megascans but customized by us sort of alien structures, what would be the best workflow in terms of textures and them looking realistic enough with enough detail close up and far
Great tutorial, man! I have a one question only. How did you remove problem with wrong rotating and position by height in UE? Because the landscape is iported from Houdini a little bit lower than in Houdini
Correct me if I'm wrong but the cost of having an 8k landscape comes with the number of components and thus the number of shader permutations needed right? Can this not be addressed with RVT volumes? I've been led to believe that utilising RVTs for landscapes severely cuts the cost per component due to knocking out most of the associated shaders.
The examples I've seen where this is supposedly the case is where all the typical stuff like layer blending goes to the RVT and the actual inputs on the final material properties come straight from the RVT rather than the graph.
Hi James, RVTs can drastically help with performance and allow more creative freedom with the terrain texturing.
We will be implementing an RVT later in the series. I've had to take a hiatus as a project that I am working on is close to release.
awesome video :)
Much appreciated!
Hi. I have this problem ''The specified resolution exceeds the maximum of 1280x720 allowed in the Non-Commercial Edition.''. What can I do to continue with your tutorials? Looking forward to your reply.
Hi, sorry for the long delay. I'm afraid that you'd need to purchase Houdini 🙁
This is amazing, the only issue I had was that my government provides 1x1 km tiles ... so i had to stich a couple together xD
This is typical, I'll be touching on faster stitching with QGIS soon
@@UndiniTuts Awesome process saved me ripping my hair out after spending all this weekend trying to get accurate Heightmap data. A stitching tutorial is really needed as I'm currently loading 1 TQ square at a time, which results in some misalignments in z-axis when brought back together in Unreal
UNDINI Wake up bro its time for them TuT Houdini Engine is out
its good for landscape :)
Why use Houdini to open these kind of files? Have you try to use directly ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unreal Engine ?
Can you add roads to ArcGIS landscape in UE5?
Based on my understanding/testing, using a 8129x8192 heightmap in unreal does not produce any higher level of detail as it's still comprised of the same number of components as 4033 (1024 components for both.)
The only way to increase the perceived detail further without hitting the terrible draw call penalty of >1024 components is just through scaling down in UE, which isn't a great solution for obvious reasons.
Definitely agree with regards to world composition. It's a real pain to work with and the results are lacking in terms of quality. The world partition/nanite mesh-based landscape possibilities in ue5 are very interesting so far. Getting extremely high detail results without much performance penalty but not sure I'm approaching it from a sound/logical position in terms of workflow.
You can scale dow the terrain to get a higher effective resolution. By default in unreal 1 pixel is 1m, which is quite highres for open world games, and quite lowres for first person shooters. Almost every game requires you to scale.yoyr landscapes somehow
This is really useful. Quick question - when I do this in the method described in the video, on loading the game, if I drop onto the landscape from the start point or start the camera on the landscape and then walk a bit, the game freezes/seemingly crashes. Any idea what is going on there?
When im projecting the new resolution of 4033 x 4033 onto the new heightfield, it's just giving me a cropped area of the terrain. Is there anything im doing wrong?
It's not enough information to go on. Did you manage to sort this out yet?
@@UndiniTuts I am having a similar issue, and it looks like the projected element is a lot lower than my USA 10km heightmap on the Z axis. The result I am getting is a huge droppoff in the terrain for 2/3rds of the heightfield_project. Any suggestions?
You should just remap twice. Once to 0-1 and another time to -256 to 256. That way you don't have to fiddle with anything else.
Unreal Heightmaps read 16 bit grayscale images that don't go out of the 0-1 range so sadly this wouldn't work. You could remap the heightmap in Houdini first so no stretching was needed in unreal, but then you would sacrifice vertical precision in unreal as you wouldn't be using the full 0-1 range on the 16 bit image. Also, you may want a heightmap that is more than 512 meters tall, in which case stretching in unreal is also unavoidable.
anyone know what's wrong if when going to export you get cook error flip1
Can't houdini export 16bit raw / Raw16 format?
Hit a snag when using the U.S 10km x 10km DEM heightfield project always comes out flat not sure why that is? (I have changed the max compositing size btw) Any ideas would be great?
same problem
slightly odd, two of my tiles were fine, the other two were missing random chunks and lines from the data
same, I get a funky weird terrain with missing pieces
21:21 is your take still valid in even for 5.4?
mathematical hills :d this seems powerfull but also pretty messy
The video is superb, but i'm making a war game and i want to make this for some regions of iraq and syria, but i do not find any info about lidar dtm any tip?
Could I use Blender instead of Houdini?
Probably!
Hi, can you explain more why you advise shouldn't use the `world composition` ? in UE5 this is improved, can you tell us more about that and instead as you said use single one whole terrain, I want to know the advantage of using 1 terrain versus world composition. I really appreciate the response. thank you.
Unreal 5 is replacing World Composition with World Partition.
They sound similar, but in practice they are very very different.
World Composition was a pretty messy set of tools that required tons of SubLevels to manage the loading and unloading for big worlds.
World Partition simplifies the whole problem by allowing the level to automatically assign actors into streaming grids, and uses File-Per-Actor instead of levels to contain all of the level information.
This pretty much covers it :)
please upload the exported heightmap from houndini. i dont know how to work houndini
This tutorial will teach you how to use Houdini, this use case is very simple. You can also skip Houdini altogether and just get the heightmap from the website.
Would you like me to tie your shoelaces as well? 😉
For some reason didnt save to disk. In height output node has an error
Nice job on getting to this point. Unfortunately you need a paid license in order to export heightfields of over 512 pixels resolution.
I appreciate that this might be frustrating, but I did mention that a paid license was required.
A Houdini indie license isn't too expensive as 3d software packages go.
Seems like the unreal plugin for LIdar doesn't except .las files, there's one for 4.24 only.
Did you ever resolve this?
@@UndiniTuts I installed 4.24
Am i the only facing the problem of the tiff files not being usable ? it is either pure white or more like a black and white topographic map ?
White or Black tiff files should display fine in Houdini. As explained in the video - this is just because geotiffs have values outside of the 0-1 range that photo viewers and editors commonly expect.
If you are not seeing the expected result in Houdini, it's perhaps because the resolution of your file is larger than Houdini supports by default. In which case - check out the following video :)
ua-cam.com/video/itCbS70wdzs/v-deo.html
@@UndiniTuts i tried using them in 3ds max and gaea, currently my license are expired so not using houdini at the moment. thanks for the reply
Friends, is this part where we create at least the main heightmap (and as a hopeful bonus, the other masks) possible to do in Blender? I've taken 32bit Tiff DEM's from OpenTopo but going the ghetto route of using photoshop to clamp their range with 'levels' and exporting as a 16bit PNG isn't really producing accurate results. I'd really like to have an accurate representation of the real landscape, it's true height, slope etc in Unreal. Any takers? I've Googled my face off but maybe I'm searching the wrong terms. Thanks mates.
Try qgis, it's a free software and can import geotiffs. It's amazing for dealing with real world data and mapping. I used it before Houdini.
when i import heightfield data in height field file node my terrain is not showing inside houdini is there any problem sir...??
Try to click on the viewport and press F to focus it. Alternatively the heightfield may be the wrong format. Try to download some other data and see if that works :)
My man do you know if is any possible to use that data we download and process it through another program? I do have gaya but i think the workflow for that program is different and i'm obtaining very sad results
All the USGS tif maps download as blank white image, so that doesn't work for the US. Also OpenTopography now requires a login to download any topological data, and you can only have a login if you use a '.edu' email, and you have to apply and be approved. It seems the Topo map resources are too limited for this method.
The 32 bit TIFs from USGS are not blank. The data is outside the 0-1 range so appears white at first glance. Load them into Photoshop and convert them into 16 bit with method set to Equalize Histogram. The lowest and highest values will be remapped to 0 and 1 respectively. Then save a 16 bit (Gray) PNG to import into the Unreal Engine terrain height.
Houdini will natively read the "white" images as the correct height, which saves you remapping in PS.
Lidar data is pretty widely available. 32 bit images won't display correctly because as Michael pointed out, they extend out of the 0-1 range. Lidar is in GEOTIFF format, which Houdini reads natively and correctly.
If you need a lot of lidar data to be combined, you can use QGIS, I will cover this soon.
I would love to see the eye of the Sahara, and possibly reconstruct it as the location of the lost city of Atlantis, then move onto the rest of the location in-between there and the pyramids. And try to reconstruct what it might have looked like according to the flood maps of 10,000 years ago and bring back the lush green landscapes and Forrests as described by Plato and what the Bible explained that the area looked like.
Sounds cool!
@@UndiniTuts
It might be the only way to prove that something like this actually existed in this region.
I am using USGS (USA Heightmap) and got 4 10km by 10km heightmap, they are .tif format and each file is around 230mb, also they are just completely white in any photoviewer.
When I try to import any of them in Houdini it gives me a red Esclaimation on the Heightfield_File node and if I go into the info of that node it says :-
Error
Invalid source /obj/heightfield1/heightfield_file1/cop2net1
Error: Failed to open COP network.
Any idea what I am doing wrong?
Edit - I cant open the .tif in photoshop (it says its the wrong type of document) and I notcied that the compression the .tif are using is LZW (in the properties of .tif in windows)
Edit 2 - Apperantly only the europen DTM is working in houdini which is btw the same format (.tif) and everything as other DTMs.
I haven't tried the US data yet, please update if you find a complete solution. Alternatively, please feel free to share the files with me and I will see if I can find a quick and dirty solution as it's likely I'll need US data at some point in the future anyway.
@@UndiniTuts Couldn't find any solution for making any height data except the Europe work in houdini. I have absolutely no clue why would that even happen since even the metadata of those height maps intersects (meaning in their properties there is no difference). If I had to point the finger at the culprit I would guess its the data itself that is curropted (which should be extrememly unlikely). But yeah you can try the link for USA Lidar Exploration in your description to get a .tif and test if it works for you.
@@mashonoid I found the solution and it's simpler than you might think! ua-cam.com/video/itCbS70wdzs/v-deo.html
Hey thanks a lot for this tutorial, very helpful right now. I did use a Nordic lidar heightmap following the other tutorial you posted but my when I import the landscape into UE it is just too big. I tried to scale down the original TIFF image in photoshop but the height information is all messed up during the HF remaping in Houdini so I use the original resolution and it worked but once in Unreal as the landscape is too big I just scale it down from the transform panel but now every time I save the file it take ages as well the landscape painting takes its time every time I choose a layer. Can anyone advice on a way to optimize the landscape? or is there something I am doing wrong in this process?? Any help very appreciated.
I do describe how to deal with this in the video if you watch closely. Good luck!
👍
Aaahhh thooooo
Why you didnt import this tif streight to UE? I am not sure why you need houdini here, besdies remap height which can done another way in UE
Do you know if there's a good way to get color data using this workflow? Or is the only option to create it procedurally?
I'm struggling to find a good way to get high fidelity color and heightmaps. BlenderGIS gives me super high res color but rubbish resolution height, this seems to give good enough height but no color. Mapbox for Houdini seems pretty good but I'm not sure what you get in terms of resolution and accuracy there. 1m lidar scans don't seem as widely available as SRTM 30m unfortunately.
So this is how they made that "game" Earth 2?
"A terrain artist has a really hard job" WUT???
This is just a starting point! But yes the ready availability of lidar data now means that it's much easier to produce games and animations with highly realistic terrain.
TOO MANY ads! Please lower your setting, can't watch in such state really
It's a three hundred dollar package, and the landscape he spends half the video downloading doesn't work. That's when he switches to a magicalal landscape which we have no access or insite of. He is fast with the key strokes, doesn't explain which key's he's using and quickly loses all but the experience folks. I think this guy's heart was in the right place but he couldn't be bothered to put a little thought into his presentation. As it is almost useless even if you invest the $300 as he says the free version gives bad results.
I had to bite my tounge to avoid a snarky reply, but on reflection, I think your points stand.
But to clarify, the terrain I ended up using came from the same website, I just chose some different tiles, since I had the bad fortune of downloading some during the recording which had some data missing, which is uncommon, but does happen from time to time.
But as I say to my students, encountering these kinds of issues during teaching doesn't hinder, it usually aids learning, because it either:
a) forces students to think for themselves to find a solution
b) forces the teacher to explain their problem solving process
That being said, I don't think I took the opportunity to turn it into a teachable moment here, so I apologise if that led to some frustration on your part.
Best of luck figuring out terrains in Unreal!
@@CupMcCakers Thank you for the thoughtful response. I did purchase the package because I was so excited about your video. Although I was frustrated yesterday, as I had spent considerable time in painstakingly trying to follow and reproduce your results; I have been contemplating returning to your video and trying again with a different lidar tif ever since I abandoned it. I definitely see the value in what you are detailing, hence my investment in both capital and time. I'm relatively new to unreal and while I have had some success in different areas landscapes is one which continues to elude me. I'm doubling down and going to pursue your method, starting over. Thank you for the video and the effort and I look forward to pursuing your method this afternoon. I was encouraged to read that the "corrupted?" lidar files are generally a rare occurrence.
@@mattsebastian6534 glad to hear you aren't giving up. Landscapes are a complex area and there's no one right way to approach them. Brushify is a great toolset that allows you to easily use Lidar directly in Unreal as stamps you can place to construct your own terrain. It's a nice way to approach it as well.
I think missing data occurs around sensitive sites and military installations sometimes.
@@CupMcCakers Thank you for the suggestion on Brushify, I will look into it. It appears the corrupted lidar .tif files ( I downloaded another one which was also corrupted). Has to do with how you unzip them. If you rely on windows to brows e into the .zip file copy the tif and then paste it, it becomes corrupted. However if you extract the .zip file into a directory and refference / copy the extracted .tif it's useable.
Just to let you know he used the tile NY12SE in the new version instead of the old one but I have now come to the conclusion that id doesn't even matter as you cant export such a great detailed terrain from houdini on the free version
All the US websites for this are terribly designed and I was only able to download .laz files.
Any idea on how to convert those to .tiff or a good website for the US?
The amount of data our generation has access to is astounding.
Agreed!
Is anyone else having a really hard time finding this lidar data? Every website I try tries to get you to install software, or redirects you somewhere else. All of the original links from this video are broken or take you no where, can't find any site to download .tiff versions of these.
Literally nothing but the uk dataset seems to work. Most countries don't even have an option or link, but the US maps seem broken somehow. Have you found any better sites since posting this? Say of East Asia, South America, anything but the UK?
Once I create the heightfield_project1 node and link this to the heightfield1 & heightfield_file1 it shows a blank surface and not the height map... Why is this happening?
Same here. Any tips?
Thanks for the video & pointing me to the correct direction.
I just added a way to import GeoTiff files directly into UnrealEngine: ua-cam.com/video/bLk1-Ulb7Dk/v-deo.html
"Photoreal in under 30 minutes" - can't say I've seen Photoreal greyscale landscapes.
Fair comment, it's more of a reference to the fact that the terrain height data itself is actually "real", since it's not based on a y procedural techniques or noise, but perhaps photoreal is a misleading term to use. I might change the title since I don't want to give people the wrong impression.
@@UndiniTuts I totally get that and your videos are great, definitely doing a good job at converting people over to the Houdini workflow, I just kind of expected the end result after 30mins to include a textured terrain at a minimum based on the title - I'm well aware of the amount of work that goes into achieving a photoreal terrain, I just thought it was a little click baity (definitely plan to watch the rest of the videos though !! )
Failed to open COP network error after trying to save project any solutions?
Edit: non comercial edition nvm
loading .tif file to heighmap file, then this:
Error
Invalid source /obj/heightfield1/heightfield_file1/cop2net1
Error: Failed to open COP network.
What happens to the georeference of the LiDAR? Does it get lost?
can you pull this same process off by using something like Blender?
Great video. Working on a similar workflow using blender. There are so many more hoops to jump through. Might have to switch!
Blender seems great, although I haven't used it much and I have no idea what kind of landscape workflows are possible. I think one thing that makes this Houdini process so simple is the fact that it natively reads correct height data from TIFF files.
Before, I would use QGIS to load in Lidar data and then output a 16bit heightmap from there, which most softwares (including unreal) can open with no problem.
QGIS is great complementary tool in a terrain artists toolkit, so if there's enough interest, it'd be fun to explore that topic in a future video.
@@UndiniTuts I was surprised just how simple it was for you to get the correct height data in Houdini - especially calculating the ratios for unreal. Blender is fantastic though. There is an addon called blender GIS although its a little clunky and struggles with larger geotiff files.
I have however just grabbed QGIS to do exactly as you described. As Houdini is expensive, a tutorial on GQIS would be fantastic, not just for myself I'm sure. Either way, looking forward to more videos.
I know this video is quite old; but is there a way to import the entire UK into Unreal? (with a 1:1 Scale)
This didn't work for me. :( Followed it clearly aswell but keep getting exclamation marks on the branching in Houdini and the PNG is not exporting :(
Thank you so much for taking the time to put this together
You are welcome!
I want to take the time to thank you for this. I was stuck on importing for awhile.
Houdini proves to be the easiest way to import lidar data to UE. Thank you so much for sharing this really quick and well explained tutorial!
I have been using Qgis-World machine and last world creator to work on heightmaps for export. This makes it so much faster to create a heightfile that UE accepts.
Thanks for clear explication, but would be nice if you shara 4k hieght data for Houdini Apprentice users , 512x export looks blurry lol
Hey, sorry haha, unfortunately later parts of the series also require exporting stuff from Houdini, so a license is pretty much unavoidable...
incredibly helpful knowledge. i thought it was kind of funny when you said the most fantastic landscapes are in the real world as if it was novel information. It really hammered that code monkey stereotype of being totally real world oblivious. thanks for the info brother!
Brilliant tutorial. Clear and concise explanations. I got good results first time. I will now be checking out the next vid in the series.
I used data with the lowest height of zero, but the terrain created had the lowest z value is -(max height/2).
what is ploblem?
Thank you so much for these tuts!
Do you have any other social media that I might be able to follow you on?
Might be overscope, but I'd really love to see how the terrain data can be used to get something like a full river with the water plane and everything in it. Maybe a Houdini tool that you can trace the height map with, or even using map box and the OSM data for waterbodies you get from there! This has always been one of the biggest points of struggle for me, as the lidar points are too imprecise to really get a good riverbed going without further processing.
Also other stuff like placing embankments based on slope and such things might be cool to touch on. Stuff where Houdini can help you with these set dressing and world building tasks.
(You should totally start a cooperation with Ben Cloward)
I'm a big fan of Ben Clowards channel! Contributors like him, Tech Art Aid, Mathew Wadstein, Allar, Brushify, Simon Verstraete, Unreal Daedalus and many more who inspired me to start this channel.
As I mention in my next video, scattering, roads, paths and rivers will all be subjects of future tutorials in this series as I aim to create the most exhaustive rundown of the state of Unreal Landscape Creation in UE4 as of 2021! Stay tuned!
In regards to getting other information from a mapbox node, i'll have a think about your suggestion :)
As for collaborations, we'll have to wait and see whether any established youtubers would be interested in working with little old me ;)
Can we set a geographic coordinate system in unreal engine and plot the terrain on his truly position in the world ?
This is awesome.. But I cant afford to pay 400USD to convert 1 file into a greyscale image :( :(
You can use QGIS too (which I might cover when I find time), however Houdini is a more general 3D package and I plan to dive into a lot more Houdini related content in future tutorials.
Impressive, how can i get Lidar of south america?
Could this also be done by exporting the heigh data from plugins like Cesium or ArcGIS from Unreal Engine to Houdini?
Yes!
This is as easy as it can get..thanks for the informative series.
Also, No more videos from the last few months? Looks like you got a big project or job after this series. Good luck mate..
You got it :) Thanks for the support
How did you get all those trees there that is shown in the first 30 seconds of the video? Is that something you will show in future videos?
We will cover this briefly in this series, and at length in the future :)
May you please explain what to do with artefacts on lidar scans, like weird line drops in height. How do you refining imperfect scans?
Hi Aleksander! Thanks for engaging with the video.
If you get weird line drops in height, it's possibly due to the data being missing from the LIDAR coverage in that region. This could be for any number of reasons. If this is an issue you encounter you have a few options.
1. Use lower resolution data source to fill in the gaps (I will be covering how to acquire the low res data in a coming video)
2. Use another area of Lidar data and use that to fill in the blanks (this is obviously no longer accurate to the real site, but at least it is higher detail than option 1)
3. Pick an entirely different site
@Undini Thank you for those suggestions. I successfully end up with the first one👍. PS: Could you tell us your name? :D
Hey there, do you know if its possible to reference the long and lat of the geo tif in Houdini?
Hmm, good question but never looked at it. Google reading CSV data in Houdini with Python and you'll find a really nice CSV tutorial which would be a good starting point. Don't be intimidated if you've never coded or used python, it's beginner friendly. The video is by Entagma.