I think in a previous studio, the artist working on large scale terrain used tangram as a base and did a lot of processing / work with World Machine after that.. In the past, We've taken the heightmap data of certain desired topographical features and turned it into a stamp to 'paint' onto terrain
If you are having issues with your map looking like voxels (minecraft style), in photoshop go to image->mode and make sure you have a 16 bit grey scale file. When you save the file also make sure to go to file save as NOT file export. Exporting the file as png seems to export it as an 9-bit color file.
Looks awesome! I never would have imagined the amount of work it takes to just get some terrain scans, good job! This is a great video. Looking forward to next week's :)
@@BenCloward I guess things like this are why terrain generators exist, but even those are pretty expensive. Although some people may just be trying to recreate an area from reality.
I wound up just getting Gaia around Christmas time. Lucked up and got it for about $149 USD. It’s beautiful, you can export from Unreal, edit and bring it back as well.
@@cablekingtv6557 Yeah, I really like the way Gaia works. I haven't used it personally, but the node workflow and real time preview is great. I'd love to get it one day, but I don't have a need for it now. In the mean time, videos like these are amazing resources.
FYI the merged heightmap gets a lot more distortion if there's a lot of foliage or trees around. Usually just using SRTM followed by an erosion pass in a terrain processor is the best way to get realistic terrain.
Now I haven't screwed with Lidar yet, but in my personal experience, I would avoid going down the rabbit hole of trying to find more accurate height data. QGIS and USGS are very powerful and cool tools, but at the end of the day you are not going to to find something accurate enough to actually make a sizeable impact on the visual quality of your environment. Especially that in a gaming environment you are probably going to have to adjust stuff anyway for game balance. The best results I have seen is just using the SRTM data as a base template and then use gaea, world machine, terresculptor, etc. to add detail. Even if you do find really accurate data it probably won't translate well to the limitations of UE4s landscape system. You can feed it into something like houdini to create seperate assets and meshs though but that's a different topic altogether.
There now is a render button on the site and once you press it you just let it do its thing until you get an alert saying it's finished. Be sure to not drag your camera away though lol, sometimes it seems like it's doing nothing but it is in fact doing something.
First of all from a CG Sup to an another one, thanks for your contents. I learned some neat tricks from them! I've been toying for the past weeks on that very subject. Tried Google earth, QGIS, Terrasculpt... at the end the best way of doing this in my view is to create a hda in houdini with the mapbox node. In unreal, with houdini engine you just have to drag a houdini actor of that hda in your scene, let it cook and voila. As a bonus, you can use all the other nodes of houdini to process, extract and generate your landscape layer maks and generating your foliages and instances. And all this can be edited and tweaked in unreal. In my case, the first version of the hda only had lat/long/zoom as attribute, yet changing any of those result in a updated landscape in unreal after a few seconds.... Heighfield splitting and world composition seem broken at the moment in HE v2 but if you go with a single tile, it work like a charm
@@BenCloward Hi, Ben Thanks for your amazing contents. Yes, Houdini is a fantastic tool in terms of procedural creation, and I've been using it for many years. However, Houdini engine and the relative pipeline still has lots of limitation in game dev, and unreal also made big progress for proceduralism. I would love to see more tutorial updates regarding procedural creation using Unreal build-in tools.
only problem is terrain.party doesnt work anymore... (insert sad emoji here) any other options..? I dont use photoshop... great video though. very informative..
Thank you, I hope in the future I can have datas from my region and create a landscape. I've tried different ways and different software these last years, I'm not loosing hope
tangram heightmapper now has a feature called render, where you can set a multiplier and it basically render the area in closeups and merged them into a single map for you
big problem with heightmapper is a shoreline artifacts, looks like without antialiasing, and than after import in 3d software it looks superweird in 3d
@@matinhofs yeah i know what you mean. i'm going to try to import that heightmap into world creator or sth like that and rework it until it's good. i don't think any of the results are good enough out of the box.
I may cover that topic in the future, but my experience with that feature is that it has a high cost for a low benefit. I'll have to look into it again and see if that's still the case. Thanks for the suggestion!
One solution that I imagined previously was to capture some screenshots from the google earth viewport itself, process it in some photogrammetry software then bake the high poly scan to a plane Thanks for the tips!
I've tried that in the past and it's doable, but not a great workflow. Google has their data copyrighted, and they place a watermark all over their images.
So on the Terrain Party subject. I did some experimenting and the kilometer scale is a bit deceiving. The size of the image downloaded stays the same despite having a bigger square. From what I saw it looks like it gives you the same 1081x1081 image(I think that’s the dimension) but with a bit more detail as you size it. I’m going to keep messing around on my end but I thought it was worth mentioning to see if you get different results on your end. This was great though.
Hey Ben thanks for this great tutorial, but I'm encountering an issue with the imported heightmap terrain being very blocky, like minecraft status, is this normal?
This happens when your height data is saved with 8 bits per channel instead of 16. I don't know where you got the data or how you're processing it, but if you tell me more, I might be able to help you fix it.
Hey so I ran into some stuff you may be interested in! And you got the program to do it but theirs lot of free ones to use, Alpha brushes that you add to your sculpt tool so its not just round blobs... It transforms the sculpt tool into more realistic type mountain hilly stuff, something to look into? Since you got photoshop i thought youd like to to check it out some time :)
I'm not an expert on VFX, but I did team up with Tom Harle from the tharlevfx channel to add waterfalls and splash effects to my previous environment. You can find his tutorial series on creating waterfall effects here: ua-cam.com/video/Uwy_6wQdmZ8/v-deo.html
I think in a previous studio, the artist working on large scale terrain used tangram as a base and did a lot of processing / work with World Machine after that.. In the past, We've taken the heightmap data of certain desired topographical features and turned it into a stamp to 'paint' onto terrain
If you are having issues with your map looking like voxels (minecraft style), in photoshop go to image->mode and make sure you have a 16 bit grey scale file. When you save the file also make sure to go to file save as NOT file export. Exporting the file as png seems to export it as an 9-bit color file.
Looks awesome! I never would have imagined the amount of work it takes to just get some terrain scans, good job! This is a great video. Looking forward to next week's :)
Totally agree. It surprises me every time I go through this process how much more complicated it is than it seems like it should be.
@@BenCloward I guess things like this are why terrain generators exist, but even those are pretty expensive. Although some people may just be trying to recreate an area from reality.
I wound up just getting Gaia around Christmas time. Lucked up and got it for about $149 USD. It’s beautiful, you can export from Unreal, edit and bring it back as well.
@@BenCloward Haha way outta my league LoL
@@cablekingtv6557 Yeah, I really like the way Gaia works. I haven't used it personally, but the node workflow and real time preview is great. I'd love to get it one day, but I don't have a need for it now. In the mean time, videos like these are amazing resources.
these are the questions i ask myself at 4am. thanks for the video
FYI the merged heightmap gets a lot more distortion if there's a lot of foliage or trees around. Usually just using SRTM followed by an erosion pass in a terrain processor is the best way to get realistic terrain.
Great tip, thanks!
Now I haven't screwed with Lidar yet, but in my personal experience, I would avoid going down the rabbit hole of trying to find more accurate height data. QGIS and USGS are very powerful and cool tools, but at the end of the day you are not going to to find something accurate enough to actually make a sizeable impact on the visual quality of your environment. Especially that in a gaming environment you are probably going to have to adjust stuff anyway for game balance.
The best results I have seen is just using the SRTM data as a base template and then use gaea, world machine, terresculptor, etc. to add detail. Even if you do find really accurate data it probably won't translate well to the limitations of UE4s landscape system. You can feed it into something like houdini to create seperate assets and meshs though but that's a different topic altogether.
There now is a render button on the site and once you press it you just let it do its thing until you get an alert saying it's finished. Be sure to not drag your camera away though lol, sometimes it seems like it's doing nothing but it is in fact doing something.
Amazing! Thank you 🙌
First of all from a CG Sup to an another one, thanks for your contents. I learned some neat tricks from them!
I've been toying for the past weeks on that very subject. Tried Google earth, QGIS, Terrasculpt... at the end the best way of doing this in my view is to create a hda in houdini with the mapbox node. In unreal, with houdini engine you just have to drag a houdini actor of that hda in your scene, let it cook and voila.
As a bonus, you can use all the other nodes of houdini to process, extract and generate your landscape layer maks and generating your foliages and instances. And all this can be edited and tweaked in unreal.
In my case, the first version of the hda only had lat/long/zoom as attribute, yet changing any of those result in a updated landscape in unreal after a few seconds....
Heighfield splitting and world composition seem broken at the moment in HE v2 but if you go with a single tile, it work like a charm
Houdini is such a swish army knife. It's amazing!
@@BenCloward Hi, Ben Thanks for your amazing contents.
Yes, Houdini is a fantastic tool in terms of procedural creation, and I've been using it for many years. However, Houdini engine and the relative pipeline still has lots of limitation in game dev, and unreal also made big progress for proceduralism. I would love to see more tutorial updates regarding procedural creation using Unreal build-in tools.
terrain party doesnt work anymore
only problem is terrain.party doesnt work anymore... (insert sad emoji here) any other options..? I dont use photoshop...
great video though. very informative..
I use Tangram Heightmapper, it's free and allows you a lot of customization in terms of greyscale before you import it in Photoshop.
Thank you, I hope in the future I can have datas from my region and create a landscape. I've tried different ways and different software these last years, I'm not loosing hope
tangram heightmapper now has a feature called render, where you can set a multiplier and it basically render the area in closeups and merged them into a single map for you
big problem with heightmapper is a shoreline artifacts, looks like without antialiasing, and than after import in 3d software it looks superweird in 3d
@@matinhofs yeah i know what you mean. i'm going to try to import that heightmap into world creator or sth like that and rework it until it's good. i don't think any of the results are good enough out of the box.
Qgis and game tool plug-in is handy too...
Alos World 30 DEM is pretty hight quality, better than SRTM-30 in a lot of areas
Thank you so much for this useful video ♥️
Thank you Ben!
I can't export anything from Terrain Party. It keeps telling me, "Application Error..."
@Ben Cloward What about DTM data (Digital Terrain Model Data) for location around the world not just in the US? for TerraForm plugin for UE4
Problem is there are not much datas outside US.
Is there a way to use such height map already with satellite texture?
Request - Seamless blending between different meshes on the groung texture.
Search for Virutal Texturing. That should solve your request.
I may cover that topic in the future, but my experience with that feature is that it has a high cost for a low benefit. I'll have to look into it again and see if that's still the case. Thanks for the suggestion!
Runtime Virtual Textures is what you're looking for.
One solution that I imagined previously was to capture some screenshots from the google earth viewport itself, process it in some photogrammetry software then bake the high poly scan to a plane
Thanks for the tips!
I've tried that in the past and it's doable, but not a great workflow. Google has their data copyrighted, and they place a watermark all over their images.
Great! Thank you!
So on the Terrain Party subject. I did some experimenting and the kilometer scale is a bit deceiving. The size of the image downloaded stays the same despite having a bigger square. From what I saw it looks like it gives you the same 1081x1081 image(I think that’s the dimension) but with a bit more detail as you size it. I’m going to keep messing around on my end but I thought it was worth mentioning to see if you get different results on your end. This was great though.
Terrain party is still broken. I dont think they are going to fix it
in terrainparty I only have txt file...can you tell me why?
Does anyone know a good way to make procedurally generated worlds
Hey Ben thanks for this great tutorial, but I'm encountering an issue with the imported heightmap terrain being very blocky, like minecraft status, is this normal?
This happens when your height data is saved with 8 bits per channel instead of 16. I don't know where you got the data or how you're processing it, but if you tell me more, I might be able to help you fix it.
Hey so I ran into some stuff you may be interested in! And you got the program to do it but theirs lot of free ones to use, Alpha brushes that you add to your sculpt tool so its not just round blobs... It transforms the sculpt tool into more realistic type mountain hilly stuff, something to look into? Since you got photoshop i thought youd like to to check it out some time :)
Can you share the heightmap in a file?
Have you looked at the free BlenderGIS addon? It is simpler than the methods you have described to obtain this type of data.
Great ... Thanks
all iget now is a textfile that says terrain and heightmap data is no longer available.
seems to work only in USA .
Terrain party not working, downloading error appears always
Hi, why i cannot download heightmap from terrain party anymore? it shows error. can u help me
If the web site is down, there’s nothing I can do. We’ll just have to wait for it to be fixed.
@@BenCloward Oh. Alright. Thank you
Good
It doesn't download anymore
no podes sacar capturas de pantalla para esto hermano, es una grasada total
Hablo español un poco - per no entiendo la frase “una grasada”. Que significa?
none of these options work
world creator might be nice but has a cost to it per year.
apparently terrai party doesn't work anymore.
I upscaled the data in Nuke with the help of AI.
Please make a tutorial on waterfalls .
I'm not an expert on VFX, but I did team up with Tom Harle from the tharlevfx channel to add waterfalls and splash effects to my previous environment. You can find his tutorial series on creating waterfall effects here: ua-cam.com/video/Uwy_6wQdmZ8/v-deo.html
@@BenCloward Wow! Thankyou
getting nothing in the zip ... anyone else having this issue?
also, I don't get why we would need this if we are working towards procedural generation?
Terrain.party doesn't seem to return any information