Get Real World Height Data into Unreal Engine Landscapes in Seconds (via TerrainMagic)

hi welcome again today I'm going to show you a tool that we can bring real world height data into our Royal engine within couple of seconds so this is based on a plugin called terrain Magic first I'm going to show you a demo and then you can see how it works but after that I'm going to explain uh from scratch right uh here we have actor called Earth landscape clip I'm gonna drag that into my editor window and then if I go to details panel of that actor the here we have two special button called open the map and download tile and I'm gonna hit the open the map first and it will open a map for me something like this so then I can look it into a place that I really like all right here I have already uh located the place so I can paste that location and I'm gonna Zoom a little bit right now we have it somewhere over here so now I can click somewhere on the screen and it will show me a rectangle over here so this is the place this is the area that I am gonna bring that one real engine in this case uh yeah I'm going gonna select this file maybe yeah something like this so it's about 11 kilometers but I'm gonna assume it a little bit more yeah something like this so I'm gonna select this so it's six kilometer wide but I think I can work with this I'm going to copy this code or automatically it will copy this code to my clipboard and then I'm gonna paste that code into this style info string of my actor then there's a button called download tile on the top I'm gonna click that also we can hit alt and D then you can see a progress over here it will download that tile for me right now we have it so this is my height map data over here so this is just a little bit weird over here but I'm gonna hit the match landscape size it will extend to my whole landscape also I can change the height range so this is use the positive and negative side I'll explain that later on but here I'm going to select the positive and I'm gonna hit invalidate over here or over here oh I'm gonna hit alt Q so I can get some high data over here so basically I have a lot of options uh and bring some real world High data into Android engine uh very quickly so let's say I'm not really happy with this location so that's quite easy I'm gonna open the map again let's say I'm going to select a different place all right and then I'm going to my Android engine again cop this code and hit download tile again so now I have a different height man uh in this case I really like this one I'm gonna play with my height range I'm gonna go to negative as well all right uh looks good looks good and now I have some options I can go to high resolution right now it's 512 by 512 but I can go to uh some other socialite 2K resolution and then I can hit alt D to download it again so it will give me uh some little uh more information over here but not that different from the earlier so in this case I'll stick to it to fight well uh anyway now we have it uh I can do some other options like we can blur this texture if you want if you have Jagged area and we can simply apply that alter q and we do some blowering also we have other options like fading height changes and there are so many options we have and we can use all of those things and do some sort of failing uh quite quite simple fitting right and I'm gonna yep do something like this so now we have a little bit of fading over here so now we have it so like where you can bring another or more of these Earth landscape clips into your landscape and mix match different height maps and do very interesting things so now you have a whole world of data within your reach and you can do some really interesting things right and now we know how it works uh so let me go through a full uh tutorial on how you can get all those things and a tutorial from scratch right now we have almost empty landscape projector here we have a landscape and we have sun sky actor so basically it will add some sun and Sky setup it will come with a Terrain magic that plugin that we are using of course you need to have headed magic installed into your project check the description below uh if you want to get it all right you can search the sunska actor by going into the theory magic content directory so you can search rotary magic over here now you can search sunsky and you can get this actor it will show us a simple Sun setup so you can use UDS or any other existing Solutions you have or maybe the atmosphere sky from epic right then if you can't see this directory go to the settings over here and enable show engine content and plug-in content now we have a basic landscape like this we can work on first thing is I'm about my last character and search for edit layers so here we have option called enable edit layers I'm gonna enable that so it will add some additional functionality to work with landscape so that's how we can use Terror magic then I can go to my select mode landscape then I'm going to select my blueprint brushes from the sculpt section I'm going to expand a little bit right then we have something called blueprint brushes over here yeah now you can see that I'm going to select uh 10 Magic Clip brush so you need to be careful you need to select this exact one Terra Magic Clip brush and click some on the landscape and it will adapt like this okay that's all we need from over here and here you need you can use a existing landscape material you have or here I'm using open land but you can use anything there's no dependency so it's a good idea to save this map okay I have done that then I'm gonna go to my place actors attempt I'm gonna search for Earth landscape clip so basically I have this actor I'm going to drag that into my C so basically now you can do a couple of options so this is a landscape clip based on terror and Magic so check the description below if you want to know about landscape flips I'm gonna attach a little bit things about that uh while I'm going to this tutorial but you can always learn more about landscape slips right then I'm gonna hit this match landscape size uh I'm gonna hit it twice all right it will give some like Jagged texture that's totally fine it's a default texture um yeah you don't need to worry about so we will work on this now I'm gonna click this open the map button so it will open a map for me now we can select location that I really like so I'm going to randomly select some place okay somewhere on us right okay this place I don't have any uh specific reason but here you can see style width about 70 uh five kilometers I think this is too much details for our landscape uh it doesn't need to be the exact landscape types you can pick any size you want but I'm going to select some 18 kilometers okay still I think it's too much yeah I'm going to select this one just eight kilometers yeah it will look fine but here we don't have more information maybe this one um yeah maybe this one now we have a code over here this is a tile info query string that you can uh go on you can copy that by right click and copy but if you click that one it will automatically copy to your clipboard uh if that if this text doesn't appear you can simply cook this okay now go to Android again here on this actor we have something called Pile in for string I'm gonna paste that then I'm gonna go to this uh toolbar section and I'm gonna hit this uh download tile also you can use the alter the shortcut command I'm going to use it after that so because it's quite easy right now it will download this uh now you can see how it looks like it's not particularly a nice looking uh height map uh for my case uh but anyway you you can see the workflow how I'm doing it right then I'm gonna explain some of the things that uh we can do with this right number one thing is uh I can ask for more resolution if you need I can go for let's get 2K resolution and I can hit alter D and you can see some progress over here completed it will download some individual tiles and merge them together and give me some hype if there's some information right now we are using mapbox to get this information uh usually it doesn't have that much of details in height map right now you have some option to like blur this so if there's some Jagged artifacts on your height map you can try to blur that once simply increase this blur distance just five is enough most of the time and I can hit invalidate button over here or red icon over here you can click that and it will simply do some blurring basically that apply all the settings that you change over here also you can hit all the queue as the shorter command so I'm gonna press alter Q after afterwards right so now we know blurring and we can modify the height if you want uh so here we have some some help functions ah basically it will change the height map range so this is positive one let's say positive only so you get something like this so if you go to positive and negative so it will have a range from -1 to 1. so you can have holes basically it it will give you some more more depth to your height map uh like that and then I have some failed options uh so basically we have modified height as well we can change the range and also you can yeah scale it like we can go Max about 32 000 so that's the max and yeah and then we have fading I can do some like let's say let's do some uh some box fading so now you have this I can reduce this value and so you get more area so I can do some uh saturation as well so it will change the Behavior now if I like I can bring another landscape clip and I I can create another height map and match them together and also we have some other uh landscape Clips as well noiseless equip height map so that you can mix match all of things and create your Oyo on landscape uh so check the description below if you want to know my landscape Clips right now we have this I'm gonna delete this so I'm going to show you something uh the workflow that I'm really excited about right now we have a map like this and trying to zoom into this map doesn't looks fun like it's it's fun for a moment but you have no idea some good locations huh so basically we have Google and here's the process that I use so let's search for like uh mountains in us right now we have a couple of mountains over here right then let's randomly pick some Mount that I like okay I think I'm gonna like this Mount Sanford but I haven't seen this before but yeah it's it's over here okay cool so then I know that I'm gonna copy this and go to Google Maps and let's search for this one so basically it will automatically select the location that's pretty cool now what I'm going to try to do is I'm gonna right click anywhere on this map and then the first item is the uh latitude and longitude uh values so I'm gonna copy that simply click that it will copy that into my clipboard I'm going to go to our map I'm gonna paste that on the search bar and click enter so basically it will bring that directly into this location now I can simply select the location I'm going to go a little bit higher okay something like that it's a quite a long range like 128 kilometers let's give it a try uh with the it's gonna work or not so I'm not sure about this but anyway we can try so I'm gonna get the Earth landscape clip again then I'm gonna scale it to my landscape okay also we have some jaggered area that's fine that's some default data Maybe I'm gonna fix it later on so if you're trying this sometimes later you won't see this then I'm gonna paste the trials info string over here I'm gonna download this type right now you have it okay it looks looks looks nice actually and then I'm gonna get some more details because now if you see this so here uh I have that style zooming so I can explain a little bit so this is the X and Y tile position and this is the zoom level and here we have the 8th zoom level I can go deeper go over here it's like 10. so basically now this height map has more information that we can grab uh so if we if we simply increase the resolution it will bring us more information because so it's totally possible so I'm gonna set 2048 I'm gonna hit alter D it will download it something it's basically it's been downloaded 16 tiles so now I go here so basically I can see some yeah nice interesting details uh so I can do some fading for sure uh so I like that so okay box fading I'm gonna do alter Q okay I can go do this but anyway I'm gonna not gonna do that much all right so now we have it and I really like it so likewise you can do some locations coding with Google and Google Maps and find that through our own map and bring that to Unreal and do some very interesting things so right now we are using mapbox as the uh the data source to get this information the MacBook doesn't have the uh the higher details height map all the times basically it will uh like round to like 30 meters so one pixel uh has information for 30 meters as the maximum value I guess so in that case not that high so ideally we should need to get a one meter mixer one pixel representing one meter that's the ideal scenario right now there are some data sources especially from the I can show you Microsoft planetary computer so here we have set up data sources related to Earth and we can use this data source to like bring more data into a project and I'm working on that within a couple of months we can bring some more data more detailed height map into Unreal Engine using the same workflow so likewise we have a lot of features planned with this especially bring some textures as well and do some color grading with that and so there are so many things you can do I'll talk to you soon with some new tools all right that's it for today see you soon with something interesting bye

Channel: GDi4K

Views: 10,730

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Id: HD2OIIUOmLA

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ewan400]

I look forward to playing around with this.