Real World Terrains in Unreal Engine

in this tutorial we're going to be discussing how to import height maps from USGS earthexplorer through terror sculptor into Unreal Engine 4 the first thing you need to do is go to earth Explorer USGS gov and register if you don't already have an account here you have to create a full account and it requires a lot of information to be entered in such as your name and address and phone number and such I already have an account so I'll just sign in and we'll start ok I'm signed in to earth Explorer now we'll find a good location on the map to be able to use for our hike map in Unreal Engine 4 I chose Mount Rainier National Park in the northwest United States once you've zoom the map in to approximately the area that you want you click on the polygon use map and that specifies the four coordinates for the area that you're going to be using in your height map when you are selecting a region for your height map you can also click for coordinates on the screen to form a rectangle note that when you get the data set results for this the tiles that are available from USGS will only contain this region they won't be clipped just to this region so Mount Rainier will be included in the tile that it gives me but it will be at the resolution of the tile that is actually in their database click on data sets go to digital elevation open up SRTM and choose the void filled SRTM file and click on results will now have a list of results of height maps within this region you want to choose one that's a one arcsecond map not the three arcsecond map one arcsecond map is 30 meters three arc seconds is 100 meters click on the download options and we could actually go a geo TIFF or bill here but I recommend going with the bill for download we've now downloaded that file into our downloads folder through Chrome so let's go over and extract it here's the bill file in our downloads to deliver it as a zip file so now we'll extract all of this to be able to get the actual bill file and header file out of it here you can see the bill file and the header file that will be used by terrorists gulp der now launched our sculptor we're now in Tara sculptor simply click on import terrain go to the downloads folder choose bill there's the file that we downloaded let's open it up it'll come in as a 3601 by 3601 height map which is the standard size for a bill file because it includes the header it gives us all the rest of the parameters that we need here correctly for importing so simply click on the ok' button and there's our usgs file loaded into Tara sculptor I'll now make a few changes here so that it looks the same as it will in Unreal Engine 4 in the terrain property set the X Z and Y spacing to 100 to make them the same as Unreal Engine 4 now if I go to the free camera this is essentially what it's going to look like when it's brought into Unreal Engine 4 we'll change the Y scale a little bit in the Unreal Engine though what we could do is we could crop a portion of this and load it in at real-world scale and Unreal Engine 4 but that usually doesn't look good because when we re sample from 30 meter to 1 meter we lose a lot of detail so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to resample this to the closest Unreal Engine 4 resolution of landscape and just bringing in straight now we've resampled it to a Unreal Engine 4 resolution of 80 129 by 80 129 let's export it as a PNG file for Unreal Engine now I'm gonna launch Unreal Engine 4 now that I have launched Unreal Engine I'm just going to create a new project just to test this terrain out and have a look at it to import our landscape simply go to the landscape tab import from file and select the file that we saved I'm going to change the Z scale to half the height so we don't have so much a vertical extent to the landscape and click on import and there you can see our imported landscape already to be multi-textured you can use terror sculptor as well to create all of the weight maps for the multi texturing on this and that's all there is to bringing in a real-world landscape it's that quick and easy

Channel: Demenzun Media

Views: 28,013

Keywords: Demenzun, Media, TerreSculptor, Terrain, Landscape, Heightmap, DEM, Digital Elevation Model, Video, Game, Developer, Unreal, Unity, Engine, UE3, UE4, USGS, Earth Explorer, Real World, Real, World, Earth

Id: htphx1UEct8

Length: 5min 0sec (300 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019