UE4: Secrets to Generating FREE Real-World Heightmaps from Terrain Party for UE4 

I will be finishing off this year with few more landscape/terrain tutorials. I have auto-landscape material tutorials going up soon. But after that you're right, I will be going back to architecture and level design. Things I've missed.

Yeah same, I think its to do with the websites outdated coding.

Yep same, even the area in the example above at the default location.

terrain.party doesn't work sometimes for couple of months. You'll have to try after couple of months

@@pawanbhandari6633 Cool, thanks for the heads up! I'll try til I get it!

@@pawanbhandari6633 Bro If we wait for so long we will fail in our projects. What do you sudgest we do in such a position?

same question :/

cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/ A redditor from the Cities Skylines community fixed a new site.

@@johanhammarstrom6211 It's a good start, but unfortunately not much use outside of Cities Skylines. I used Terrain.party to get height data for mountain ranges (VFX) and without the ability to increase the area of the exporter it's far too limited in terms of scale. Hopefully it's something he plans on adding in the future, if he plans on updating that is.

@@johanhammarstrom6211 Thank you so much for this info! I've been searching everywhere for heightmaps of the Norwegian contryside and that's the only site that's worked

@@Diax1324 Sorry to hear that. Worked fine for me 6 months ago.

Can you please explain why 30m resolution = 1 pixel/data point for a 54km data map? Do you know of a formula to adjust the XYZ transformation to make a height map match the topographical data to make accurate height maps of real landscapes?

@@gigapede tbh, idk what i calculated there because its off by a factor of 1.66. since the world height data resolution is 30m for the most part (as in, its consistently 30m with certain spaces that are higher res), and the site spits out 1081x1081 pixels, 30m*1081 is 32km roughly.

You're very welcome!

Whenever I try to download the specified geo location zip file, I get an error saying "site can't be reached".

Lol before i came on comments section , i have tryed same spot as the video =)))

@@demetriusparham2135 so do i

That also doesn't work... tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/ seems to work though

RIP terrain.party :(

That's a tough one. Terrain Party was never meant to be used for UE4, it just happens to give heightmap data that can be used in UE4. My rule of thumb has always been, just make it as close as possible using your visual artistic eye. If it looks right then it is right.

@@WorldofLevelDesign Yeah that woudl be ideal if you want to just create landscapes from concept and such..oh well..the search continues :). thanks

same problem

Same issue here too

@EmighettiSpaghetti yeah i found that later on, thanks for your reply

New equivalent is cs.heightmap.skydark.pl/# almost the same functionality. YW ;)

You're very welcome!

I guess Im asking the wrong place but does someone know a method to log back into an instagram account? I was stupid lost my password. I love any assistance you can offer me

same here

same

@Wiralek TV +2

yea i suggest gigapixel AI it has a free trial

You can upscale your heighmap up to 8k, the limit for unreal. I've tried gigapixel AI but it leaves artefacts and a watermark in the free version. It works much better for upscaling the texture on the landscape. Height map upscaling could be used to get rid of the sharp edges caused by pixels, even in real time at local scale if unreal supported it. Unfortunately, even doing it with third party software is problematic. Bicubic upscaling should work (according to the internet) but it doesn't work in gimp. I eventually got it to work with pixinsight (worth 230 euros and meant for astrophotography), which has cubic b-spline upscaling. This gave me an amazingly smooth landscape without artefacts or detail losses. The only artefacts were unrelated to the upscaling. Rather caused by world machine, which refuses to apply anti aliasing and leaves the rivers blocky, constrained to meter sized pixels

was looking to see if anyone else had the issue.

It seems its back online!

Thanks for the update! Good news.

it's not right now :/

@@greenwiener Yup. Sadly, stopped working again.

@@tenter8457 can confirm, no heights maps in the readme

Sometimes the website is down for a few days. Doesn't work for me either. Just wait it out.

Me too

Thank you Ben!

Watch another video on how to import heightmaps in ue 4.

Thanks Adam! Happy to have you here since the beginning.

Try this website. It works kind of the same and easy to use: tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/#10.75/52.8710/-4.5376

@@skyline-mj1yt but that is not so perfect

Thank you Terry. Yeah, Terrain Party has been doing that for at least a week. Try this site, dwtkns.com/srtm/ not as good or easy to use but works. Hope Terrain Party gets fixed soon.

@@WorldofLevelDesign I've had some luck using Microsoft ICE to stitch the terrain party images together. ICE (Image Composite Editor) is free to download from Microsoft and is *Very* easy to use to stitch images together. I had to use GIMP (it's what I have) to create the 16bit PNG after that but it works well. I'm no expert - but I am a screenshotter - and ICE does seem to work well with stitching these heightmap PNG's together. It may help people.

@@terryadams7778 Very interesting. Thanks Terry for the update and the workflow.

This is already rather old but since you didn't get any answer I think I can help a little with the second question. What I would do and have seen in many games is adding extremely low poly mountains with low res textures on them. And then add fod etc. In real life things that are further away tend to look more blue and blurry, the grade of this depends on the weather. You probably don't need this answer anoymore but I felt like sharing.

@@yanni2311 Thanks, looks like no one can answer my 1st haha. I did see another video however of a heightmap landscape in U5 - that automatically had squares in it (which I assumed was streaming levels).

i dont even get a file

You are right. 1px = 1m. Sampling any km size in Terrain.Party (and it goes all the way up to 60km) will always give you 1080px or 1080m texture terrain. I mention in the video that the sampling size doesn't give you larger terrain size texture but only the amount of information within 1080px default.

WorldofLevelDesign so if you download the 8k terrain party and want a site with real world dims could you increase image size in photoshop to 8000px by 8000px and bring into ue that way. You will still need to deal with the recommended pixel ratios of ue4?

@@WhitewashStudio If you do resize 1080px texture to 8000px, it would work yes; you would lose a lot of fidelity of upscaling the image of course but that would work. And also yes to the UE4 texture size, the recommended 8k texture pixel size would be 8129x8129.

@@WorldofLevelDesign Thanks!

Thanks for watching!

because the website doesnt work

Website error. Has been going on for a while. Sometimes they fix it.

@@WorldofLevelDesign Okay thanks :)

@Hunter592 its still broken

@Hunter592 mmm I'm now downloading random height maps from random people lmao

It's been ongoing problem with this website. It goes out, generating empty zip but then it comes back and works.

@@WorldofLevelDesign I have the same problem do I just need to keep trying from time to time or...`?

@@LDR0000 last time this happened it was few weeks before it worked again, keep checking and hopefully it'll come back on soon

terrain party doesnt work some days

It took too long and it was simply a lot of cloning over and over again.

@@WorldofLevelDesign can you please tell me how to stitch as im trying it in photoshop but the lighting of each hieght map is different , one is lighter than the other and it is creating lines in between stitching 4 height maps , please tell me how to stitch them without the lines showing

@@nishantnarayan2690 That one is tough. I had few heightmaps like that that didn't match. You could try using levels (Ctrl+L) to match each heightmap first before Cloning. But it may not be exact. You can try generating another set from another region, hoping they match. Unfortunately its trial and error and not exact every time. Hope it works for you.

@@WorldofLevelDesign okay thanks man!

@@WorldofLevelDesign there is an easier method for the levels. Using ctrl L writes the values in the pixel information, destructive. If you use the level adjustment layer, you not only can change it all the time but also can use the mask for that layer to mask out harsh lines. You can also group it to the layer you are working on so it only affects that one layer.