UE5 Mesh Tile TIN Terrains Part 1 

Thanks! TS3 is on sale for the month of July. The demo mode is also being extended to 10 minutes for the next release in a few days. I am also working on some additional videos for UE5 Mesh Terrains that include texturing, splatmaps, foliage, LODs, etc.

You are welcome! My next UE5 video is on Terrain Performance and will have a Landscape versus Mesh comparison.

I am currently making massive updates to the Mapper and Topo Explorer tools in TS3. They will be able to download the data at any resolution from what is available online. This should be in the next release.

@@demenzunmedia amazing! also, i ask because i dont know the current state of gis coverage atm, is there much in the way of 10m stuff around australia? or is 30m really the sweet spot for resolution? this would be for game dev (modding Squad) in ue4.27

@@laughingjackaso8163 - Most of the earth DEM Data is in 30 meter from the SRTM Shuttle Mission years ago. I looked at the data currently available in TerreSculptor's Mapper Explorer and Aus looks like 30 meter. The government of Australia might have 1 meter data though, I would have to do a lengthy Internet search to see if I can find any repository sites. I will take a look this weekend if I can. A lot of the high resolution government data is behind a pay-wall and prices for a 10km x 10km region can be as high as $40,000.

@@laughingjackaso8163 - Ok, I found this site: elevation.fsdf.org.au/ Most of Aus is colored in orange and is 1 Arc-Second data which is really low resolution. The lower-east section of Aus in the blue tint appears to be in 5 Meter data. I will have to try some downloads and see what I can get.

@@demenzunmedia great! When it will be released? :)

Any mesh deformation tools in UE5 will be able to deform most any mesh including a mesh terrain. So anything you can do to other meshes you can do to a mesh terrain tile. How useful the tools will be on a terrain is questionable though, you usually wouldn't warp or twist a terrain tile with a spline for example. So in most cases you would want the final terrain shape created in other third-party software. The main disadvantage would be that the Landscape specific tools would not be available. So edit layers, the landscape sculpting tools, alpha brushes, etc, would not be available. You also have to do the texturing manually, by that I mean that you have to create the material for each mesh tile. Landscape does that for you under the hood with their Landscape material system, it textures all components by using a set of Layer weightmaps -- but that is also where it is very limited, it is 1:1 heightmap pixel/vertex per weightmap pixel. Again in a comparison, technically you could use a 16k texture set with EACH terrain tile whereas the Landscape can only do a single 16k edit texture and per-vertex weightmap texture for the ENTIRE Landscape actor at 1:1. So any texturing on a mesh based terrain could be significantly higher detail and quality. It just depends on how much work you want to put into it. The UE5 Landscape tools make many things easy, but they are very limiting when you dig deep into it. For example I have created Splatmap Materials for Landscape at 2x standard resolution, for example a 4033 Landscape with an 8192 splatmap texture, and the detail is 200% greater detail than what you can do with the regular Landscape material painting system. On the regular Landscape material system, the finest detail that you can paint is 1 vertex, that is why with a 1 meter scale Landscape you see large 1 meter blocks of texturing weightmap pixels. Ever notice how a path at an angle has the blocky sides? With a mesh terrain you can go much higher resolution to the texturing weightmaps. That said, as mentioned, a lot of games use mesh-based terrains, especially if they are using TINs to greatly reduce the triangle count for large open world systems. The Landscape's heightmap-based system simply can't compete with that.

@@demenzunmedia thank you for the detailed reply. I am very interested in massive terrain generation that maintains very high detail and have found the limitations in UE5 bothersome in achieving my desired results. I've been following your TerraSculptor videos for some time with great interest in the results that can be achieved with it.

@@MichaelMoellerTRLInc - You are welcome. I find the UE5 World Partition system frustrating myself. UE5 requires a computer with 128GB and an RTX-3090 24GB just to be able to import a 32k x 32k heightmap. I did an HLOD Build for a 16k Landscape and it required 350GB of memory! They simply don't write code for average hardware. A computer with 128GB+24GB can work on a 256k x 256k or larger heightmap in TerreSculptor! My next video that I am working on is a Terrain Optimization and Performance video. I will be making a lot of different terrain systems and comparing them on systems as low as a Dual-core 16GB GTX-1650, to see what performs best. I plan on having Heightmap-based Landscape versus Mesh-based Terrain tests also in the comparisons. I would also like to do a video on a high quality texturing workflow for the Mesh Terrain system. I have to spend some time working on this to see what all of the options are, and what techniques work best with UE5. I may develop some custom pipeline tools in TerreSculptor for it.

@@demenzunmedia oh that's fantastic. I can't wait to see what you develop. I do have a 13 gen system with 128GB and a 4090 24GB with 24 terabytes of storage. I knew I would need a horse to try and pull off a map of SE Asia at 1m resolution.

@@MichaelMoellerTRLInc - A computer with 128GB+24GB will just barely manage 32641 x 32641 in World Partition with Edit Layers off. Any heightmap size larger uses up all memory both CPU and GPU and just crashes UE5 with a memory allocation error. I have yet to see what the maximum Mesh-based Terrain will be, but the source heightmap in floating-point can be up to 180,000 x 180,000 or so, and more with Virtual Memory. So a Mesh Terrain of around 200km x 200km at 1 meter should be easily doable on 128GB+24GB. I want to do some Nanite tests with a large Mesh Terrain as well and see what the memory and performance impacts are. I bought an Intel Xeon W7-2495X 24-Core, ASUS W790-ACE, 512GB DDR5, RTX-3090 24GB in order to have enough memory to work with UE5. It's a real hog.

There are many benefits, but think of it more as an option to consider rather than a replacement. Which choice you make depends on your game design. A few benefits are: A static mesh terrain system can easily be created with a lower-end computer system (UE5 Landscape is a memory and resource hog especially when getting up to 8k and 16k sizes, creating HLODs, etc). A static mesh terrain system doesn't have the size limits that the current World Partition Landscape has for maximum size (WP max 16k). You can optimize the mesh tiles into TIN's for such game designs as large open world driving and flight simulator game (those types of games almost always use TINs and not heightmaps). You get control over such things as tile size (World Partition Components are fixed at 511x511). A mesh based terrain system typically renders faster and is lighter weight in memory consumption than the Landscape system is. You do lose the in-engine Landscape editing features though. So I am only presenting this as an option for people to utilize. TS3 now fully supports this type of pipeline, which is why I made the video. I do have a Discord. YT usually deletes my comments with links so go to the Demenzun website, scroll to the page bottom links area and click on Contact or Support to get the Discord Server link.

Wut

Hi. Hopefully you can follow this if your English isn't good. Ask more questions if I am not clear. Digital Elevation Models typically come in meter pixel sizes, such as 1-meter pixels, 5-meter, 30-meter, 90-meter, etc. This does not affect the heightmap pixel data itself, it just changes how the terrain mesh is rendered based on that scale. In TerreSculptor you change the Terrain Properties Spacing X,Z and Y to the actual meters values. This will then draw the terrain mesh in the correct size and aspect ratio. If you have the TerreSculptor Settings for Dimensions set to centimeters, then the Spacing X,Z would be 2000 for 20 meter data, for example. If you have heightmap data that is different meter values on the X and Z axis though, that will not be rendered correctly. I am currently separating the X and Z properties in TerreSculptor 3.0 to correctly manage heightmaps that have differing meter values on X and Z. That change will be in the next update release. Note that Y is the elevation range on TerreSculptor, and XZ are the width and length. This would also be done for example in Unreal Engine 5 using their Landscape Scale XYZ properties, you would set the Scale to the meters values based on centimeters. This would then set the terrain mesh to the correct scale. TerreSculptor 3.0 has significantly better Digital Elevation Model management and importing than 2.0 has. TerreSculptor 3.0 correctly manages heightmap scale and can automatically calculate the correct Terrain Properties Spacing X,Z and Y for you. I am also splitting the Spacing X,Z into two separate values to correctly manage digital elevation models with different X,Y sizes for the next release. TerreSculptor 3.0 has tens of thousands of new features compared to 2.0.

The short answer is that TerreSculptor 3.0 will be correctly managing different spacing values for the width and length on the next update coming out in a few days. For example, heightmaps that are 20 meter by 30 meter will be correctly scaled on the next update release. I release updates usually every one to two weeks with many new features.

The latest release of TerreSculptor 3.0 for 2024-211 now has support for different X and Z axis Spacing. It will support heightmaps that are for example 20 meters on one axis and 30 meters on the other axis. TerreSculptor 3.0 is on sale until August 7th.

In this video I adjusted the mesh scale manually to what looked like a good value. I will be adding features to the Tile Creator OBJ Export so that the Elevation Range Z-Scale is correctly calculated from the elevation range of the source Digital Elevation Model currently loaded into TerreSculptor. The scale factor is an odd multiplier which I have to calculate the math for. I will be getting to this feature soon.

@@demenzunmedia great, so is it coming soon :) ? It's very useful because exporting anything to Unreal, we should manually calculate the z-scale..... somewhat.....

@@MrLyonliang - This video shows calculating Elevation Data for TIN Terrains using Mesh Tiles, that is completely different from using Landscape. This is not a UE5 Landscape video. For working with real-world data with Landscape there are other videos on this channel that show how to do that. This video is a special design system for TIN terrains and NOT Landscape. TerreSculptor already has built-in features for calculating the Spacing XYZ and UE5 Landscape Scale XYZ for Digital Elevation Model files that are imported. If you are importing a DEM file, check the GIS panel to make sure that the GIS data is correctly parsed and available in the DEM file, then on the Terrain Properties panel click on GeoScale and enable the Set Spacing to GIS values. Then the Terrain Properties will be automatically set to the real-world sizing of the terrain. These same TerreSculptor Terrain Properties Spacing XYZ values are used in UE5 for the Landscape Scale XYZ, to set the Landscape to real-world size.

​@@demenzunmedia thx for comprehensive explanations

These are standard static meshes, so the same features available to all meshes are available to these mesh tiles. You could create low-poly collision models for some tiles if you wanted, disable collision on tiles that are unreachable by players, etc. The same options as any other static mesh.

Collision works, this is just standard static meshes. You can build an entire terrain with static meshes.

@@demenzunmedia but how to apply material on it custom landscape material

@shahmaarbaba - You apply materials to the static mesh sections the exact same way that you apply materials to any static mesh. If you have 64 static mesh sections then you would create a Master Material and 64 Material Instances with the individual textures in them. You can see by my videos that I completely textured the terrains, it is not difficult. It is using Static Meshes, and not the Landscape, so it doesn't use the Landscape Layer system. This is a TIN Static Mesh terrain, so it is textured and uses materials the same as any static meshes do.

@@shahmaarbaba - For example, if you had a Satellite Map Texture of the terrain region that was 16384x16384, and you were working with 64 static mesh terrain TINs, then you would split the Satellite Map texture into 64 tiles, and apply each one to each static mesh piece of the terrain.

You have many choices when texturing Static Mesh TIN terrains. You can use an Auto-Material the same as a Landscape, or you can use a Master Material with Material Instances for each terrain section, you can split a satellite map into tiles for each terrain section, etc. You should also be able to use the UE Mesh Paint but I haven't had time to test that yet.