Large Scale Island

[Eisen]

(This is a WIP still expect to include rivers, hills and more natural features)

Currently I am in the process of developing a large scale Island terrain that will be used as the base terrain for an open world game in UE5. The Dimensions of the terrain as of now will be roughly 8kmx8km

The Main objective I am struggling with is developing this island and maintaining a high amount of detail. Exporting this into UE5 under an 8k res doesn’t really cut it for the benchmark of the game that has been already set.

For example the island will have a few natural features that I have yet to integrate properly such as this canyon. I do understand due to the limitation of a single height texture there is only such limited resolution available for such detailed features.

Is there a tool within Gaea that I am under exploring? That mainly will aid me in exporting this large scale terrain in a resolution better suited for its level of detail when it becomes finalized? Potentially will splitting this into 2x2 regions exporting each one separately as an 8k map or something similar along these lines.

I appreciate any advice you can share with me in advance.

[TyXanders]

For a single tile yes, UE node only supports 8k out, Ue supports more, but following it’s recommneded guide 8k is “safe limits”

Your 1m per px metre is pretty standard for 3rd person landscapes, though I would even say on a 64km2 map you may opt for 2m per px to save memory costs at runtime, so you could actually lower your overall output resolution.

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Where you can further refine details in the map is concluding where your shapes and details are missing.

With a /graphiceq node you can debug your terrain;s detail frequency quite nicely.
If there aree particular freqencies missing shape or details that you want there, then consider tuning it some more

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This next one is a bit arbitrary but for higher frequencies you may actually see the viewport “shimmer” when in 4k, it’s sorta like looking at a bluray or some form of media that hasnt been reduced by digital compression, arbitray but quite obvious that you have detail there.

[ATom]

Might want to go the Tile Build route