UE5 Massive Mesh Tile Terrains

Unreal Engine 5 Massive Mesh Tile Terrains.
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TerreSculptor by Demenzun Media
This video was created by Demenzun Media in British Columbia Canada.

[@demenzunmedia]

You may have noticed in the video that I mention that the TerreSculptor TileEx Creator currently supports up to 52 x 52 tiles for 2704 total tiles.
Since more people are going with larger and larger terrain systems, I have increased the maximum tile count in TileEx to 1000 x 1000 tiles for 1,000,000 maximum total tiles.
A 2048 x 2048 OBJ mesh tile file is 800MB, so 1 million of them would be 800TB of disk space, which should definitely be large enough for most people's uses.

[@Nysa3D]

Good job!

[@lazyhexor]

Thank you for this mate

[@demenzunmedia]

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

[@ValkyrianGaming]

so what would the benifit of using a meshed map be over using a normal height map, and would be amazing if you had a discord.

[@demenzunmedia]

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.

[@MichaelMoellerTRLInc]

Really interesting option. In your below response on the benefits you mentioned a disadvantage of losing the in-engine Landscape editing. Does this include any terrain deformation as well? Are there any other disadvantages that come to mind?

[@demenzunmedia]

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.

[@MichaelMoellerTRLInc]

@@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.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@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.

[@MichaelMoellerTRLInc]

@@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.

[@demenzunmedia]

@@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.

[@mindped]

is there a good way to handle collisions for performance reason in a game?

[@demenzunmedia]

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.

[@crimson7377]

Hey man, just read your comment about your ex wife.
Hope you’re doing better bud, stay strong.

[@saturn5312]

Wut