However, it is also possible to drape your terrain with real aerial imagery, captured by satellite, aircraft, or even your own drone (assuming you have the capability of orthorectifying and registering the imagery yourself). You may want to paint your landscape manually later, once it’s formed, using the UE4 editor tools to modify its appearance, layering materials such as grass, dirt, roads, etc., to visually define the elevation surface. Resolution varies depending on source, but publicly available data is typically found at 1 arc-second per image pixel, which equates roughly to one elevation measurement every 30 meters. The upper-left pixel is defined as being at a specific geographic coordinate and the gray-scale value of each pixel is an integer that gives the height above sea level for that point. It is commonly found as a 16-bit gray-scale heightmap in GeoTIFF format, which is essentially a standard TIFF image file with embedded geographic information. This is a regularly spaced grid of elevation points that is available in various formats. These may be freely available from government (local, state, or federal) resources in some areas, or they may need to be commercially sourced, depending on the area of interest and your project requirements.Īt minimum, digital elevation data will be required to give three-dimensional form to your terrain. To accurately represent an area of actual terrain within a game, or any other virtual environment, the developer must first begin by collecting location-specific geographic source data. This article provides an overview of the process for developing such a virtual terrain, running in UE4, using an example case of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Or possibly, you need to enable scientists to safely explore the terrain of a difficult or dangerous environment.

Maybe you are working on previsualization for a film being shot at a remote location.

But what if you would like to integrate real-world terrain within such a game environment? Perhaps you are developing a new game based in a very specific place. Many of these games feature rich, imaginary landscapes for the player to wander about on their given quest. A wide variety of video games can be developed with powerful game development platforms, such as Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), ranging from first-person shooters to role-playing games.

Unreal engine 4 heightmap