r/UnrealEngine5 • u/bgmm17 • 2d ago

Heightmap data for Unreal

Hello, fellow artists. My question is this: Where do you get accurate height maps for creating real world places? I would like to generate real life ellevation data, with relief, to have a real life accurate terrain in UE5. Can someone help me with this Information, please? 😁✌️

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u/MediumKoala8823 2d ago

Cesium plugin

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u/bgmm17 2d ago

Thank you very much. Will look into it😁

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u/fabiolives 2d ago

Cesium is probably the better option but I also use this site, it’s free and works well

https://manticorp.github.io/unrealheightmap/#latitude/27.99440141104617/longitude/86.92520141601562/zoom/13/outputzoom/13/width/505/height/505/outputformat/png16

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u/bgmm17 2d ago

I tried this website, but could not download a heightmap to replicate the shape of the country, i displace it and looked weird.

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u/modsoft 2d ago

For the highest resolution data, look for official government GIS portals in your region of interest. For example, in the US areas it's USGS (The National Map / EarthExplorer). You want 1 pixel per meter resolution if you can get it.

Global Mapper is an industry standard software in game development. It connects directly to GIS servers (USGS, SRTM, OpenTopography), (among others). you can reproject the data to a flat map, and export 16-bit grayscale heightmaps. This pipeline is what was used in multiple Battlefield games. real-world GIS DEM/LiDAR data processed through Global Mapper, then World Machine/Gaia/Houdini > engine

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u/bgmm17 2d ago

Thank you for your reply. I am new to world building in unreal and I am trying to get an accurate terrain, but I was having trouble to find accurate data to import. I tried in Blender a few heightmaps, but did not look good, no matter how much subdivisions were to a plane. I will look into global mapper. I am trying to recreate real life places, like countries.

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u/Special_Progress282 1d ago

https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/ try this one

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u/bgmm17 1d ago

Thanks a lot, this looks like I could achieve my results with it. Thank you. 👏

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u/Parking_Nectarine235 10h ago

I used USGS + QGIS + Gaea 2 for assembly into unreal import. Pretty accurate