Adding Displacement

To add a displacement map, you just have to enable the Displacement space in the builder, and then add your map.

Once done, you have 2 ways of actually getting displacement from the map, Tessellation and Virtual Heightfield Mesh.

Tessellation adds geometry near the camera then moves that geometry according to the displacement map. Using Tessellation requires excluding the layer from caching.

Virtual Heightfield Mesh uses the displacement to generate another mesh matching the landscpae in size, but with the vertices changed to suit the displacement. It does NOT need excluding from caching.

Example of displacement on the rock sub-layer. You can notice how it "bulges" out of the terrain.

Tessellation (UE4 Only)

Click on the MASTER button to open the master. On the right, set GTessellation Mode to "Flat Tessellaion" or "PN Triangles".

The Tessellation Quality changes the number of mesh subdivisions.

In the exampl below, the dense area is set to 5, and the lesser dense area further away is another Sub-Layer set to 0. Each sub-Layer can have its own quality depending on its needs.

The Displacement force affects how further up the vertices will go based on the map.

Virtual Heightfield Mesh (UE4-5)

You need to have set virtual textures on the terrain with the volumes. See Landscape Caching for more information.

Place a Virtual Heightfield Mesh actor in your scene, and in its detail set the Virtual Texture to your "World Height" VT.

Then, click on "Set Bounds" and in Heightfield click on "Build" next to "Build MinMax Texture". Let it build its mesh.

The build time can take some times, depending on the size of your terrain and size of your height VT.

Then, create a new material.

It will be used to apply the texture of the landscape into the Virtual Heightfield Mesh.

The material should look like this : a Runtime Virtual Texture Sample linked to our normal VT, which sets the Color/Specular/Roughness/Normal to our Heightfield Mesh.

Assign this material to your VHF and you're done !

Note however that excluded layers aren't in the Virtual Texture and as such won't be on the VHF !

The VHF can be hidden in editor to not interfere with the edition of your Landscape Instance, in its details. It is hidden by default !

The displacement maps & their force values blends with each other, if 4 sub-layers blends with each other then their dispalcement would be a middle-ground between each of their values.