i have a basic terrain that's 2048x2048 and a heightfield_output. if i just export the texture pressing the SAVE TO DISK button in the heightfield output, it actually saves out a 1024x1024 image which isn't correct. If i go and manually set the resolution to 2048x2048 in the heightfield output and press the save button again, it saves out a 2048 texture but it's broken. it's exporting only 1920x1080 of data and the rest of the image is blank.

I asked customer support this and they said yup they're reproducing it as well and so they filed a bug.

ok.... well what about if i chop the terrain up into chunks smaller than that 1920x1080 res cap? nope that doesn't fix it either because it'll just be exporting the same empty data to those multitudes of files.

So... i went from houdini ver 18.5 down to 18.0, thinking that'd solve it but nope! So i tried 17.5 and that's broken there too! So what in the world am I doing wrong? How are you folks exporting terrain larger than 1024 because all my attempts are failing...?

and yes this is a licensed houdini core i'm running.

thanks in advance!
-seneca

i've since found two hacks around this bug. if you export a single channel image instead of a packed channel image, it'll work correctly. and if you export the terrain through the unreal plugin, it'll not export the image, but it will get the terrain into unreal which is what i was ultimately aiming for. of course, i'm going to have to export to the greyscale image anyways because i can't have houdini recompiling the terrain from scratch every time i open the file because the erosion compilations take way too long...

You don't need to have Houdini every time "recompiling" terrain from scratch. What you normally do, you basically have a HIP file where you generate your terrain, at the end you save it as BGEO. Then you create a simple HDA which just merges that BGEO and that HDA is loaded in Unreal.

hektor
You don't need to have Houdini every time "recompiling" terrain from scratch. What you normally do, you basically have a HIP file where you generate your terrain, at the end you save it as BGEO. Then you create a simple HDA which just merges that BGEO and that HDA is loaded in Unreal.

awesome thanks! i really didn't want to have to save out multiple images (for height / water / etc), so i'm glad this will fix that.

Out of curiosity, I get the impression you have to have two HIP files, because if i have both a terrain file load and a terrain file generation inside my HDA, unreal will compile both, when i obviously don't want it to compile the terrain generation part.

I THOUGHT that not having the terrain generation go to an output node would stop unreal from compiling it, but nope. I then thought that having the terrain gen and terrain file load go to a switch and the switch is just set to load the file would have unreal not compile it, but nope there as well. I'm brand new to houdini, but am I correct in that there's really no easy way to have the terrain gen be in your scene, but stop unreal from ever compiling it because there's already an image baked? In all the other node based apps i use, they don't compile any code that's not hooked up to the out or a switch, so i feel i'm missing something.

i could probably select all the terrain gen nodes and disable them, but i don't want to do that because some of them are temp nodes that need to be disabled, so if i disabled all, i'd have to find the ones that were supposed to be disabled and disable them again (every time), which sounds annoying.

If you have a simple HDA where you read a once generated BGEO file with the landscape. Houdini Engine in unreal wouldn't cook anything while you've opened the level. At the end of the day, if that's not fast enough. You can always bake landscape to actor:



The last question, you're getting the message which says "Cooking" not "compiling" right?