Gaea 1.2.1.4 (currently in Bleeding Edge - see #builds for more) supports splitting your terrain into tiles for game engine friendly export and consumption. But how does split-to-tile work?
Split Only
In the Build Manager
, set your overall terrain resolution first. Then select Enable Tiles
, and choose Split Only
(the only option currently supported). Select the Resolution
for the individual tiles.
Your terrain will be built as a single heightfield/image, then split into tiles as defined by the tile resolution. You will get a small readout below the tile settings. So for example, if my export resolution is 2048 x 2048
and my tile resolution is 512 x 512
, then it is 4 x 4 tiles.
Resampling for Unreal and Unity
Unity requires a +1
pixel option for the tiles. So 1024
becomes 1025
. While Unreal has its own sizes (as explained here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/BuildingWorlds/Landscape/TechnicalGuide/index.html) such as 253 and 505.
This means you select the closest file size in the tile Resolution
property, and then choose the Resample
resolution as the Unreal or Unity friendly size.
So, Gaea will build a 2048 x 2048 terrain, split it to 16 chunks of 512 x 512, and resample each to 505 x 505.
Worth noting: to resample the ENTIRE terrain, without splitting to tiles, just use the Resample
resolution option right under the main resolution dropdown at the top of the Build Manager.
You may think resampling is a bad or that you will lose quality somehow. Not at all. In fact, it is the opposite for Unreal. You are building at 512 x 512 and downsampling to 505 x 505. This means you get an extra boost of "super sampling". And the +1 for Unity has shown negligible impact on the terrain because of the high quality image resizing algorithms Gaea uses.