UDK: Cannot import heightmap properly from UDK

We’re using both UDK and Worldmachine at the office. Our level designer has made the necessary landscape, heightmaps, layer and all within the whitebox. However, exporting the .raw file from UDK doesn’t seem to be accepted by Worldmachine. Is there something we’re missing at the import or export stage? We’ve been banging our heads trying to convert the exported file into something Worldmachine will accept without any luck. As of the moment, our remaining solutions are scrapping the blockout heightmap and remaking it after Worldmachine or just forgoing Worldmachine… neither of these feel ideal and aren’t a positive workflow going forward. Does anyone have any solutions? Thanks in advance.

Hi there,

I believe the problem might lie in the fact that when UDK is exporting a heightmap, it names it .raw when it really is a .r16 file. Make sure the exported heightmap is named .r16 either on export or after the fact and WM should have no problems importing it!

(as a further aside, this has been reported frequently enough that I have put making WM autodetect the raw type on a .raw extension into the queue for the next maint. release!)

Cheers,

Thank you for the quick response. There were a number of problems we discovered but we found a solution to most of them.

In the interest of optimization we had removed unneeded components from the Landscape in UDK, exporting that causes a lot of problems obviously. We had to go back through our Repo and find a version with the original component / pixel count so we could get a proper export. We also discovered the renaming .r16.

This isn’t exactly related to anything as critical as failure to import, but your signature says Guru so I thought I’d ask. It doesn’t seem that many people go from UDK > World Machine > UDK (but it gives our designer the freedom to make the terrain he needs to iterate with, so we like it), so I haven’t found much information on this. Our landscape we worked on last night was really just a product of me eyeballing the elevation when importing into World Machine and then eyeballing again the results (from WM) when importing into UDK and scaling the landscape model. I’d love to get some actual guidelines on that, is it possible to get a 1:1 ratio from the original landscape in UDK and the final landscape in UDK?

Thanks again!