I am trying to create a 1st person walking simulator (for now) that is based on a real location. The area has some thousands of square km. It’s big. I intend to use UE5 and its world partition system.
In any case, my question is: how to get, process and generate the best heightmap possible, in terms of details and resolution? So far, I have figured out these different sources and methods, but I feel like I am stuck.
- Download grayscale heightmaps as .tiff from USGS. The files are small but I don’t believe the resolution is the best out there (I think 1px is around 30m).
- JAXA is another place that claims to have height data of higher quality. I don’t see any difference and besides, I see some weird artifacts when I load a .tiff in World Machine
- Copernicus offers something more promising, big files (even 8GB) with SAR data that the Sentinel-1 satellite provides from their observations. You can’t simply use these files in a game engine or terrain creation software. I am trying to wrap my head around them and try generating the best height maps possible. I am trying to do this using SNAP Desktop along with ArcMap but so far I did not manage to produce some good raster results from the data. Has anybody used this source and have you achieved something?
- Lidar is a modern technique for generating very very high quality data but there’s no coverage for the area I am interested in
- ALOS PALSAR is another one. Didn’t get to study it yet and see what tools I can use to extract and convert the data into nice height maps for the game. Have you tried this one?
Have you ever worked with any of these sources or any other? Do you have other recommendations?
