Building large continental maps

NAIMA

Whats the best tool and approach to build large terrains like continents or even planetary scale ? With plenty of details etc? To use as world map for open world?

oglu

Inhouse engines. There arnt any "highend" tools available to the standard user.
The closest you can get in Unreal5.

NAIMA

I mean to create the terrain , sculpt, etc, There aren't many good tools inside the game engines to do that, you usually have to rely on external sources like world machine or others, but as far as I know those only work for limited spaces and not planetary or continental scales.

poopipe

Computers aren't big enough to store the planet at a resolution that makes sense from ground level.  Everything is broken into tiles in these systems and therefore worldmachine/Gaea etc are perfectly fine

I'm not sure if Cesium for unreal allows for custom data but that's as close as you'll get without custom tools. 

NAIMA

poopipe said:

Computers aren't big enough to store the planet at a resolution that makes sense from ground level.  Everything is broken into tiles in these systems and therefore worldmachine/Gaea etc are perfectly fine

I'm not sure if Cesium for unreal allows for custom data but that's as close as you'll get without custom tools. 

I know Worlmachine had problems with tiles , but Gaea I didn't try , checking their site they do have an entry for tiled builds but no explanations or text in the help guide, means its a planned feature but not yet implemented?

NAIMA

Also I see there is World creator too now, I was wondering what are the pros and cons relative to those three softwares.

poopipe

Last time I checked Gaea will export tiled areas but won't go past 32k in one file and that requires the expensive version

NAIMA

poopipe said:

Last time I checked Gaea will export tiled areas but won't go past 32k in one file and that requires the expensive version

32k you mean and overall size of the map like 32000 pixels wide?

poopipe

Yes