Converting block of Cesium World Terrain into unreal landscape

Cesium for Unreal
1

Hey everyone hope you’re having a great day.

I’m working on a project where I would like to import a real world terrain to unreal landscape. I stumbled accross the Cesium project which looks like it might fit what I’m trying to achieve.

The question is, is there a way to convert a small portion of the Cesium World Terrain into unreal landscape so that I can edit the world terrain using the unreal landscape tools? This would make my life much much easier as I’ve been trying to find a solution for this problem the whole day… I just need the terrain without any textures/materials. Is there maybe a way to export a height map from the cesium terrain that can be applied to unreal landscape?

Thanks in advance

2

Hi @Memmer57, welcome to the community!

There currently isn’t a way to do that, since Cesium World Terrain is streamed dynamically and it would be difficult to apply sculpting changes. However, I think you could achieve something similar with Cesium ion’s clipping feature.

Cesium ion Clips allows you to download portions of terrain as a single glTF model. Then, you can bring the clip into 3D editing tools like Blender! We demonstrate this workflow with an example here: Editing Real-World Data from Cesium in Blender – Cesium

Let us know if that helps with your use case!

3

Thank you very much janine!

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Hi Janine,
Is it possible to clip a portion of the Cesium Moon using Cesium ion Clips?
I tried, but the Moon does not appear in the imagery or terrain selection list.

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Hey @pilgrimstranger, good news! You can actually use Cesium ion Clips with the Moon terrain! The trick is:

  1. Make sure the Cesium Moon Terrain dataset is added to your assets from the Asset Depot

  2. In Clips, select 3D Tiles (not “Terrain and Imagery”) – Moon Terrain won’t appear in the terrain/imagery list, but it will show up under 3D Tiles

That said, for future questions like this, I’d recommend opening a new topic rather than replying to an old resolved thread. It keeps things easier to search and makes sure your question gets the visibility it deserves!

Cheers!

6

For anyone landing on this thread looking for a way to convert Cesium terrain into an editable Unreal Landscape, community member @AiAiCip built a paid plugin called GeoLandscape Conformer that automates this workflow. It conforms a UE Landscape to Cesium terrain at the vertex level and handles the Z-fighting cleanup automatically:

I don’t necessarily expect everyone to be able to go buy this, but it can also at least serve as proof that this is possible.