Unreal 4.26.2 Crashing Everytime I Export To Unreal

[anechoicE]

Hello,

As a brand new user of Instant Terra coming from a year of work with World Machine, let me start by saying I am INCREDIBLY impressed and excited by Instant Terra, especially with this beta plugin for Unreal. It's an enormous time saver by eliminating all the landscape material layer setup and masks, as well as the rendering time for erosion nodes in Instant Terra. I am already a convert, and I can't even get it to work right yet.

Here's my goal and here's my problem. Goal: To import a large and long coastal landscape via the Instant Terra for Unreal plugin, and get it to interact with the Ocean Water Body with Unreal 4.26's new water system. The problem is that every time I create a new landscape in a new Unreal project, no matter what size, I can send the Landscape to Instant Terra to edit, but Unreal crashes every time I try to send the landscape back to Unreal from Instant Terra. (It did work for me once with a small default size landscape, and it was able to be deformed by the Unreal water system once, but I didn't save that test and I haven't been able to get it to work again since.)

I followed the getting started instructions for the plugin installation, and everything works perfectly up until the final step of importing the terrain back to Unreal. Unreal even prompts me for the locations to store the materials and layer info needed for the landscape. To recreate this, I used everything default (default UE4 landscape size, default Instant Terra project, default layers, default locations).  I even tried removing all the masks and layers and just trying to get heightmap data to import back to unreal successfully. All except for that one try has crashed.

Is there something I am missing or might need to change? Has anyone else had this issue?  I recognize that maybe I need to roll back to Unreal 4.26.1 which I will test shortly. Unfortunately space on my machine is very limited now and I need 4.26.2 for work at the moment. I will report back when i can test on 4.26.1

I am using:

Unreal Engine 4.26.2
Instant Terra 2.1.3.13217
Windows 10 Pro (OS Build 10.0.19041)
128 GB Ram
GeForce GTX 1080Ti

Thanks!
Eric

[Marianne Calva]

Hi Eric,
thanks a lot for this nice feedback!
We have been working with Unreal Engine latest official version, so it should be 2.26.2 (not at the office anymore to double check now).
Difficult to understand what's wrong here. Can I ask to share your Instant Terra project (the . terrain file), and send it to support@wysilab.com, to let the dev team investigate on Monday?
Thanks again, and hopefully we'll understand and find a solution. That's what beta programs are for!

  Marianne

[anechoicE]

Hi Marianne,

Thanks for the quick response. I just sent an email to support with the project file (it's just the default project the plugin creates) as well as a video recording of my whole process of creating a new unreal project and using the plugin to start a new Instant Terra project. The video shows a reliable recreation of this crash I have been experiencing. Please let me know if there is anything else I can provide. Monday is totally fine, I'm in no rush.

Thank you!
Eric

[Alexis Vaisse]

Hi Eric,

Thank you for the detailed report and the video.

We found the bug. It was caused by the ‘Enable Edit Layers’ property of the landscape which was not handled correctly by the plugin.

We’ve just released a new version of Instant Terra Unreal Plugin, which is version 0.5.1 (initial version was 0.5.0).
You can use the same link to download it.
Please remove the previous version of the plugin, replace it by the new one and let us know if it works.
Thanks.

FYI if the landscape has several Edit Layers, Instant Terra always updates the first one and leaves the other ones unchanged.
We’ll add this information in the documentation a little later.

[anechoicE]

Hi Alexis,

This update fixed the problem! I can now load my Instant Terra project back into unreal without a crash and it interacts with the water system.  Thank you for your quick resolve of this issue! Looking forward to spending more time with this now this week.

Eric