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Basically, I've taken on a personal project to make a map of the town I live in to use in BeamNG.drive (a car physics sim type game).

I've taken Digital Elevation data derived from LiDAR point clouds for a 8.939 km x 8.939 km square that covers the city. I've used my GIS software (I do GIS for a living, so this part is the bit I do understand) to clip out only the roads from the entire elevation raster heightmap. The result is basically a heightmap with only the roads. My thought was that this would make the resulting mesh (which I'm making from the heightmap in WorldMachine) less complex so I could work with it in blender to smooth out the roads, and then later combine it all back into one heightmap or .dae file or something. My problem is that it's about 10.25 GB which is too big for me to work on in blender without considerable load times and lag.

Is there any sort of best practice for this workflow? Am I doing something totally wrong, or am I on the right track? I basically just need a way to smooth out the choppy roads. I've thought of dividing the heightmap into several chunks, but I'm still figuring out how the game engine would like that.

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    $\begingroup$ Is this a problem related to Blender or Worldmachine? I'm not sure to understand why you work with such polycount if your machine can't handle it. Can't you export a smaller version if you are going to semplify it anyway? $\endgroup$
    – Carlo
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 14:32
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    $\begingroup$ The biggest problem with topographic data is that it is triangulated in regular intervals, creating a lot unnecessary vertices that don't really make the models more detailed. I don't know GIS enough to know if there are ways to decimate the information directly and changing to quad topology. In blender you can do this with the decimate modifier, but that process will stress your computer quite a lot, since it has to have the whole model and calculate the interpolation. If you can successfully pull that off in blender, then you should be able to make workable models. $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 15:07
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    $\begingroup$ If you are working from raster data, all you need is a subdivided plane in blender, and work the displacement there. Again, the issue is that the displacement will need to start with a heavily subdivided plane, then apply displacement using a modifier (not in the shaders). After the displacemet then you can use the decimate modifier, to optimize the subdivisions. See: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/42640/… $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 15:13
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    $\begingroup$ Read also: blender.stackexchange.com/questions/80788/… $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 15:13
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    $\begingroup$ Maybe using meshlab to decimate would work $\endgroup$
    – susu
    Commented Feb 2, 2021 at 15:19

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