Hello guys! I am working on a pipeline to import tiled lanscapes from Houdini to UE4, that is 9 tiles of 4034*4034. Since it's a huge area, it won't be an option for my team to use the classic HDA approach to generate terrain in UE4. Instead, I feel it's much faster to load the terrain into UE4 by creating a HDA that load heightmaps from disk and then transform based on its tile index.

However, by doing that I notice the heightmap loss its details badly. I read SideFx's interview with the developers of Uncharted 4(https://www.sidefx.com/community/fx-adventures-in-uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end/) and they mentioned something like “since we could only use 8-bit textures we had to render the 16-bit height encoded in a 2-channel 8-bit map.” Can I do something silimar to this in a Hou-UE4 workflow if I can only use the heightmap I/O workflow?

Tips anyone? Thank you so much!