[Tutorial] Landscape Material Breakdown

Loginius · Nov 2016

Hi fellow artists!

We had quite a few requests to do a breakdown on our terrain material on the fb groups "Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community" and "Ten thousand hours" so we crated a short blogpost doing just that.

The material has tessellation, height blended layers and puddles that respect to the underlying textures and can be painted in using a separate layer.

http://sanethegame.net/2016/11/26/la...ial-breakdown/

Images of the mat:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/md/1a3ke6f6mb9f.png

And a first look at the breakdown:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/y0/ds5hkb99xyiv.png

Hope this is useful to someone and lets them avoid the problems we ran into while crating this material

John Baxter · Nov 2016

Thank you so much! I've been struggling with these things myself, so I'm definitely going to read this very carefully. It looks great!

Loginius · Nov 2016

Thanks, I hope it is able to help you!

Loginius · Dec 2016

We actually created a video tutorial on this since last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAJhppttJgI

Its part 1 in a two part series.
Feel free to check it out!

John Baxter · Dec 2016

Hey, just wanted to say I was able to create a really nice tessellated material over the weekend with the help of your tutorial. It looks and performs way better than my last attempt, and I was able to do it in a fraction of the time!

Loginius · Dec 2016

John Baxter said:

Hey, just wanted to say I was able to create a really nice tessellated material over the weekend with the help of your tutorial. It looks and performs way better than my last attempt, and I was able to do it in a fraction of the time!

Glad to hear that it was useful to you!

another caveman · Dec 2016

Hello!
Thank you for the video, it really helps!
I have a question however: I just followed part 1 to the end, I am done making the landscape material, but I'd like to know if I can use it to paint on whatever mesh I want? (say I make a ground in some other soft for instance?)
I was also gonna ask about tesselation on top of that but it seems to be in part 2

thanks!

another caveman · Dec 2016

Figured out that no it's not, but I can still import it as a terrain somehow (height map etc) thanks for your video it helped a lot !
I am gonna try and add tesselation on top of that I need it like ASAP

Is it possible to have parrallax ?

Loginius · Dec 2016

Hi caveman, glad you got it figured out.
It is possible to use parrallax mapping but we find that the bump offset doesnt look good and parallax occlusion mapping is really expensive when blending multiple heightmaps so its not really worth it.
Its even more expensive then tessellation, at least the way we tried it.
For tessellation feel free to check our blog post, that should give you an idea of how to do it

Good luck!