Creating Tire Tracks in Landscape Sand
I was hoping someone can help me out with this. I have an environment I have created using megascans and a quixel landscape material in UE5.1.1. I would like to create randowm tire tracks in the sand but I am not sure how to go about it. This question was asked some time ago in this forum and there were verying answers but no direct solutions I could figure how to implement with my current knowledge.
I found a texture in Quixel that has the tire tracks. My thought is that the ideal way would be to possiby paint the tracks onto the landscape. I have limited knowledge in creating landscape materials with layer information but my assumption is that if my current landscape material had a layer with the tire tracks texture, this painting idea would probably work. I opened the material for the landscape and there is no way for me to get my head wrapped around that setup to create another node for layer information.
I then thought that maybe I could create another landscape by duplicating this current landscape area and then create a material with the tire track to apply to that duplicate landscape, Then, by subtle sculpting, I could get this mesh to expose itself in some areas to show the tracks. This seems like such a hack though.
Similar to this was to export the mesh to 3ds max, create other "patch" meshes that have the tire tracks material and reimport to unreal but this feels like another hack similar to the previous thought
I thought of using the spline tool to create a linear path of the tracks in the landscape but I am not sure how to go about that yet. The texture would need to be one that can be replicated into a continuous linear path.
Any other helpful thoughts or methods to accomplish this?
Replies
For static tire tracks I would use decals.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/using-decals-in-unreal-engine/