Unreal Engine 5 Blending Materials

drstalibov

Hello. I want to do material blending for painting a terrain in Unreal Engine, and I’ve done it using three materials and height lerp. My question is, since I’m doing this with RGB channels, I can’t use more than three materials. How can I use layer painting together with height lerp? I want to increase the number of materials beyond three, and also make sure the materials are painted according to their respective height maps. I’m new to this, so I apologize if I’ve written something incorrectly. I searched for this but couldn’t find anything. If you have any sources on this topic, I’d appreciate it if you could share them. It would be great if you could show this with nodes because I’m not familiar with using layer nodes yet, but I think they can be combined.

This is the node I'm using. I want to increase number of materials.

Fabi_G

Hi! I would check out Epics documentation on the topic of Landscape Materials. Perhaps they have some step by step tutorial in their documentation too.

If you want to cut out the tech-art part to focus on content, you could search for a sample project that does similar things you're looking to do and reuse its resources.

Named reroute nodes and material functions could help to improve the readability of your material graph.

drstalibov

Thanks your answer. Do you know the project in which this is used? And If you have any knowledge about terrain making, I would like to ask you something. Are the terrains in the games made in one piece or is the whole map divided into pieces? If so, how do they make the transition in the cuts at the joint? Do they make the whole map and then divide it in a 3D program?

fangazza

Seems you need to take a deep dive into docs: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/landscape-outdoor-terrain-in-unreal-engine
;-)

Fabi_G

Hi! To find suitable samples, I would comb through the marketplace.

The latest environment sample by Epic I can remember is the Electric Dreams one, but I don't know to what extend landscape is used, from the description it's a PCG showcase.

A sample project mentioning landscape content in its description is the Rural Australia one.

If you're just starting out in this area, you might want to find something useful in the UE Online Learning Category.

I don't know what your goal is ultimately, maybe if you elaborated more on it, people on here can give you pointers how to achieve it. Personally haven't used Unreals landscape tools in some time. Whether it makes sense to use depends on the specific project, reading the documentation to learn about use cases and caveats is certainly a good idea. Might find some more general yet useful info in the wiki.  

Alex_J

ben cloward has a tutorial series about landscape materials on youtube here: Fixing Landscape Tiling - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 5 (youtube.com)

drstalibov

Thank you for your answers. I will look into all of them.

In general, I want to become an Environment Artist and work in big game studios like Naughty Dog. I'm not saying I will definitely use Unreal Engine, but I currently think it's the best game engine I can use. I want to learn the craft from the basics, starting with terrain creation and mixing materials together. I also want the things I create to be optimized enough to work in a game. It's important that the resources I use are suitable for game development.

Benjammin

Landscape materials are not the easiest starting point for learning materials - Modern methods involve virtual textures, decals, flowmaps, lions, tigers, etc... The setup of all that is generally a tech artist thing.
That being said, the official wiki will explain everything. It might be worth looking at UE tech breakdowns so you get an idea of what's possible. 

poopipe

I agree with that
but since you're there already



what I usually do is.. 
build material functions for specific terrain types - eg. grass. these materials might have slope blending, various stuff to break up tiling, heightblending between the various textures - whatever is needed
then
use the specific landscape layer blending node (the one that uses the painted weightmaps) to composite the materials,  the node supports heightblending between materials already 

once that works you can worry about virtual textures and all the other stuff (its very simple, but not something you want to worry about while you're developing the materials and settling on the look.

drstalibov

Thank you for your responses.
The answers you provided helped clarify many things in my mind. Right now, I'm trying to create materials for landscapes by using texture cell bombing to randomize tiles and then combining the materials using landscape blending to paint in landscape mode.

Additionally, I'm open to any advice you might have for becoming an Environment artist. Where should I start? What should I learn?

 By the way, I'm currently working at a small game studio where I arrange the models I make and the ones that are made in Unity. It's a very small game studio, and my first job has helped me grow a lot. So I have knowledge in modeling, texturing, and creating modular pieces.

Benjammin

I'd suggest following the official guide so you understand how unreal's landscape and weightpainting works. When you have a basic landscape material setup, you can start getting fancy.