Masking Terrain Texture Blends?

Zipfinator

I've seen a few people say it's now possible to mask the blending of terrain textures with the new landscape system like you would with vertex paint but I haven't figured out a way and the threads where people say how to do it weren't very clear. Could anyone who's figured it out post a picture of the material setup?

Thanks.

sprunghunt

there's a picture of a material which does that in this thread

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86751

Zipfinator

The only picture I see in that thread is of that lady in the black shirt.

sprunghunt

Zipfinator wrote: »

The only picture I see in that thread is of that lady in the black shirt.

Well there used to be a picture of a shader. Ask chris89 to change it back!.

maybe I'll make a new image of how to do this when I get home.

Bart

sprunghunt wrote: »

Well there used to be a picture of a shader. Ask chris89 to change it back!.

maybe I'll make a new image of how to do this when I get home.

Great ! That would be also very helpful for me

Swizzle

I was actually trying to figure out this exact problem last week. This is what I came up with. I haven't had a chance to work on this for a few days since I've been kind of busy at work.

A good chunk of this was based on Laurens Corijn's Vertex Blending Snow tutorial. Currently it only uses two textures for each channel, but I'm sure it's possible to use far more textures each for diffuse, normal, spec, etc.

This is what it looks like with various weights painted on the Landscape:


Here's what the overall shader layout looks like:


And here are some closeups of the nodes:





It's a fairly simple setup, when you get right down to it. The key thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to use TerrainLayerWeight nodes to make blending layers for the Landscape system to use. You'll also want to utilize a TerrainLayerCoords node to give your textures proper mapping on the terrain.

You just need a couple of textures to blend together and a depth map to control blending between different materials.

Ace-Angel

I would give my left ball for a good tutorial on Landscape, almost all of them I have seen, don't explain 'the logic' behind how the system is setup, so it leaves very little room to go all crazy on the materials and loads for getting it wrong.

Swizzle: Hey, thanks for that, really useful info! Question, mind if you could upload the material package? I created the exact same material as yours, but all I get is a black material over several 'components'. It would be much appreciated.

Also, what version of UDK?

Zipfinator

@Swizzle, thanks for the write-up and pictures. Maybe it'd just be easier to use a mesh and vertex paint for now until I feel like sitting down and figuring it out for the terrain.

@Ace, I would think he's using the August version. I think it was possible to do in July too though.

Swizzle

I'll put together a little writeup on how to get Landscape working with that material in a bit.

Swizzle

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=88347

There's a little writeup on how to do some basic stuff in Landscape. I'm going to add to that in the second post by outlining how the vertex blending material I posted above works, though I probably won't be able to get to that until tomorrow.