UDK beginner questions

Leodido

I recently started making a map for RO2 which is a WW2 FPS and I'm having some issues so I thought I'd make a thread where I could add my questions to you guys.

First all, RO2 SDK is based on UDK September 2010 release so there's lots of stuff that hasn't been fixed.

So my first problem is this: I have several terrain material setup layer with each a material I made assigned to them (only one), they are all very simple mats. I have 5 materials that work perfectly, but I'm trying to add a new one and as soon as I try to paint on the terrain this happens.
I tried recaching the terrain materials a few times but it doesn't fix this.

Oniram

from what i know about using terrain, you cant have more than 4 layers painted over each other. once you get the 5th layer in an area where there are 4 other layers, you get that "rainbow map" as i call it.

have you tried messing around with landscape? i havent used it but i think you may be able to have more textures with it.. this though would require you to use the march 2011 or higher version of UDK.

Leodido

Oh I see, it makes sense.
it's a shame because the UDK 2010 september version doesn't have any landscape stuff I can't use an older version.

Leodido

I'm working on a steppe type of terrain, I've been fiddling with various material and now I'm thinking about the folliage. I tried looking around but there aren't a lot of resources of how to make actual folliage (grass etc..) could anyone point me in the right directon please?

ultramedia

Just for the record, that rainbow pattern is an error texture from your video card which is complaining because your terrain materials are trying to use more textures than it can handle on one mesh.

So you can have as many layers as you like in a terrain, they just can't collectively use more than 16 different textures.

ultramedia

For one way of working around this limit, google for info about texture atlases in udk.

Leodido

I'm currently working on the terrain material and since I'm getting most of my textures from cgtexture they are between 500-700px wide. Most of the texture that RO2 uses are at 2048px, is there anyway to improve my cgtexture or should I really aim to get larger texture to make into 2048?

Oniram

usually ill never grab the tileable textures from cgtexture because of their size limit (Unless you have the paid account). when it comes to making large textures it would probably be best for you to grab 2 or 3 similar textures at large res (the ones that are not tileable) and just do some blending in photoshop between them, crop to be square (2k x 2k) and then do some masking work to get it to tile.

passerby

ya i do exactly what Oniram does, to make tiling textures, has a few advantages to just dling the tiled one, you can play with the scale more, and depending on the piece you can cover up details that would give it away as being tiled, or in the case of a unique texture you could take the most interesting details from each of the few images you used.

this also helps your stuff look different from others peoples too, since there only really is 5 or 6 good photo refs in each material category in cgtextures, and chances are they were heavily used by other artists, so composing yours out of a set helps make it unique too.

Leodido

I'm having an issue with my material tiling when I use it on large surfaces.
What do you guys do to reduce that tiling? I guess using grass, trees and other assets to hide the tiling could be good but what about modifying the material to reduce that effect?

I've tried this method : http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TerrainAdvancedTextures.html#Multi-UV Mixing: Reducing tiling through scalar mixing
While being nice it is not very optimal, is there any other method to do that? A method that wouldn't use another texture sample would be nice as well, since we are limited in the number we can use and I'm doing a game map this is important.

Jessica Dinh

Try increasing the size of the tile? If you double click the Terrain Material, there should be an option in the properties to change the Mapping Size. Not sure if that's what you mean though.

Leodido

I didn't know about this property, thanks for the head sup.
But anyway I'm not sure it will fix my problem, what I mean is if you use a seamless texture in your material and use said material on a large surface, you'll notice the texture tiling (see image).



Basically I was wondering if some shader magician had any idea how I could change this material without using another texture sample to reduce that tiling.

ArchieVision

In UDK, you can use the same texture several times without having another draw call or uping your texture count. In any case, you can use a lerp, an alpha mask and a copy of the same texture in a different scale to reduce the tiling. Of you can add the 2 together, and put in a constant clamp to keep from getting artifacting. Experiment and research. I have over 20 Landscape and Terrain material tuts on my YouTube. A little Google goes a long ways.
http://www.youtube.com/user/UDKLearning

Good Luck,

Lee

Leodido

thanks man, I'll check those tuts

Jessica Dinh

Or if that doesn't work for you, you could always just fix the texture!

Leodido

I did some material tweaking and got this

Clarence

There is a way that you can solve the tiling issue that involves actually using the same texture but at a distance it won't show as if it's tiled as much as it really is. Sort of like how you would have two normal maps on lets say a brick wall. One for looking at the wall at a distance and then another for when you are up close to it showing different depth. I'm really drawing a blank on how it's done but I know that I have this in a few of my materials. I'll post some photos of the materials..

Leodido

thanks, I'd like to see this