A little mountain environment

Hey everybody!

is a little mountain environment I’m working on. The plan is to get a small castle built up in there somewhere, but I might have to scope down my ambitions a bit. Still a lot of work to do and at the moment I’m working on the landscape shader. Will try to keep this thread updated. Any feedback is most welcome :slight_smile:

Really fantastic terrain! Hard to make out close up details from these images, but it looks like there is quite a lot of detail there already. What software are you using to generate the terrain / textures?

Thanks, I’m using worldmachine for the terrain.

That terrain looks phenomenal! When I first glanced at it, I thought that you had just posted a photo for real life terrain. Keep up the great work Pampers.

Looking good! :slight_smile:

I’d love to get a peek of the material setup for the terrain!

Or the world machine nodes- looks awesome.

Love the gentle slopes

Great work! beautiful details

Very good work ! I love the feel

Looks great, love it.

Looking awesome! Yes, World Machine’s erosion nodes are really great, giving those realistic looking mountain slopes.

One question: It seems you made good use of WM’s global colormap. I tried to do so myself, but couldn’t find a good way to blend them with the detail textures at close distance. Have you used colormaps? If so, would be really interested in your material setup… Also, did you make use of a WM generated normal map, or just used UE4 internally calculated normals?

So atm I am just using albedo and normalmap for far away distances, then I fade in some tilling normal maps for stuff that is a little closer, so for the terrain that is closest to the player I fade in a new set of textures. Or that is the plan anyway, have to keep a close eye on the texture count if I do it this way :slight_smile:

Interesting. Sorry if I kep bombarding you with questions, I am trying to do similar things but am not really a shader guru. Feel free to ignore me… :slight_smile:

How do you do the distance blend? I couldn’t find an appropriate shader node (apart from a DistanceBlend that seems to be thought for particles). Are you calculalting this yourself based on camera distance? Or are you blending between materials?

Also, I couldn’t get a convincing blend between the colormap and the detail textures. I tried an approach like in CryEngine where they multiply in desaturated detail textures - that looked somewhat OKish, but not really good. Then I tried using an average color value from the detail textures as the value for World Machine’s color generator nodes in the colormap texture, but that didn’t look convincning as well.

Again, sorry for bothering you, and i can perfectly understand if you’d like to keep that to yourself - I am grateful for every tiny hint…

Looks great, can we see a more close up shot as well to see the detail in the textures?

I think I use the same setup as this UDK Forums Update - UDK Content Creation and Design - Epic Developer Community Forums atm for the distance. I am away on vacation right now so can’t open the editor and check :slight_smile: Also, what looks good when blending the textures depends a bit on how you are going to see it in-game, whether you are going far away to very close in a short amount of time like a flying game or stick to the ground like an fps or racing game, I guess.

Tiny update. Been working on the nuts and bolts on my landscape shader, adding material functions and some debug stuff like the flat color setup to help visualize where the different blends happen between far, near and up close. Using a material instance and parameters to control the distance and the falloff values. Also just using Epics textures as placeholders :slight_smile:

Awesome man, I need to setup a shader like that :slight_smile:

Simply stunning. Great job.

Wow, that looks really awesome!
I’d like you to show us more of your fantastic work in future :slight_smile: