I am in the process of choosing an auto material to work with.
I see in the marketplace that there is a wide range of prices. I also have a free one in my collection.
Wanted to ask if these materials do indeed have such a wide quality/functionality range so as to warrant such price ranges. If so, what would you look for in an auto material?
Thanks!
I donât know, because I donât have them all, but I assume thereâs a lot of crossover between them.
Unless youâve found one thatâs totally astounding, I wouldnât go over 100 bucks.
Something to factor into your research is to get a recent one, as itâs more likely to have all the latest tweaks. That doesnât always follow though, as some vendors are very good at updating their products.
Whatâs the free one you have?
The sample project âThe boy and his kiteâ contains auto-landscape material that is worth checking out. Also Brushify has a good one. You can find good tutorials showing the steps,which I can share it here if you need.
Typically you want these features:
Thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
I have one shared by Unreal Sensei, a youtuber.
Nice one, thanks a lot for the info, Iâll get into it!
Glad it helped. Keep up the good work.
Itâs worth taking the time to make your own. Yes, you can just buy assets, but then you will have no understanding of how they workâŚand when you run into performance issues you will have no clue why this is happening. If youâre unsure whether they are all the same or not, this is a good indication that you do not yet know or understand what is going on âunder the hood.â Itâs also not really possible for you to be capable of evaluating whether a marketplace landscape material looks âworth itâ if you donât understand what it is that youâre really buying.
Usually when Iâm buying an asset, Iâm paying for (1) something that I either donât have the expertise to make or (more commonly) (2) something that will save me a lot of time by acquiring instead of making it myself. Some things are time consuming and itâs worth it to avoid doing it yourself, but you should still know how they work so that you can be an informed purchaser.
UnrealSensei has one on his channel but he also has a video that goes over how to make one from scratch. I recommend going through that before you consider dropping money on assets because the learnings you will gain from doing it yourself are much more valuable than the asset itself.
EDIT: I think this is the one I was thinking of. Unreal Engine Landscape Master Material Tutorial - UE4 Tutorial - YouTube
iâm just seconding the advice above.
unless you are content to just accept whatever conditions the material gives you and not want to make any changes, it is gonna be worthwhile to at least get an idea how they work.
They are not all the same, though many share similar features. The way an author codes the thing can make a difference in how easy it is for you to make changes - that is probably the biggest difference you might notice between one or another.
Besides that, some may include tons of features that you wonât use, but not one little detail that you do want. If you take a few days to do some tutorials like shared above that will make it so that you can make the changes that you want to make more readily, and also help you make a more informed purchase.
There is also a good one available free in the Rural Australia marketplace project. In general I think purchasing these things is kinda money wasted since you can make your own in a few hours watching a tutorial, but thatâs just opinion.
HeyâŚ
Are you using the version for UE5.3 onwards, or the earlier one for UE4?
If itâs the earlier UE4 one, does it work in UE5.2 (if u ever tried it that is) as I canât currently go to a later version of UE due to an issue with the Epic Water Plugin when I use it in 5.3 (a weird doesnât draw all of water body, and odd culling of ALL the water when looking forward / downwards but not upwards in 5.3)!
Thanks if u can provide any insights!
Did you mean to direct this at @Krabworks ?
Itâs 2024.
If the concept of an âauto materialâ were to finally die off it would be almost as good as finally getting rid of Internet ExplorerâŚ
Automaterials add extra - completely worthless - processing power consumption to your final product.
You can pull the exact same final slope maps to use off of any GIS program.
Which means you can get the exact same result without forcing the end user to incur the cost of the PER PIXEL calculations which are otherwise required.
Ps: saying that the boy and his kite landscape paint is good (regardless of what date it was said in) is laughable ffs.
The overall performance was so bad that they recycled texture channels off the albedo to get it going. That, on top of using a bunch of other - albeit interesting - hacksâŚ
lol I am not sure what I have just been pulled back into discussing, my comment on this was two years ago.
P.S. I had to google âboy and his kiteâ to see what it was and that demo is almost a decade oldâŚnot exactly a modern example.
Same here 
Or the grass⌠or the rocks in the background which happen to be meshes.
Thatâs incorrect. I got these instructions from my older notes:
Migrate the assets: M_Grass_Landscape_01_INST, M_Grass_Landscape_01_INST_HOLE and M_Landscape_01
Open your projectâs level editor, select all landscape proxy actors and apply M_Grass_Landscape_01_INST
Play in editor and youâll see the foliage.
Thats assuming a lot of things.
Like you importing the correct textures, the grass meshes and a bunch of other things which arenât part of the landscape.
And for what?
It looks like sh*t and it isnt an âautomaterialâ, its a noise pattern used in a tiling setup to place grass meshes around.
Time to do it yourself?
about 5 seconds.
And you can probably use a better way to generate the noise texture too in that 5 seconds.
And if we are calling âautomaterialâ a random noise pattern which places different grass around, then we can also call the engineâs documentation section âhelpfulââŚ
Yeah, got it! Iâm only assuming you have an I.Q. of 40 and an internet connection. Letâs use this forum for constructive and helpful topics. Any auto material is customizable, you should know that. Do you know how to do it better in 5 sec? Write a tutorial in the learning section and help the community.
The only proplem which makes this thread destructive is you.
There is clearly written evidence of the fact you had an IQ rendering you incapable of adding 2+2 back in 2022.
SOMEHOW you managed to double down on it and make it eveident you havenât learned anything at all about anything (not even life or etiquette) in the last quarter of 2024.
But hey, go ahead and make an â â â of yourself some more by telling people how a thing that isnt an automaterial from 10 years ago is great and an automaterial. Im sure billions are going to take you seriously 
I think that might be a bit harsh. Hand painting materials across 64 square kilometers is going to be super tedious. A material that reacts to slope, and interacts with the foliage placement volumes, and spawns appropriate ground greeble, can be a huge time saver.
It is true that it could save a lot of runtime performance if you could then bake these materials a bit, to get less of the per-pixel cost (especially for the tri-linear calculations/samples.) Thatâd be nice, and something youâd want to do for a production AAA game, but probably can skip in pre-production, prototyping, or one-man-banding a full game.
There is also the case of deformable terrain â either the voxel plugins, or the landscape materials. Some of the auto materials work quite well for these cases. (Again, assuming the per-pixel cost isnât your biggest concern.)
Also, getting a few assets that all work well together, have consistent lighting response, and match up with the ground textures, is worth a couple of lunch coupons in itself. Yes, someone whoâs decent at modeling and texturing can do that themselves, too, but thatâs time that a small outfit might rather not spend if they can pay for it.
