Also - I will be releasing a video tutorial soon showing how you can utilize the displaced material material to larger, lower resolution landscape actors as i have been getting a few people asking me about this.
So i am going to create a quick walk-through video for using the Tessellated Displacement material on larger landscapes, does anyone have any other material specifics they want me to cover in the video for this pack?
Videos would be excellent thanks. Also I have a question, pardon me if it is very newbish.
I understand that I don’t want to create huge landscape components for the sake of performance, but you’ve mentioned creating smaller components and blending them together. I’ve been playing around with this and found that if I duplicate an existing square landscape I can manually reduced the size of this landscape to something much smaller and not square if I so wish using the standard editing tools in UE4. However, my question is - are these smaller fragments of landscape still taking up their original size resource footprint or is that footprint now proportional to its new smaller size? I was planning on using small slices of landscapes to patch in additional textures here and there to get around the limitation of having just 3 materials per landscape component.
I hope this makes sense?
Regards
Slinky
Woohoo, Go Charleston, Go Charleston! Can you explain how you make everyone of your awesome materials! =)
Hey SinkyMuffins,
The landscape actor’s resource hit depends on it’s actual polycount so if you duplicate a landscape actor then scale it down or up without changing it’s resolution then, yes, it’s resource footprint will be the same.
What i would recommend is scaling down the landscape actor’s resolution in accordance with it’s scale and keep it a proportional/square/1:1 size ratio then just use the Add Component tool to add additional squares to make it rectangular.
I will cover this in my tutorial video as well.
I see you!
Hi Charleston,
I’m not sure if this is off topic and should be coverd as well now, but are there any plans for inplementation of splatmaps and how you would set things up in your landscape material. Or is this something for future packs?
I plan on covering this is the video but if it’s not the implementation you’re looking for, if not, let me know!
Hi. Not bugging you but wondering if there was any progress on your video?
Regards
Slinky
I finally got around to doing a quick walk through of how to properly utilize the Tessellated Displacement Landscape Material on different sized Landscape Actors - If anyone has any questions let me know!
So in theory, as long as the pixels:meter ratio of my terrain heightmap is high enough, and I keep the resolution inside the engine at max, this should scale indefinitely, right? I only need a small local area tessellated at any given time, but I like to use large landscapes.
Exactly, there is a hard limit on the amount of tessellation done per quad so for higher tessellation you need more densely packed quads.
Great Video CharlestonS !
Thanks man!
Hi CharlestonS
I am trying to use the material for the creation of my landscape. It is quite handy but I found some issues which I hope you will help to resolve.
The first problem is that there are some holes appearing in the landscape geometry. They are not very obvious but when you get the settings of the “displacement max” to the higher values they become very visible. I attached some screenshots of them.
the second thing is the stretching of the textures. It seems that the displacement is working only in one direction and the maps become flat on the cliff sides. I think that I found the solution to this problem in this video where the guy is setting some “vertexnormalWS” in his material. So perhaps it will be good to have this feature integrated in your material? I just need to know how to make it right.
Here is the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3L-GlYWmpc
Hi Kvazimod, thanks for the purchase!
So, those holes you’re seeing are caused by the advanced tessellation multiplier, they are showing up i the area between the min and max fade distance. If you disable it then you will see them disappear but you will no longer have LOD for the material’s tessellation - The other alternative is to set the fade distance higher and/or change the fade threshold (distance between fade-in and fade-out) for the Tessellation. This seems to be an issue with the engine and i couldn’t find a work-around for it.
As for the World to Tangent (flat sides on cliffs, etc.) - When you use a Vector Transform (World to Tangent) with a displacement material on a landscape actor it causes the height map to be effected by the actual polygons making the tessellation have a triangular grid pattern.
Again, as far as i can tell this is an engine limitation and if there are any work-arounds for it i haven’t seen them.
I am currently working on improving the Landscape Displacement material as an update for the material pack so if i am able to fix any of these issues those fixes will be incorporated in the update.
Tesselation
Thanks for the answer CharlestonS. I really hope that you will be able to make an update and fix these problems.
Although I don’t quite understand the part about Vector transform. You say that using this makes the tessellation have a triangular grid pattern. So whats the problem? As I see, our grid is made of triangles and the grid of the object that the guy is experimenting on in the video is also in triangles.
I am still new to the engine so I hope you will understand me.
Landscape Actors are rendered differently than Static Meshes which is what the guy is using in that video so even though they are both comprised triangles the way those triangles are rendered is different which causes issues - That’s why i had to create a tessellated displacement material just for Landscape Actors because the standard method used for Static Meshes would not work.
The last time i tested World to Tangent on Landscape Actors was in 4.5 so Epic may have fixed the issue since then, i know they have increased the sampler limit so i may be able to add more layers as well.
Ok, will be interesting to see the update to your material
I wonder if it is possible to attach a texture to the material so that it covers the whole landscape? Not a tile but an image for the whole landscape. Put it to overlay mode for example.