Certain Landscape Layers appear blocky

Development World Creation
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1

Hello people,

Please o please, unreal Gods, deliver me from this pain.

I’m a bit of a beginner with UE5 and I recently learned how to set up landscape material layers to paint with. This worked great for the first 3 materials, after which I attempted to create a stone path texture only to find myself with a brush that refuses to paint anything except these ugly blocky splotches no matter how I fiddle with the brush settings (see image attached for a comparison between one of my previous materials and this new one).

Screenshot 2024-10-30 205628
Screenshot 2024-10-30 2056281920×1082 251 KB

I’ve been wrestling with this for hours now, and I’ve already determined a few things from my tests:

  1. This is not a landscape resolution issue seeing as my other layers work perfectly fine, but just in case I still tried to change the res and lo and behold, same result.

  2. I’ve tried swapping the individual texture image of the faulty layer in the material Blueprint around with my other landscape layer textures to see if it had to do with some kind of weird setting I’d forgotten when setting this particular layer up but, nope, swapping the texture to a different layer makes that layer just as blocky even without touching any settings.

  3. All my layers are set to LB Weight Blend in the landscape layer blend node, and I set all my layer infos as Weight Blended (Normals) when setting up. Other blending modes in the landscape layer node settings served little purpose, the height blending looked a little better I suppose but even there the blockiness was still evident.

  4. I’ve tried going back to Photoshop (where I made each of these textures including the ones that work fine) to mess around with resolution. I made two blank white test textures, one at 225x225 @ 72 ppi (this is the resolution I’d accidentally set the texture to originally before changing it) and 2560x2560 @ 300ppi. Both of these textures also had the blocky problem when made into landscape layers. In fact it was somehow worse with both of these, and both were identically blocky despite the difference in resolution.

I’ve scoured the internet for similar issues and each one either didn’t have a satisfactory answer. or the answer provided did not solve my issue. I did come across a thread about somebody who fixed this by tweaking their weightmaps (?) but being a beginner I have no idea how or what that is, and looking into it didn’t enlighten me too much either.

I will be eternally grateful to anyone who can provide me with any clarity on this issue.

2

Thats just how the landscape works.

You have 1 vertex evry unreal unit (which is the same as a meter).

The resolution you have to change would be tjat of the landscape.

Common ways to lessen the effect are to filter the edge by some other texture.
Its also why your height blend looked slightly better.

Add some other texture to break up the linearity of the paint, use bigger paint brushes that cover areas larger than 1 meter.

Etc.

3

Oh, interesting, thanks.

In that case why is it that my other landscape layer materials blend so much better? (like the orange one in the picture) Afterall if I’m getting this right they’re all on the same landscape resolution and all have the same settings, yet for some reason the stone material layer comes out blotchy and the Dirt doesn’t. If there’s something I can look for to guarantee that kind of smooth blending I’d love to know so I can do it in future :+1:

4

Noticed another thing, put up a video here

The layers seem to behave entirely differently to each other in the way they’re blended with the other materials onto the landscape. This is most obvious when erasing a portion of the functional material (red dirt) vs the broken material (stone). The red dirt can be smoothly blended away by another material whereas the stone gets erased sharply per-square.

No idea what to make of this but figured it was interesting.

5

In this case, i think it’s just the height blend that gives the illusion of smoothness.

The better the texture used for the blend, the less you notice the blotchiness factor.

If you use no blending and solid cloros, you basically get hard lines everwyehre, circles too.

Under the hood, each meter ends up being a pixel.
If you try and export the painted layers you should see that.

Like I said, you can use the same texture as teh red material in the height blend of the other, and get slightly better results.

Also do make sure the layer data you created is the correct tipe while at it…