Creating complex landscape materials?

Development Rendering
, , , , ,
1

Hi,
I’m rather new to UE4 and I’m now currently experimenting on photorealistic scenes. Through tutorials and guides I’m quickly grasping the basics of the material editor, but it’s a few days I’m stuck with the landscape painting system.
It seems strange to me, that creating a material containing many other materials is the only way to do it. If you are working with only a few kinds of terrain it’s ok, but if I’m in need of using many different textures and materials, sometimes even complex, isn’t there any other way?

Let’s say I have 30 different kind of terrains, all showing textures with at least a resoultion of 2048x2048 px… How would you proceed to use them on a landscape?

Thanks in advance, I’m hoping to understand a bit more about this system as it feels like I’m missing something of obvious!

2

You could use Static Mesh instancing instead. Half of Epic demos have no Landscape.

But there are no better way to blend materials except make them in one shader.

Landscape could handle up to 128 material nodes.

I’ve never seen more than 5-6 materials at once. Moreover using 30 x 2K maps same time would be unwise in means of performance.

Speaking of Photorealistic, landscape can’t be one. it’s just huge plain surface. It’s the assets/foliage that makes scene realistic.

3

You could always make different types of terrain into separate models. Take these models into say substance painter/designer and paint on all the detail you wish - that way it’s not performance heavy in unreal as the complex texture you created is simply applied as one shader.

You can then join all the meshes together and use some basic unreal landscape sculpting with rocks to blend them all.

This is just an idea, but this is how I make a lot of my more complex terrains.

4

Let’s say I have 30 different kind of
terrains, all showing textures with at
least a resoultion of 2048x2048 px…
How would you proceed to use them on a
landscape?

For a single landscape the answer is simple. You can’t. It is outside of the scope of what can be realistically achieved with modern hardware.
In a large world you have an option to have multiple landscapes, that are loaded and unloaded as needed.

Also, staying photo-realistic has nothing to do with number of layers on landscape.

5

TASTY TREAT…I would watch the entire video but at 1:02:20 in the video is the answer…select all materials including normals in the blueprint, look in the details panel and you will see sampler source, change default to shared wrap and bango bingo.