Does UE 4 use colour maps at all?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Kia ora

I had a look at a tutorial landscape textureing using a splat map but that limited
to three colours, red green and blue right.

What I’m thinking is if I can use a colour map I can asign a texture to a colour
and colour a map like a splatmap to blend the textures to levels of my map

eg:

sandy wet bottoms (riverbeds, lakes etc) = grey
beachs river banks = brown
flat lands = green
rise’s and hills = darker green
Cliffs and mountains = Dark Grey

Or something along that line simalr to the way dDo and nDo use
a colour map to asign materials. This would give a landscape a base colour
to make less hand painting yet a good high quality texture. or an I stuck with
a splat map, that works but leaves out cliffs and vertical faces.

2

Avoid splatmaps and use weightmaps from world machine (if you’re using it).

I’m not sure if later versions fixed this, but splatmaps will work. The problem you’ll find is when you come to modify one of the layers (like adding cobble road) it’ll loose splat data and the tile you’re working on will revert to the base layer.

If that’s not a problem for you, then great… For me the weightmap (.RAW) outputs from world machine were a lot better way to go.

3

Thanks I’ll lookat finding a tutorial to see how thats done

4

Splatmaps works great and you can paint on the Landscape. Create a Greyscale png image and import it on the Target Layer.
Just right click on the Layer in the paint tool form ue4 and click “import from file”

I am not using a Splatmap directly, i use it with the method above. Save every channel as an single png file and import it.

5

Hmm interesting, you learn something new everyday.! Thanks :slight_smile:

6

I’ve never witnessed such a problem and I’m always doing this kind of work. There are chances your shader wasn’t properly setup. The good thing about using a splat map is once you paint with another layer on top of it you can paint back the splat map again if you wanted to.

7

Well good for you, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a problem and I’ve tried all sorts of ways (project submitted to the UE4 engine devs due to other issues as well)… This was back in the days of like 4.1 / 4.2 anyway…

But the weightmap system works just as well, so it does for my purposes…