I don’t know why actually. I’m obsessed about creating everything myself. Firstly I want to learn how to create my own assets and I’m excited about it. Secondly, I was thinking using free assets and textures is not sustainable. I’m not sure about this information at all. But In games we played it seems game studios creates their own assets(I’m not sure about that too). I thought they are doing this for reason. But if it’s true I don’t know that reeason too. What do you think?
Because of licensing.
what do you mean? does megascan cause problem about licenses? Can you inform us?
Read their licensing. it’s as simple as that.
Read it and determine for yourself if it suits your needs or not.
as I understand, I can create a game with unreal engine for commercial purposes. So that makes using megascans reasonable. Is there anything that I’m missing here?
I think your materials are fine.
Don’t study a single element of the entire scene in isolation. It will always look strange and you’ll waste time tinkering back and forth.
Get the entire scene put together in a quick way, then tune individual elements as necessary while evaluating the whole scene in the same way a player would while playing the game.
If I have to offer very specific advice, I’d say consider the color palate. Usually, less is more. A few complimentary colors, maybe one that goes against, for example.
You can tweak the colors and values pretty well just by adjusting the sliders on the textures detail panel - try to get each material in same range as the others so they look natural when blended together is the idea.
You can also grab the free Rural Australia package and checkout the landscape material. It has a few material functions for overlaying additional textures + adding tint to textures. Same idea just more control - you tweak the colors and values so that there isn’t harsh, eye catching contrast that appears unnatural.
Whether you use megascans or you own materials, the key art principle is called “color theory”. Youtube that and you’ll find plenty of nice, easy to understand instructions.
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You’re not missing anything at all. Epic now owns Quixel Megascans and you can download the Bridge plugin tool that makes using all the textures and models super easy and the licensing agreement seems the same as Unreal Engine anyway.
Certainly making your own ground textures from scratch is admirable but if you want anything decent looking you’ll probably need to go out and get a good camera and take pictures of real ground surfaces and then create seamless textures in Gimp or Photoshop.
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Actually, most cellphones today use enough DPI to be able to create decent (think AAA game but not cinematic) quality PBR.
Taking pictures of a surface is however to be done with experience. Its not enough to just shoot at the ground.
You need a specific distance, you need specific parameters, etc.
What is 100% more important is correct light. If you have any glare or distortion happening you can forget about tiling.
To produce a tiling result, you can start with photoshop or gimp, neither is any good.
Normally, I toss the non tiling material directly on a plane mesh in blender and 4up.
I then distribute pieces of the same mesh across the seams to where it looks natural / or even involve other meshes (rocks pebbles etc).
After which you just bake it out (f12 render if you set up the environment and a camera works just fine).
And if the licensing is fine for you. Sure why not use quixel.
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I couldn’t understand your process of creating textures. It sounds cool. Can you explain it further or can you share a youtube link about this process?
mosthost is talking about making something that is really legitimate. However like they said you can use a newer phone to make something somewhat decent. I’ve made a few lichen covered rock textures with an android phone and then stitched it all together in gimp. Look into photogrammetry on youtube as well.
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I often look an games that have this tec, that are photo realistic.
The photo produces a flat effect, where things don’t seem 3d.
I often look at photos and then I look with my eyes around me to see how it seems, and the photo seems much more flat as 3d go’s. That is why these games seem flat out, like it does not feel textury, embeding, captivating call it what you will.
Reality is not photo relalistic, so this photo stuff is not , it will just produce flat masks that are like walls without corners and bumps.
I think the best name for this tec is rigid, rigid texture.
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You should look into foliage, normal maps, and you should try methods to make some of the textures non-tiling, good luck! 
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I would invest in a good auto landscape material. The marketplace has many to choose from. Look at the ones that are optimized and have mostly great reviews! TeamDisorder
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You need to work on sharers. Thee key is the blending. Look at Unreal Sensei
He has like 4 video tutorials covering the key things. Removing tiling, macro variation, face angle blend, and specular I think.
Your images above in my books are suffering from the blending issues. If you blend with normals (as he shows with the snow blend) you can see how the rocks stick up through the dirt. Your blend lines are too sharp too. It goes from dirt to grass in almost a sharp line. Additionally you only have 1 type of grass and one type of dirt.
Additionally, Lighting. Your lighting is very sharp and flat. Lighting is a HUGE part of making an environment look good.
You also have a very flat surface for ground. Ground is rarely that flat. I have some seriously flat surfaces in mine but it’s got slight curves and gradient to break away from the roblox look.
Really, just do a practice run with Unreal Sensei and some mucking around with terrain landscapes to get used to it.
For me, I have 2 cliffs that are blended with a noise texture, and 2 grasses with the same blend, and those are all shaded with a macro/micro variation tint, and then I have those applied to my terrain based on the angle of the faces. I also use world align in order to make sure all the textures line up properly.
I don’t worry about distance blend because I am hardly up close and I use 4k textures. So at any range, except a couple of feet, it looks fine. Getting too close has blurry textures but I don’t really care about that.
Hope that helps.
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I one up the Unreal Sensei. I don’t know where he gets his expertise, but its spot on. I think linear interpolating blending with probably 4 textures can get you a solid single environment landscape. With distance, World Aligned Blends, using Normals, roughness and landscape coordinates to break up the tiled effect without going overboard on the shader complexity game engines have come a LONG way. You can get a good solid ground without foliage, but the foliage and rocks really bring it together in the end.
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This is equivalent to stating the obvious.
Grass, gravel, etc. Has no real reflectivity/specularity at a distance.
Up-close maybe.
Possibly if it has water on it.
But even then very, very little.
Here, have a random landscape picture from my stuff: (note that this was very Damp, the grass is all wet. still no reflections from the sun off to the left hand side)
And compare it to this one where there is actually supposed to be a reflective value:
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Best example I can probably give you is with grass:
A grass mesh is made up of photorealistic meshes generated from an atlas. You 4Up the meshes so as to focus in only on the internal 50%.
This makes it so the items will “tile” when photographed.
You further force tiling by adding additional parts:
Eventually - mostly through experience - you can end up producing cinematic quality textures from this simple method - and since you bake things down, it would become rather easy to produce new texture sets for different purposes by just re-arranging the items within it in an intelligent way.
To make it more clear: the grass is made up of individual grass strands which are properly textured from a grass texture atlas which was made by picking and scanning individual blades:
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EDIT:
-Added displacements
-Created bumps with landscape sculpting
-re-created with references
-Created texture variety(for example created 3 diffrent dirt materials instead only one material)
-Rearranged material colors with using Material textures sliders (inside engine,helped a lot)
I’m Still working on it
