How do they do that?

Development Rendering
1

So I am twisting my head around this and since im a noob I have no idea how to implement this type of material effects.

So in the attached image, its a snap of ther DOTA game. nop I am not remaking a dota type of game LOL However i LOVE the way they handle the materials blends and landscape objects like trees and such. So I have been able to sort of figur eout how to design the foliage, but i am hung up on the floor materials and stuff.

So in the image i circled 6 areas I would like some tips on getting.

Corresponding numbered circles.

  1. How do they get a material to follow the path angle? Are these meshes that are hand painted and stitched together? or is there a way to make a UE material bend? I tried using splines material, but I cant ever get it to follow the spline direction, it always paints the material in the pattern that its made.

2 Again the same material is bending with the path.

  1. The edges of the floors have these stone structured that protrude from the edge, Is this a mesh that is upagainst the side, and then they vertex paint to blend with the nearby floor?

4 The same material bending with path.

  1. they have these protruding bricks, is this just a material with a normal map and just set with blend weight? and again how do they get the brick pattern to “follow” a path?

  2. marking on the ground. Is that a decal that just sits on the landscape? a plane mesh with an opacity map sitting just above the floor?

Any tips would help me break through this mental hurdle i am experiencing.

Thanks!

2

Maybe this video helps you, because someone recreated one Level from LoL in Unreal:

https://.com/watch?v=e01ppLCYAuE

The path creation is at the 7 minute mark.

3

Sweet! Thanks Ill check it out!

4

It had some good tips but didn’t really go into the floor materials. He kinda did something cool with the splines but i’m not sure if that is something that will achieve the results.

I’m going to try and create materials a curved one and have it flipped and make sure the texture coordinate tiling is set to fit the size i need and try to add that as a layer in my landscape paint layers, and see if that is a possibility

5

For the landscape material, and some of it´s blend modes (like height based blend), maybe this helps you:

https://.com/watch?v=KCVyf6LrFFk
Height blend starts around minute 17.

https://.com/watch?v=9W6j4EEIS1E

But i am not sure, if this is still actual/relevant, since they introduced virtual textures. This might something to look into too.

6

Thanks so much for your help! I will give it a watch and see what I can cull from it! Much appreciated!!

7

And just for completion, while crawling through , i also stumbled across this tut, which should solve some starter problems around splines:

https://www…com/watch?v=JoCPi-9Op5U

I really like that tiny trick at 9.45, where he just deletes the spline points, and basically just use it to lay out/paint the dirt road for further details, which he then can manually paint.

But again, keep virtual textures in mind, they might be helpful too ^.^ Most of these tuts seem to be made, before virtual textures were introduced.

8

Cool beans! Thanks! I got something close to what I wanted using Decals. but it leaves a lot of things unusable for later in the game dev stages. I will also investigate virtual textures. Thanks so much man, i cant thank you enough!