How to create a Material that implements a Low Poly Landscape effect ??

Development Rendering
1

UE4_lowPol_MatRefernce.png
UE4_lowPol_MatRefernce.png2048×800 47.4 KB

Hi all.

I am not so new to materials in UE4, but still far away from creating any cool advanced stuff.
To start off I am attempting to create a material, which does something similar to the pic attached.
Intention is to create a low poly flat shaded material that fits well within the ES2 setup.

I’ve been looking around the forums to create a low poly material.

I found this thread here to create a low poly material.

There are a few things though, that i’d really appreciate, if someone could help me with.

  1. How to create a similar something as a landscape material. Something which randomly color every polygon of the Landscape mesh within a color ramp.
    I tried reproducing the above linked setup. But what it does is, color the landscape chunks randomly, rather that polygons.
    How can one go about creating a basic material which randomly colours polygons within a given color ramp!!

I also saw the DDX and DDY method, but i believe these nodes are not for ES2.
Guess it indicates in itself that they are expensive and in all will beat the purpose of adopting such an art style, beyond its aesthetic appeal.

  1. Should i use the aforementioned material setup and build my landscape out of static meshes??
    Will it be expensive to use Static meshes as Landscape, something for an ES2 level?

  2. Is there somewhere, that one can learn on working with vertex shaders.
    Something that could help producing cool material setups for mobile with UE4??

Any help will be appreciated.
Warm regards.

2

2a1f44b0636dad563456a2b49bb151e5.jpg

This is something done in Unity with a plugin.
How can one achieve something similar inside UE4?.

3

Hey this is just a quick suggestion :slight_smile:

Generate some perlin noise in PS (between 16 and 64px wide). Then use this as Lookup texture. Use the VertexNormalWS and some maths, then plug that into your perlin noise UVs.

4

I thought of the same initially. I want to avoid such an approach to bring in some randomness in the material, instead of a patterned approach.

Or is there a way, that i can take multiple noise textures and build randomness within the material editor??

5

If you can get triangle index(built in input for hlsl) this should be easy.

6

How would one go about doing that??
I am really new to all this.

7

I created the landscape for a project I did on 3D Studio Max and imported it.

8

You might want to take a look at this thread too: