Hi, I want to use a landscape as a background, but the camera moves around 10 meters only.
When a landscape is near the camera, then it’s easy to make it looks realistic because the grass foliage looks real near the camera. But here, the landscape doesn’t look realistic, the grass texture and the grass foliage are very different.
I tried to multiply by 0.5 or something the BaseColor of the grass texture but it took very long time to compile the shader, I ended the task.
But I think multiplying the BaseColor like that doesn’t solve my problem because my landscape still doesn’t look realistic.
How did you do to make the landscape in the Open World of the KiteDemo looks realistic in the far distance? Thanks.
There are many ways to get landscapes looking good at a distance. Try looking at some GDC talks by Ubisoft, their FarCry ones are really good.
You could start with breaking up the tiling. Again, a few different ways to do this. Give this technique a go first: - YouTube
Then look into changing textures / tiling at different distance levels. The texture you see up close is going to look liek a solid colour when it’s really far away so you need to use different textures with different tiling values for objects that are further away. Look into detail texturing too.
This question doesn’t have a simple one sentence answer, you’ll have to do research and figure out what works best for you, good luck!
Thank you! When this small project in the photo is finished with realistic foliages, then I have another small racing game by using landscape that I want to make looks realistic with the same technique. I like small projects because I’m sure I can make it very realistic that will impress everyone when I search a Job.
I’m just wondering why the landscape in the Open World of the KiteDemo looks so real? The grass foliages are baked into textures, but I don’t know how to bake it.
This is how people can do it, but it’s not a tutorial: https://youtu.be/3ispyNxpRyg?t=1770
I searched on YouTube: How to bake grass foliage into texture in unreal engine?
But no relevant result, that’s how I cannot do research, maybe someone in this forum knows it? Q: Does anyone know how to do it?
Unfortunately, it may be very long time to compile the shaders of the Open World of the KiteDemo on my computer.
The link of the technique you gave to me is important, I added it to my liked videos.
Just my two cents, I’ve just made my landscape material transition slowly to the color of the grass the further away the landscape portions are from the camera. Up close you would have your normal landscape texture, but the landscape farther away turns into the darker green you have on your grass so you don’t get that weird contrast between the light landscape and the darker grass. This works fine for what I’ve worked with, but you may have varying results.
Thank you! I was wrong about “Baking grass foliage into textures”, that’s why there is no such results on YouTube.
The guy in the YouTube says: “You guys see that pink stuff (pink grass) … that’s defined by the World Machine masks”. The grass texture masks are defined by World Machine, it’s focused on World Machine.
Anyway, thank you guys, I always need any techniques because I must use Unreal Engine to combine the textures.
I believe they’re talking about the process where your landscape texture/mask propagates it’s diffuse value to the foliage above it, I remember trying to follow something similar when I was at university, but struggling to get it to work.
Generally the aim is to make your grass match the colour of the landscape below it. The first thing I notice about your image was your grass “pops”, it’s too dark and the scaling is way off.
First I would match your grass with the colour of the terrain, then work on your scaling, the grass blades are way too large for the size of the hills e.t.c - put a character from the UE4 content files for reference.
Your terrains specular/roughness seems odd from a distance - are you using normal/roughness maps? the hills look too smooth & shiny.
Also try adding exponential height fog to help grey out the terrain at the distance, this emulates atmospheric perspective - where distance terrain/objects decrease in saturation and take on the colour of the atmospheric haze.
And as said above, using techniques to break up texture tiling helps a lot!.
