Huge Landscape

JosephJames · January 26, 2015, 11:12pm

;210498:

Actually you can easily combine the two methods in that video. In the 2nd video the author used RGB splat-maps to blend the material functions, but that could just as easily have been done with paintable Landscape Layers. Here is how:

First, place a “Landscape Layer Sample” node in your landscape material for each layer you want. Then use the output of the layer nodes exactly like the author of that 2nd video was using single channels of the RGB splat map.

After adding the Layer Sample nodes to your material, you might have to re-apply your material to the landscape for the layers to show up in the landscape paint mode. After you do that, go to the landscape tool and to the Paint sub-tool. You should see a question mark for each new layer. You will need to make a Layer Asset for each layer. I suggest you select “Non-Weight-Blended” since that style works better with splatmap type texturing and importing layers, but you should do some searching on the difference between weight and non-weight blended if that concerns you much.

After you have created a layer-asset for each layer, you can either start hand painting or import a weight map for each layer by right clicking the layers:

And as for the extreme messyness of some of the Landscape example materials, sorry about that! I did work on some of those. Were you talking about the content example one that is very plain looking, or the separate Landscape project with the Hang Glider?

For the hang glider landscape material, the biggest thing making it a mess is that it was created before we had “Material Attributes” outputs for functions which can pass a whole set of material inputs with one single pin. And that material was originally made for tech demo purposes (elemental demo) and there wasn’t too much thought given to building something user-friendly. Then later when we needed a landscape example, that material got used again since we didn’t have much else to select from.

If the materials were cleaned up to reflect that more streamlined style it would make them significantly cleaner. I hope we get around to that sometime soon!

I’d also like to point out that the messy landscape material is extremely versatile but sometimes having too many options can still make it difficult to tweak to a desired end. Just about everything had a parameterized offset including normal/height blends between the layers and custom mixing of the macro textures inside the layer masks to create more noise.

Actually these three screenshots all use the same materials and textures, only the colors and blend options were changed, so there is really no upper limit to how tweakable a landscape material can become. It sounds like what we need to do is make it easier for people to understand what is going on to make it possible.

In the last image, the messy blend of rock/snow/dirt is the result of modulating the Imported Worldmachine layer weights with the texture displacement for each layer. To get good tiling in the distance there is a scaled up “Far” version of each texture in the material (yet another thing making it so huge, tiling params and blend distance for each), and the Far displacement is always combined with the up close displacement to keep the blend from appearing to change with distance.

Hi Ryan, I appreciate the response. I wasn’t meaning to overly criticize, it’s just that the knowledge you’ve provided (about how to combine multiple methods) is nowhere to be seen in documentation or any other format so most beginning users are stuck with the default method of making a terrain material (the first video that posted) and a few others that don’t provide much freedom, and I don’t really expect them to be able to pick through the terrain example (the one on the Marketplace) and figure out what’s going on as it is very confusing for most. I get a lot of what is happening in that material, but most of it I will not use so I’ve been looking for another set up. And as for me saying that the material was not customizable, I should have been more clear I suppose; to a user trying to learn how it works, it seems like it’s geared for certain purposes (at first glance) and perhaps not immediately usable for an average user. Also, the pictures you posted do look extremely good, so thanks for sharing them. I do feel the need to apologize for the overhaul remark; clearly the system is more capable than I initially thought, but I do think that some more tutorials perhaps over what it’s capable of are definitely needed.

I really don’t know how you can assume something like that at all; I’ve been trying to get a good working set up that accomodates my needs for an extremely long time. The only expectation people have is having somewhat of a clear guide for them to go by in terms of usability for terrain materials, and what the users have to go by is what is freely available, and what is freely available may not be enough. For example: the layer sample node that Ryan was talking about; there is no way for me to have known what purpose it served as there seems to be no docs on it and ctrl-alt clicking on it just says that it’s a “material expression landscape layer sample” and I cannot extrapolate its entire use based on those 5 words alone.