Landscape Material pack

Hey there!~

I just bought Landscape Material Pack. I know a bit how to work with landscape materials. but not good enough.
Is there an effective way on how to add all Layers( Or alteast 5 of them ) To my landscape material keeping the normal maps and all the other layers of my materials.

I’ve worked with custom materials for a while now but i can’t seem to get it right, and the documention looks a bit chinese to me.

I wouldn’t mind redoing the landscape material as i haven’t really done anything in much detail.

I know i can work with Layerblend but there i can only add the BaseColor.

Kind regards,
Celeste

Layer blends really are the way to go. You need one for each input, so one for diffuse, one for roughness etc. You probably already saw this page, which admittedly looks intimidating but the basics are fairly simple.

You hook up all your color maps to one layer blend, hook that up to diffuse. You hook up another layer blend to all your normals, another one to all your spec maps etc. As long as you name every layer correctly, they should all show up in the paint tool.

I’ve worked with up to 10 layers simultaneously using the wrap method which came with the 4.6 update. Not doing that caps you at 16 texture samplers, which would translate to about 4-6 layers depending on how your shaders are setup. Just select your textures in the material editor and switch SamplerSource to Shared:Wrap. This will allow you to combine up to 128 textures accross an unlimited amount of layers (just keep an eye on your shader complexity).

I find the most important thing with landscape materials is to be tidy and organized, as they can become very complex very quickly. Generally I’ll keep the individual mats, and just copypaste their nodes into my landscape mat for extra tweaking. But I’m not entirely sure how to further answer your question?

Hey,

Sorry for the short answer, i have a tiny timeframe here.
How exactly would i wrap this? Haven’t seem documentation on it yet.
Could i also have a look at your material?

Ty!

No problem! Like I said, you manually change the sampler source of each texture to wrap, it should be in the details panel for each texture.

34330-screen+shot+03-16-15+at+07.37+am.png

You can look at my mat for sure, but it’s very complex and the result of many months of work, don’t know how useful it’ll be to ya.

This is really the most important part because that’s where all your layers come together…

This currently results in 8 paintable layers. :slight_smile:

Hey,

So if i get it right, If i wrap all my textures. I can basically make an unlimited amount of layers? With 128 textures?

I Took a look at your landscape, and it’s well organized. You don’t want to see mine btw. It’s a major mess :slight_smile:

Ty for the help!

So just one more question though. Is it possible to get about 15 layers? With all their own roughness and macro texture variation? About 8-9 tex per layer?

Hehe you learn to be organized when you can’t figure out your own functions anymore.

As far as I know there’s no limit to the amount of layers, so 15 should be possible but that will result in very high shader complexity (it might take very long to compile).

8 or 9 textures per layer does sound like an awful lot though, may I ask why you would need that many? For most materials you only need a diffuse, normal and specular. Another quick note, I think the wrapping is part of a fairly recent shader model, it wasn’t possible before 4.6 and I think this method is not available on mobile. But if it’s a pc or next gen title you are working on you should be fine. :slight_smile:

Hey,

Yea i miscalculated. It’s only 4-5 per layer. Since i’m setting all specular to black as i don’t like the specular effect on the materials. I do use macro texture variation which is 3 textures already. Then i have(For my rock-tex only) a normal map aswell. All the others just have diffuse and roughness + the macro texture variation :slight_smile: And yes it’s not a mobile game :slight_smile:

Oftentimes you don’t need the specular at all when using roughness or metallic. Keep in mind whatever you aren’t using, doesn’t have to be hooked up. If you want to keep the specularity down, just hook up a Constant with a low value. No point in adding a black texture if you can just input a numerical value (from 0 to 1). :wink:

For tweaking textures I would recommend hooking up a Clamp. It’ll allow you to change the minimum and maximum values without having to change the actual textures. So if you want something to look more rough, just set the minimum value to say… 0.5 instead of 0. Or if you want something to look more shiny, set the maximum value to 0.5. Etc…

Hey there,

Sorry to bother! So after a while i thought i found all the perfect textures but since i have the substance database i just found tons of better-fitting textures for my landscape. If i now change a landscape material and apply it compiles 12k shaders. Which takes quite long.

So as you can see, it’s quite big with a lot of textures. Does roughness really do something? And is there a way to change 1 material on it and not having to compile all layers again? I can’t really redo my painting since my world is getting big. So the question is, is there a way to lower my compiling times?

I agree completely it can take very long to tweak your mat once you’ve built it. The only way to avoid having to recompile everything is to work with material instances and a master material (a landscape mat kind of already is a master). The most straightforward answer would be to instance your current material, and further modify it thru that instance.

This should allow you to change your layers without having to recompile. Keep in mind though, you can only change parameter type functions thru an instance. So you may have to modify your master to give you the controls you want. An instance can only influence the settings you’ve assigned to it.

Roughness does have a big impact on your material yes. Think of roughness as a way to control the sharpness of your reflections. A roughness of 0 will result in mirror or diamondlike reflections. A roughness of 1 will result in mats looking like dry dirt. Oftentimes you’ll want to invert your specular if you want it to work properly alongside metallic (a highly specular area tends to be less rough and vice versa). To get that effect just add a ‘‘OneMinus’’ or ‘‘1-x’’.

I’m also wondering how to use the materials from the pack and merge them into height blending, without pulling them apart and rehashing them.