I’m having trouble finding an example of how to create a landscape material that has things like macro texture variations and alpha masks for things like roughness. The heightmap blending nodes are confusing. What is the height input and why is it attached to a texture’s alpha? Doesn’t this prevent the use of a texture’s alpha channel for other purposes? What happens if a layer is comprised of more than one texture? Arrghhh…
I googled, but all I found were very simplistic examples. Could someone point to more sophisticated examples?
best terrain to study imo is the desert race example. Its not a tutorial but the whole scene including the rocks that match the terrain are all really well done. While I understand all that you’re asking its kinda a lot to explain with all the typing and the thinking… But yes a tutorial for terrain thats professional would be nice, so everyone doesn’t have to learn it the hard way.
this is the “dumb” way as in it doesn’t do much for you in the way of auto assigning materials based on slope etc. But it works.
SPLAT materials or texture maps from Vue or World Machine look good but are not editable with the paint tool. So again, meh not great. The Desert race is called “Vehicle Game” and is in the “Learn” tab of the launcher. Start there, try to break down what you can understand from that and ask more questions here.
The starter content-Grass Material has a good macro texture variation setup, as for alpha masks for blending and stuff like that, look into the linear interpolation node.
I understand blending. But since the landscape materials appear to use the alpha channel for the height map, it leaves me scratching my head how to do things like masked specular and roughness. There’s also another question: If a layer is using more than one texture, which texture’s alpha channel do you use?
You’ll need to blend together two alpha channels. And I believe you can use the red/blue/green channels for heightmaps, if you store them there. IE, you go into photoshop, create a new texture, go directly to your channel viewer, and paste your heightmap textures (individually) into the red/blue/green channels, so each channel has a separate texture, then save it and bring it in to UE4, then lerp say the Red and Blue channels to get the heightmaps that you want, while saving on your texture budget.
I looked at the terrain texture in the road game and it’s pretty complicated. Unfortunately it’s using alpha blending rather than height map blending, so it wasn’t helpful in that respect. But it was very cleverly done.
Alpha blend is the same as the height blend with the added bias of the height map. They use a HeightLerp in the DesertRallyRace, is that what you want? I don’t know of height map blending as a specific node. I do the height lerp same as the DesertRallyRace. LayerBlend>TransitionPhase of the height lerp, and add your height map. then when you paint it will fade up or down based on the painted value. what do you want it to do?