Landscape. Paint different detail texture layers based on slopes

Hey,

Some people asked me how i get my landscape textures to blend like in my thread in “work in progress”.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?46594-My-Landscape-Enviroment-wip-%28heavenly-inspired-by-The-Witcher-3-demo-videos%29

I have done a lot “trial and error” since i started my landscape material and i thougt maybe its a good thing to share a simple but working starting point with you. This material is basicly “patchwork”, (craped some notes from here and there :wink: ), but from there you can go crazy with it.

I still dont understand some parts of it (especially some strange parameter values needed to get to this point) but it works.

Maybe we get an overhall for landscape layers (wish i cant paint slopes like in cryengine).

Plz ask if you have question.

Looks like this ( maybe not complete, there are some more things in like fresnel and some layers more but the starting point is the same)

And the material. To get normals working copy this part and exchange the texture templates with normals. Layer names stays the same but because you need the same information for the normals dont change the parameter names. Because if you create a instance of it you can push diff and normals with 1 parameter. You dont need the tiling block, these are basicly offsets for uv for better tiling.

the results look good but I don’t really understand what you’re doing next to your World_Aligned_Blend nodes. they go into the Alpha of a Lerp, where you blend between one texture and… nothing? :confused:

making something like what you have there would automatically texture the terrain like a splatmap would?

because i have only one texture on every layer i need a way to blend only the slope from one texture to another. The lerp set to zero basicly cuts out the part that is not a slope (slope = texture; rest is white; lerp turns white do black . Dont know how to discribe it well.
will do some screenshots later the day :wink:

Hm… no… you still have to paint layers but you paint your textures only on slopes/angles wich you set in the parameter. I chose this way because i can apply phys material to layers, same for applying foliage only on grass layer and still have a good control over other material features. You can do it with a splatmap too, then you dont need the world aligned blend and plug your channels in the layer blends but if you want to do changes you have to change your splatmap.

May I ask how you added the snow to the mountain tops, on top of all this? Thanks!

9c4e4a0bac151fa23fdbc859d28262ff62134bd5.jpeg

What are the images in those texture boxes please?

bumping this from ages ago but I think the two bottom texture samples are normal maps used to add noise to the normal blend between the two layers (somebody please correct me if I am wrong). I’m not sure what the top one is.

Did some research, the top image is an image obtained from the world machine application (https://www.world-machine.com/)