Landscape WorldAligned Issues

[SOLVED - POST #3 IN THREAD]

Hey guys,

I’m currently working on a landscape material that blends by distance from player, then blends by surface angle. I’m using tiled procedural textures and trying to pull it off without any global/baked textures.

However, at this point I think I’m not entirely grasping how the WorldAligned node works in the material editor. I’ve read all the associated documentation provided by Epic, and I thought I understood it all, but I’m still not getting my desired response. I ran into this problem before setting up a distance blend, so my issue shouldn’t have anything to do with my distance blend logic.

I’m looking for sharp and complete blends based on angle. For example, a cliff that has a plateau on the top, the plateau should be entirely grass, and when it runs to that 90 degree drop (the cliff edge), it should be entirely cliff when the landscape faces are vertical. Here’s an example of what I’m trying to describe.

Here’s my current material setup: http://i.imgur.com/4Ly0yRR.jpg (I did some no-so-clever Photoshop editing to get it all on one image)

I apologize for the mess in that material - my distance blend functions (and my desire to tweak EVERYTHING via parameters) makes it look a lot more complicated than it is. I’m doing essentially the same thing as shown in the last post here: Best method for creating a cave in a landscape - Content Creation - Unreal Engine Forums

I’ve tweaked Bias and Sharpness about 1000 times to test as many combinations as possible, which is why I’m asking for outside advice because I think there’s something else I’m doing wrong.

Here are my results, in a nutshell:

Sharpness always at 4 to keep the blend relatively sharp.

Bias at 0 - Pure grass, no rock (angle doesn’t matter)
Bias at -1 - A blend between Rock and grass (the blend seems to be uniform and almost entirely ignores the angle)
Bias at -2 - Pure rock, no grass (angle doesn’t matter)

Any advice would be greatly appreicated!

P.S. - for the sake of testing, I also tried sculpting the terrain with 0 falloff so that the angles would be 90 degrees (and really no room for misunderstandings as to what textures should show up where), and it looks the exact same as my above images.

That post you mentioned was mine :slight_smile:

The screenshots of the mat come out so much worse then when I took them (I blame imgur) so you can’t really see what the constants are set to for Bias and Sharpness.

I set my Sharpness to 30 and Bias to -10. See how that looks.

Hey iamgoret - it was indeed your setup :slight_smile: Thanks for posting it!

I actually discovered that a major part of my problem was that I was using the Alpha as an output for the WorldAligned node, and I should’ve been using “w/Vertex Normals” for both normal and diffuse maps. For additional coverage, I dropped in a second WorldAligned node with its own sharpness and bias and was able to ensure complete, controlled transitions from 0% to 100% texture coverage.

Thanks for the kickstart on this material setup!

Hi ,

Is it possible to see the network for your Distance Blend function ? I’m trying to create one by myself but with no good result… Thanks for your help