Hello,
I’m trying to have a multiple-biome map, including desert, forest and snow areas.
I found the landscape material of the VehicleGame example very well done and allowed myself to take it and modify it in my game for my desert biome.
But I wonder something, do you think it is possible to have lot of layers in only one landscape material?
I was trying to add one layer in the desert material and I couldn’t…
Landscape materials do have a limit on number of texture samples that can be used for each landscape component. So if you have material with 5 or 6 layers, you can only paint 3 or 4 of them(depending on how many samplers there are for each layer) on a single component at time. There’s a few threads here in the forums that you can search for that covers this issue and several ways of working around it.
Hi ,
The limit is currently set to 6 textures. However, you can have many different layers with those six textures.
Do you means that I can only have 6 TextureSample nodes in my material?
How can I have a landscape with multiple ecosystems then? 
If I have a normal file in addition of my diffuse image, I can only have 3 different textures on my landscape…
I’m not entirely positive, I haven’t gotten to this particular issue yet. But it seems like the kind of problem that could be worked around by having your different biomes in different levels. You could use World Browser (or similar) to make it feel like one big map, but each map should have it’s own landscape, right? You’d need to handle the transitions (so you’d still need to share at least one thing in common from the neighboring tile I would assume), but I would think this would make your range nearly limitless.
The limit would only apply to each landscape component(the smaller sections of a landscape). So you could have more than 3 for the whole landscape, but only 3 at a time per component. Another work around is using a texture atlas and store 4 different textures in one large texture(sort of like a sprite sheet).
Thank you for your answers.
I will use the World Builder and create multiple landscapes.
Also, split up some of your diffuses that can be grayscale into each of the 4 channels of a texture2D, RGB and A, this way you can have 4 diffuses in one texture, then just add color using other nodes.
You can also generate fake normal maps from grayscales using the NormalFromHeightmap function and you can get rid off the blue channel in many of your normal maps and use the DeriveNormalZ expression to get a decent result without it and save a channel for use with something else.