Manual request for Landscape Grass Tools UE4.8

[proffzulus]

Hi folks!
I’ve spent some time making a procedural landscape and it’s fine, but with static foliage it’s way too heavy to have a 16km2 area detailed well.
Now, with dynamic grass tools it looks like I can implement this. However, while texturing the landscape, i used material functions and MatLayerBlend_Standard nodes to blend them in the way i want it (slopes, heights for snow, nice looking shores and so on). My landscape does not have any layers.
The question is:
How do I use grass with this material, so it could be blended correctly? Should I paint all layers manually and get rid of nice procedural texturing? Should i add transparent invisible layer just for grass to grow? Should I use same heightmap that i used for the grass layer to blend? What is “best practice” advice for this?
Finally, for every provided solution, i’d like you to post a basic “how to”, please. Nothing too tricky, just basics, so I can get unstuck on this.

Epic, why does Landscape Layer Blend works “per channel”? Why there is no option to assign entire material to a layer? I mean, that would be much easier.

Thanks in advance.

[Sam_Deiter]

Did you check out the new Grass Tool? Have a read through that as it should do what you want it to do.

[anonymous_user_c94f194d]

In your terrain material you make output node grass. Then you output scalar value between 0 and 1. This number tell density of procedural grass. You can just use current material logic and out put grass texture weight to grass output node as well.

My grass node look like this.

[proffzulus]

Thanks guys! Both advices helped me to understand how it basically works. I did some math to adjust grass to grow only on “green” areas, so now it works fine (used alphas from my current texture blending and adjusted them). Next step would be improving texturing (this is just sample texturing here) and creating dynamic foliage. Then make atmospheric fog, post-processing, make it rain, put a firecamp and yep, i wanna live there
Some screens of what’s now:

[gwrought]

Is there a way to set a minimum layer weight percentage for the grass tool? Like in the procedural foliage tool. My landscape is tiled so i don’t think masks would be the best way to prevent grass from being placed in some areas.