Photorealistic ground creation

Development World Creation
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1

Hi! I have been using Unreal Engine (4 & 5) for roughly a year now for photorealistic environment creation. So, quality > performance.

Something I am struggling with is the ground texture for my scenes. I would like to use the Quixel surfaces with displacement or equivalent (?) with really, really fine tesselation quality.

So far I have tested landscape materials with displacements in UE4, to create a ground material with Quixel Mixer and then displace it on a really hires Nanite mesh in UE5. But non of those options are optimal. Haven’t tried vertex painting on a really hires mesh with displacement yet, but as far as I know that’s not possible in UE5.

The ideal scenario would be to paint out textures with non-destructive displacement and with super fine tesselation quality. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance. Also, I’m new to the forums and not really sure if this is the right category.

2

I haven’t worked with Nanite yet. You want to create a displacement map / tesselation map with Quixel with the highest possible quality, to use in a UE shader. It’s been a long while since I looked into the topic but I remember that it is important to choose the corrent file extensions for those maps to ensure any quality.