So hopefully this is the proper page to ask this on but I’m currently experimenting with some stylized materials, and I’ve actually yet to ask this but when using a tiling texture on terrain, especially a large piece of terrain how do you go about breaking up the repeating look of it. I assume things like a 2nd or even 3rd material blend in areas, maybe grunge maps. But I’m really not sure where to begin going about doing that stuff. Would anyone happen to have tips or even know of tutorials for it? Ideally I’m trying to emulate a look similar to Breath of the Wild as a side note.
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This seems to be what you’re after and can take a bit of guessing initially, so click on your terrain , click on 'details on far right for properties, double click your terrain texture,and then see attached photo, click on texture Coordinates, left far left for U,V tiling and play with settings. Texture must be tilable so if you’re using your own you may need to find tutorial called making a texture tileable, goes much more into it here: Coordinates Expressions | Unreal Engine Documentation .
I’ve been making my own in Substance Designer, so they already tile, and I’m well-versed in the basics of Unreal’s node system. But changing the tiling doesn’t break up the obvious repeated texture through the map. That’s why I’m asking mainly what other people do, whether it be material blending or just throwing on a big grunge map or something else.
Paint or auto-blend material landscape layers, and use this:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/comm…-your-textures
You will have to edit the random material functions though, because it uses uncommon channel masks (not the standard RMAO rgb)
Look into macrotiling.
Basically you overlay different textures in world aligned position over the main texture with different alpha levels in order to create shadows that remove/break up the visible tiling.
On top of that, you can probably make 2 different materials for the grass, and spot paint zones where the tiling is extremely visible with it.
On top of all of that, a good landscape material usually uses different textures based on camera distance.
From afar you have a large texture that highlights the anatomy of the landscape - usually this is a custom paint world aligned texture overlaid to the base materials that are tiles at a different size.
From a medium distance you have tiling set at a number that works for the materials and a lower blending of the world aligned texture.
From up close you set the textures to a tilting of around 1 - because you really want the detail visible, and you dispose of the world aligned texture underneath as it would otherwise just pixelate the area.
Just keep in mind that by default you have up to 13 texture samples per terrain tile.
So when you start painting the textures on your your landscape may break if you exceed that count.
There are workarounds on this - and I’m hoping that the new version with virtual texturing will take care of fixing that once and for all, but I haven’t tried it and it’s been reported bugged before.
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You’re Welcome 