Same texture has different tones on adjacent landscape components

Development World Creation
,
1

Hi all…

Using UE 4.27

My terrain material has 8 layers.

I’ve been struggling with trying to address a weird blotchy issue I’m having with my landscape. At first everything was fine. But it seems ( and I stress seems ) that the more I manipulate my terrain height sculpting/smoothing and what not the worse things would get. Not just blotchy dark spots, for the same exact terrain texture , but two different components side by side will have tonal shade differences.

To try and figure things out and fix the issues, I cleared each of the 8 layers from the terrain, rebuilt lighting. Looked good for a minute until I would alter the terrain again.

I went as far as deleting all the landscape layer info objects for each texture in my material, creating new texture info objects. Rebuilt lighting, looked great again, until I manipulated the terrain doing something like smoothing some edges.

Here are two images… You can see a very distinct line of tone value difference in the first one. The second image you can see a distinct line but also how it’s blotchy fades out from dark to light(normal tone).

Hoping someone might be able to help give some pointers, towards resolving this issue.
Thanks everyone!

Landscape Textures Messed Up
Landscape Textures Messed Up1091×747 36 KB

Landscape Textures Messed Up2
Landscape Textures Messed Up2677×546 282 KB

ALSO… I guess I could have added this issue as well. Sometimes when I’m trying to use the smooth tool, areas of my map that I’m not even remotely close two will randomly get these flat spots, as if I just ran the flatten tool over an area. Just randomly happens, and I’m constantly fixing one, to then have another one appear.

Beginning to wonder if I should just cut my loses and delete this entire map and create a new one.

Weird Holes
Weird Holes1198×741 40.4 KB

3

For issue 1, I think the problem is the material itself.
Maybe you are not using landscapes UV on it for coordinates? Something similar to that must be causing it.

For 2.
Don’t use unreal to make landscapes.
It’s really as simple as that. The editor has sucked for years. The whole concept of the way they created landscapes is bad.

Houdini by sfx is free. It does a much better job at making landscapes. And even supports world composition.

You may want to consider that, over continuing to waste time with the editor…

4

Hi MostHost_LA…

Thanks for the reply. The texture material I took one that was created in an asset pack that I purchased, I then added to it. I thought I followed along with their model exactly. Maybe I messed up on something and didn’t catch it. I’ll go back and look.

I’ll start playing with Houdini. I take it Houdini can create terrains and export them to Unreal? I think I read that there was a Houdini plugin, does the plugin allow you to create terrains right there inside UE?

5

The end result is the same. And yea houdini also still uses the landscape, if you want it to.
I would suggest swapping to static meshes if you do not need to rely on the procedural grass node.

6

Hi MostHost_LA

What is the ramp curve on Houdini? I downloaded it, but looks like it might have a pretty steep ramp up curve… Not really afraid of that, rather, I have time constraints. While doing Unreal work is simi related to my day job, it’s not what I currently work on. Which I’m also ramping up on. I started to watch a Houdini terrain tutorial, but that tutorial started off with the assumption you had a background in some degree of Houdini.

If all I’m wanting to do is just generate terrains, how much other Houdini knowledge do I need to have?

7

You mean the learning curve.
There’s a tutorial set for world composition that should probably get you through what you need.

The whole thing is a time sink regardless. It’s an art pipeline so that’s normal…

9

My 2c.
Learning a DCC you can do other stuff.

Learning unreal you can only do unreal.
And unreal doesn’t really cut it about 70% of the time (99% of the time you need performance since 2020)

10

■■■■ accidently deleted my post… Anyway…

What is DCC? I know it’s an acronym for something, but not sure what.
Is that to say that the terrains that UE generates is not performant during gameplay?

11

The ue4 landscape has a bunch of issues. Performance is one of the more critical parts - and is completely ignored by Epic…

DCC stands for Digital Content Creator.
Basically any 3d editing software that let’s you change/create meshes in this case.

In 2022 there’s way better ways to handle something like a landacape if it was being coded from scratch. Unfortunately Epic doesn’t seem interested in that so far.

There’s a few community efforts - Or private efforts - but generally speaking, we are all intent on making realistic or procedural words, which has its own set of performance concerns.

Voxel plugins and the like, are also a performance consideration (as in they take more to run), but they give you a lot better options and include runtime editing, so it’s something to consider…

12

What about Blender? I hear that it can create terrains. Just asking because of the learning curve and the amount of time it would take to ramp up to become somewhat dangerous to myself. :wink:

All my Unreal work is in the evenings after work. Rather it’s ramping my skill base in Unreal or other technologies related to game/environment design.

Basically, trying to go from years and years of being a software engineer in other disciplines into the gaming industry. Seems like there is no end to the amount of things to ramp up on.

13

Blender makes meshes.

Houdini can interact directly with the landscape system, making it easy to produce world composition levels - in theory anyway.

So…
learning blender is definitely a good idea anyway, but it’s not really directly related to what you asked for.

Again, if you need to use the grass node for distributing procedural meshes you must use the landscape.
(And we all wish they’d just allow the node to work on anything)…

14

Ah… That is interesting about Blender. I didn’t realize it didn’t have the ability to interact with the landscape system… Makes sense why you mentioned Houdini and why I would want to use that. :+1:

Does Houdini do everything that Blender does? Make meshes, allow for texturing and all that?

Just thought about another question… Does Houdini do everything that Substance Painter can do? Material creation and what not? Or is something like Substance Painter still needed?

15

Pretty much. Blender is faster to learn and has a better made UI/system since it’s community driven.
Sidefx listens to feedback, but for as much as they listen they aren’t really driven by a community.
Also, Blender is absolutely the best to do stuff via python procedurally.

Houdini includes a fair amount of math. You can pretty much write a formula into any field, and the field uses the result.

Zbrush is also in the mix.
It can do what both 2, but it’s way way inferior on almost everything except sculpting and paint.

You still need stuff - Substance is probably the worse.
Marmosette for baking, Mixer for painting single materials.
ZBRUSH for painting poly paint and then baking it to a texture.
All of those work way better than Substance since Adobe got their hands on it - and as any other Adobe product, no high density or 4k support, on top of all the other issues it has. And the trash Adobe puts on your PC too…

Quicel Mixer is also a decent painting program - free to use for the time being apparently / probably always free since it’s owned by Epic now.
They are working on it, but the fearues they include aren’t on par for hand painting as they are of other programs.
In time, maybe they’ll get to it.

Art takes time, and a lot of money if you need all the programs. Also, there’s some I haven’t mentioned like Mari at $2.5k for a perpetual license.
At that price they ought to do the painting for me.
There’s at least another 2 with perpetual license pricing between $900 and $2k that are decent - can’t recall their names.

Ans then there’s the stuff exclusive to clothing, like Marvelous. Now, instead of that, I use Blender.
It just goes from taking 10m to taking 2 hours to get the final result initially, But once you have it down and you keep yuor cloth patterns simple, it gets easier to mimick it.

Another one I have to try is ArmorPaint.
It’s got good reviews, at least.

Thing is, most of these programs are object specific.
Characters paint - zbrush.
Object paint - Mixer.
Object sculpt - Blender.
Character sculpt - Blender/zbrush/black magic and a lot of cursing.

Etc.

16

Hmmm… Disheartening hearing that about Substance. It’s the one I have been ramping up on. I had heard of Substance and ZBrush. I think I chose Substance because it was an Adobe product ( acquired by adobe anyway ). Familiar with Adobe for a while, photoshop and other stuff of theirs. Plus it was a bit less expensive than ZBrush.

Biggest reason I wanted to ramp up on Substance was for texture creation to use in Unreal. Plus it would be cool to manipulate existing textures from content packs, where two different content packs have the same theme but, when you put them into a scene together, you can clearly tell that they came from two different asset packs… Would be cool to manipulate the textures from one pack to have the same look as the other.

Long road ahead.