I’m missing something to do with the terrain, I cant seem to achieve this realistic look that you see in the last two images. If you look at my image, and disregard the rocks and foliage, you will see that the terrain is very flat, there’s not much of a gravel or sand texture about it, no little rocks or small details that would make it look realistic, there’s no variation, and the texture is tiling. I don’t understand how I can get it looking like the other images. Am I just supposed to completely spatter the terrain with foliage and rocks to hide it? In the example images, I see tons of variation, cracks, rocks, clear tracks in the dirt etc. This is for a work project (hence the black boxes) and I often miss out on projects like this because I dont quite understand yet how to achieve this look yet. Any help would be very appreciated.
You can’t do that using epic’s sham “landscape”.
Use meshes, add baked normal maps. And also, add decals rather than fuss with both.
It’s a “togetherness” of things rather then any lack of knowledge on a singular aspect. Also the misconception that the engine can make good things - it can’t. You can.
Thanks mate. Yeah I get all that. I think my issue is I find it challenging to understand how a repeating texture is supposed to look good across such a large area. Even for roads, I’ve always struggled to get how artists make them look photorealistic using a tiling texture. My thinking is that they break it up using two or more textures so it doesn’t appear to tile, and then on top of that add tertiary details like cracks and debris using decals. So, what I have done on this project after trial and error is increased the scale of the landscape textures so the tiny details can actually be seen from an aerial view. I have 6 different layers, and I went full artist mode on painting them on so as to look natural. Then I scattered rocks and foliage, adjusting colors to compliment the landscape. The result has left me feeling more confident in my abilities.
Generally you have more than one texture to break things up, but the real magic is advanced UV techniques that allow you to break up and randomize the texture without much of a cost.
There is still more cost than 2 textures or the same texture being overlayed to another. But its on different aspects, memory for the extra sample of textures, vs sheer computational cost of the uv math.
Some examples here https://youtu.be/De8DUod26Mg?si=cT2Be5HMWkajKnuA