Terrain Texturing

Development Rendering
1

So, I’ve recently switched over to UE4 from CryEngine, and I’ve noticed that painting terrain is astonishingly difficult. I’ve linked a video below that shows the problem I’m having.

The first video teaches how the landscape blending works, but the way it works seems to take away the control that I’d like to have. The problem that the first video has is that you combine all these materials and they share certain attributes like specularity, roughness, etc. I have my textures/materials set up in very specific ways, so this is a huge problem.

The picture of the snow material I have there is an example of what I’d like to be able to implement with the video I linked, but I can’t seem to do that. I have materials like mountain rock that utilize POM, but that apparently isn’t happening with the standard landscape blending like the video teaches.

I even tried a workaround with material functions, but that fell on its face pretty fast. So far I love UE4, but the simplicity of how CryEngine utilizes terrain painting blows UE4 out of the water in that area. You just make your material and stick it into the layer painter.

I’d really appreciate any help I can get on this.

2

Hi James,

I’m in this exact same situation, coming from CryEngine and trying to customize landscape material in Unreal Engine 4. I have sand, dirt, grass and mud, layered, but I’d like the mud to be a bit shiny. James, I know you checked out one of the free projects from Epic available on the marketplace : Landscape Mountains. Their landscape material is really complex. Did you make any progress on that matter?

3

Hello James,

One of the major issues that made me switch to UE4 over CRYENGINE is how UE4 handles terrains and everything regarding it. UE4 can be set to achieve the exact same environments as in games such as Battlefield 3 and 4. So if you take a look at those terrains in those games and the way they are painted, you realize you can never hand paint your terrain in CRYENGINE like that. And the simplicity of use in CRYENGINE is because you have no control over anything.

Good luck.

4

I had no idea people were commenting on this. Using splatmaps is the way to go with terrain texturing, so yeah.