Tessellated landscape - textures not tessellating as hoped for

[Devatsu]

Hey,

I have followed Ratsgames tutorials (reference: UE4 Landscape Material Tutorial Pt1 - YouTube) on setting up a slopebased automaterial and that’s all good and done for now. I now want to add variety to the landscape by tessellating my rock and erosion layers. My terrain is 20x20km, with tiles that have 1009 resolution, 63x63 quads in 2x2 sections, 8x8 components (64 components). I’ve read quite a bit on tessellation and landscapes, but I’m just unable to make it look as good as AAA games and would love some assistance on my issue:

My material uses material functions. I’ve also set up distance blending tessellation by following this tutorial: Landscape Material Tutorial - Adding Tessellation (Unreal Engine 4) - YouTube, but I’m having trouble isolating the effects to the rock and erosion material functions; I want different height results to affect the cliff than the erosion.

Here’s the tessellation setup in my master material. I tried setting up the tessellation in the material functions alone, but that yielded a result that simply showed the tessellation of the landscape, but no movement in geometry.

I masked the (B) value from my Slopemask and pulled that into the texture texture sample of my height texture. I’m not exactly sure as to what value I should pull from the height texture, as some gives errors etc. Is it using the correct value (blue channel)?

Working tessellation on my cliff layer.

The grass is being tessellated, which is not what I want. I do intend to tessellate the grass and erosion at some point, but I need it to have a different height information than the cliff layer. How should I go about doing this?

I’m also getting some cracks; when I enable crack free displacement the tessellation simply doesn’t show; although when it’s disabled I get some nasty cracks. The tessellation in the picture below is pumped up just to demonstrate how the tessellation affects all my layers and also the cracking. Any suggestions?

Summary: I want to use distance based tessellation for my material functions used for my auto-master material. I’ll need different height information for each layer, which is why I can’t use the master material, as far as I’ve tested. Looking forward to getting this fixed and moving onward to forests, rocks, etc. Tired of looking at the ground haha.

Regards,
Simen

[Devatsu]

So I tried to build up the tessellation inside of the material functions and simply pull the BreakMaterial Tessellation and World Displacement from my autolayers into the MasterMaterial, but tessellation is still applied to all the layers even though I just applied tessellation in my cliff layer. I’m pretty lost here, experimented with a lot of wires and I feel at a loss. Am I missing something obvious here?

[bennleww]

Hey i may be able to help as i had the same problem following ratsgame tutorial. So if im correct you have your auto slope material lerping with some paintable layers? If so the way i fixed the tesselation being applied to all the layers, i made the auto slope into a function in itself. So all i have in my master material is functions. All the functions go into there own break material attributes, then into different landscaoe layer blends for the base color etc. I am confident this will help you. Let me know if you fix it

[Devatsu]

Thats great news! I gave up on the tesselation for a while and worked on mechanics, as its nice with a change of pace. I’ll try out your solution asap when I get to my dev PC. Thanks, I’ll keep you updated.

[Devatsu]

Hey Bennleww, I’m picking this up again and was hoping you could shed some more light on the situation; possibly a screenshot or two?

[JOSE_ABBOUD]

If you take a look at some advanced materials for landscapes, including auto materials, for instance one that is being sold in the market place, they usually show demos on youtube and sometimes they show a very fast shot on the master material, obviously fast shot because they are not dictating a tutorial, they just want to sell… But I tried to freeze the video somewhere and saw that no tessellation has been implemented in the whole material. Not at all… although as a surprise, you watch the demo and then you see gravels look as if they are tessellated… The trick is simple: Occlussion Parallax functions withing every layer. In my opinion, they work better than tessellation when you have an auto material with a bunch of painted layers… I went for this solution in the meantime and it looks amazing…