I was hoping someone can help me out with this. I have an environment I have created using megascans and a quixel landscape material in UE5.1.1. I would like to create randowm tire tracks in the sand but I am not sure how to go about it. This question was asked some time ago in this forum and there were verying answers but no direct solutions I could figure how to implement with my current knowledge.
I found a texture in Quixel that has the tire tracks. My thought is that the ideal way would be to possibly paint the tracks onto the landscape. I have limited knowledge in creating landscape materials with layer information but my assumption is that if my current landscape material had a layer with the tire tracks texture, this painting idea would probably work. I opened the material material for the landscape and there is no way for me to get my head wrapped around that setup to create another node for layer information.
I then thought that maybe I could create another landscape by duplicating this current landscape area and then create a material with the tire track to apply to that duplicate landscape, Then, by subtle sculpting, I could get this mesh to expose itself in some areas to show the tracks. This seems like such a hack though.
Similar to this was to export the mesh to 3ds max, create other “patch” meshes that have the tire tracks material and reimport to unreal but this feels like another hack similar to the previous thought
I thought of using the spline tool to create a linear path of the tracks in the landscape but I am not sure how to go about that yet. The texture would need to be one that can be replicated into a continuous linear path.
Any other helpful thoughts or methods to accomplish this?
So I forgot to mention the decals possibility whihc is kind of the first solution I was actually considering. If I understand things correctly, decals will not show actual displacement or height values in the landscape surface. I was also reading these do not work great for undulating surfaces. If I am wrong on this understanding, then this definitely could be a pretty easy fix. I can easily try the decal solution becasue it is not difficult to create decals. Thank you!
You simply remove the procedural instances with a localized render target that constians the decal pattern/shape.
You can do it multiple ways too - witnin the meshes themselves, by just using the opacity. Or within the landscape paint system, making it more dynamic.
Ofc because it works at runtime by desgn it will eat performance.
The plugin in the video probably (not definitely) just changes the output of the textures of the landscape layers, so its baked in and costs a little less overall.
Neither option has to do precisly with what Op was asking.
Sand tracks/snow trails in a ststic enovironment can look 100% real with just a normal map being applied to the surface to offset the way the light bounces.
In fact, it will look a ton better than a heightfiled or a physically distored mesh, and since it wont be 1 billion tris it will perfom much better to boot.
Maybe by 2043 we will be able to render single grains of sand though. Right now if you try to path trace you likely get 1 fps at 4k on a 4090 so we arent anywhere near where it needs to be for that kind of physical detail.
