I have used Unreal 3 and 4 and now am starting in Unreal 5.
Mostly I have been in VFX since 1995. Starting in the SGI era and over the last 27 years have used pretty much every application available for paid work.
Unreal 5 is the 1st time I have really considered a game engine as a solution for production output. It is really a step up for content creation.
Though, I have this one question about painting Landscapes.
I created a landscape and went into the Landscape mode and started sculpting the way one would expect. Ok… “Shift” doesn’t smooth like Zbrush but instead reversed the sculpt add to a subtract mode. After messing around I intuitively figured out the Unreal 5 specifics.
Though, when I went over to the paint mode this is where things fall apart.
There is an area for layers below the usual paint controls and brushes.
I can’t drag and drop materials into that area.
I can’t press a button and “add layer” that would then create an empty layer that I could then drag and drop a material into and assign to a paint layer.
I couldn’t figure this one out from the UI.
So I go to Youtube and find a few tutorials to figure out how to paint multiple materials onto a Landscape.
The process seems to involve taking the textures from current materials… dragging them INTO a new material window where you setup one MakeMaterialAttributes node for each set of textures that combine into a material.
So say I want 5 materials to paint from? I will then drag each texture for each material… create 5 MakeMaterialAttributes… blah blah blah…
Eventually combining all this into a Layer Blend node…
Like the guy does in this video… which shows that this aspect of the “paint” process is overly/unnecessarily complicated.
It is way too fiddly and unnecessary.
BECAUSE…
You … at Epic Games… could… create a UI function… that allows people to just drag and drop ACTUAL materials INTO paint slots that you can then pick to paint from as I described above.
I think it would improve the whole experience for everyone if you optimized this part of the paint process.
That area below the Paint UI where you eventually see materials appear after that whole “prep” process in the material editor… should just have a plus symbol that adds an empty slot where one can then drag and drop or use a pull down menu to pick the material that already exists in the level/project.
I have to paint a landscape today that has eight different materials. I am about to start that whole… drag/drop textures… into a new material window… just so I can assemble the same materials that already exist in the project… just so I can combine them in this large connection stack material asset etc and Layer Blend … just so I can see these same materials in the paint layers stack.
Surely you could make a UI function this way to create the paint layers.
EVEN… if you just simply created texture slots in each added paint layer that one could drag individual textures into… would be more streamlined than this current “workflow”?
Though if it was a button that added an empty material slot that one could drag a material into, that would be ideal.
