I’m running into an issue where my texture is creating these squares when it connects to a floor object. It is using a texture randomization function and parallax occlusion.
what do you mean by “connects to a floor object”? When it’s placed on top of a floor? That’s really odd. It looks like the grid, but not fully visible. Was the texture made in an external program and modified in UE material editor? or did you make it in UE material editor?
I mean when the texture collides with another texture, I made it in an external editor but this squaring effect disappears if I turn off my texture randomization.
Can you post screenshots of your blueprint network for the two effects (Parallax and Randomization)?
Did the fix have something to do with the reference plane? and/or shadow steps?
If you look a bit carefully at the first screenshot (before the fix), the boundary of the material contains those straight lines too, but has pieces of the material overlapping them to get it appearing to blend with the ground. There’s a content example about this type of thing with the example at the end of the hallway map of examples. I think it has a connection to parallax occlusion and the height map not being calculated correctly at the boundaries to display the material accurately. It’s almost as if the material gets pushed visually into the boundary and because there’s a constant cutoff for the heightmap, it doesn’t display organically or without straight line edges formed. Seems like more randomness is needed for the heightmap / boundary areas.
Interesting that it required a specified texture node. I don’t understand what’s happening there quite well, but it could easily be a bug. Is the specified texture the same as the texture object in upper part of the graph? If so, I suspect it is a problem with the node for a specified texture, and may or may not be lacking a setting or something to be set correctly…or perhaps an extra node connection to it. It could be the grid showing up before was what displays when there’s no specified texture connected to the reference plane…a warning or visual check of a sort.
Is it possible to add an offset or world displacement node after the specified texture node, and then connect it to the reference plane pin? That might solve that ground blending problem.
That network for the randomization alone is quite complex, though it’s still mostly linear. I’ve only begun learning parallax occlusion, and it’s rather difficult to understand how it works. Whenever I’ve seen it in a material network, it usually involves either pixel depth offset or world position offset / displacement. And modifying the UVs intermittently to get the effect of a 3D texture, and prevent any problems from arising. By intermittently I mean between certain nodes controlling for the parallax, and not as the primary basis of the whole material’s UVs as in completely modifying the UV chart in an external program.
There’s a deeper explanation of parallax occlusion mapping in the UDK page for it by doing a search of it in the doc pages. It’s really in-depth, and shows this extremely complicated network of nodes and wires. Then I saw a tutorial or two via YouTube and those were 10-20% the complexity of the UDK one at the most lol.
The problem disappeared in tandem with the reference plane and me adding a specified manual texture.
It seems I have fixed the problem but it doesn’t blend with the ground like usual.
Here are my randomization parallax occlusion mapping and networks I made based off of tutorials and personal tinkering.
When I tried adding it there it breaks the texture. The gird it’s showing is the split parallax occlusion from my randomization. I better fitted my texture and it fixed another problem coming from and improper texture size. The problem might not just be my tiling and could be how I’ve set up my parallax occlusion since I was having some texture coverage issues with other textures I had before I specified the texture that didn’t have the randomizations.
