I’ve found few answers to this, which all more or less say “increase the landscape resolution”. But this has never worked for me. Why is it that when I paint a layer onto my landscape, it looks like this? This is weight blending, by the way, if that’s at all relevant. Attached is an example of what I’m talking about.
I want a smoother, more rounded edge on the path and dirt patch. How can I get that? Or is there something else I’m missing, here?
Turn on the wireframe visualizer ^
Go into your landscape details panel, search LOD. Change those numbers to make more vertices, thus increasing the landscape resolution.
Landscape texture painting is done per vertex. Therefore, the only way to get better resolution is increase the amount of vertices (this is what people mean when they say increase the resolution.)
Hey BIGTIMEMASTER, thanks for your help.
However, when I follow the steps as you laid out, I can tell that the vertices are changing, but they aren’t necessarily increasing. What people have meant when they say “increase the resolution” is using the settings when first setting up a landscape to do so (such as ‘section size’, and quite literally, the ‘overall resolution’ setting). My issue is that even on the highest setting (8161x8161 vertices) in there I see a very miniscule difference to even the lower settings.
As far as I can tell, without tesselation the most resolution you can get from the landscape is 1m faces. I think that if you are wanting what appears to be less than 1m resolution, you’ll want to use a height blend layer type in the landscape material.
This will break the blending up from being linear and make it look more natural, based on your textures height texture.
It’s a bit to setup but there is many tutorials on the subject:
Landscape Textures - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 3 - YouTube
Intro to Unreal Landscapes - Alpha, Weight and Height Blend Modes - YouTube
I always caution though - don’t evaluate a single aspect of the total art in isolation. Assuming you will have grass, trees, and other props breaking up the landscape, you may be solving a problem that won’t actually exist.
Height blended layers was definitely the way to go.
How did you do it @Maladrum? I have the same problem and High blended materials don’t change anything. Here is the example with weighted-blend but it looks the samy no matter I change:
Have you solved this issue? I’m currently facing the same problem.
Hey guys!
Can anyone advise on how to use the height blending in order to get rid of the square problem when painting over landscapes?
Appreciate it!
Allen
Its not magic, it wont “get rid” of anything.
It may lessen the visual effect.
And many times that’s more similar to gasolene on dumpster fire that is UE4 landscape when you needed water.
I havent really reviewed the topic but i did see some BS that needs to be pointed out.
This is farily consistent, so the paint essentially matches up between any size landscape.
Larger size = more pixels.
Not a different ratio.
It was mentioned above with some other BS. Its not. It doesnt affect anything. Never did.
Given #3, a height blend partially does just this.
Generally, it isn’t enough.
This is simply due to the texture UV sizing.
Texture Scale is geberally the same or very similar across areas, to the point where the visual effect of the height based lerp is not actually enough to properly introduce enough diversity into the layer overlap to stop noticing the Square nature of it.
So? What do you do?
well, you can run the same idea manually.
No one on any professional project is likely to be using the landscape layer blend node stuff illustraded here
Mostly because their perormance is really bad.
So what do people do?
Well, you have layers which are an alpha (black/white) texture representing the way you paint the landacape.
You use that as the driving factor of a lerp to cover what the white area would be with your desired texture, while the black area is the rest or output of all the other combined layers.
(More layers, more perfeomance downsides ofc).
In the case of a simple 3 layer material you always have.
A base - no paint.
That is the initial layer you begin with.
And the 2 layers you want to paint in.
The material will looks something like.
Uv > texture > A of lerp.
UV > texture of grass > B of lerp.
Sample Grass > alpha of lerp.
Output into A of anotber lerp
Samole Rock > alpha of another lerp.
Uv > Texture of rock > B of another lerp.
You build up from there, and can add infinite complexity.
What you can also do is to math fudge your sample’s alpha:
Say you want the one pixel to be more than 1 pixel of paint. You can probably power of 10 the paint sample, and clamp it back to 0/1 range so that the material colors in not just the 1 pixel you ended up painting as a layer, but several other pixels around it.
I believe something similar to this is used in the GC kite demo.
However note that because the demo had to be somewhat performant, they obviously don’t really use landscape paint.
Its done with individual textures.
Adding to this.
A creative way to generate some sort of a blend.
You know the alpha of the blend occurs in situation where the value of the layer is Less than 1.
You can run a branched IF statement (apparenly you have to use Custom nodes again in ue5)
and output a texture channel (values below 1) on top of the alpha value, clamping the result in a 0 to 1 range, and using the output of the branch operation as the alpha of the lerp.
could end up being cheaper than a height blend if you utilize existing texture channels to make it.
