Bake Layered Height Texture to Nanite Displacement Tutorial | Unreal Engine 5.2

[@gillgonzalez8479]

Hey great vid. Came here from reddit. Can you do this with a whole path in a forest? Doest it have collision? Thanks!

[@Procedural_Minds]

Absolutely, you can do this with any mesh at all. This doesn't need to be a plane. Once you create the displacement map, apply it to any geo. And of course then it's a matter of whether your geo has collision. :)

[@trauma2980]

Hello, it was very interesting, i just got some questions. Since the full release of the 5.3. We can now have the displacement in the material. So i'm wondering if it's still necessary to do all the setup for the bake. Coz i guess we could just get the data of the blendheight and bring into the displacement channel (on the material)

[@Procedural_Minds]

Yeah, with 5.3 it's potentially possible to just have it all inside of of the displacement input. I haven't tried it yet, but it's on my todo list. The general layered concept will stay the same, but it does eliminate the need to bake it to a texture and push it through the custom UVs.

[@trauma2980]

@@Procedural_Minds Hey, I tried it, with the same setup as your video. Everything is well configured. But it's not working, after some troubleshooting I think it's a problem with the GetMaterialAttributes node, but I'm not sure. I just started learning Unreal. Maybe there is an other way to make it work but without the layered setup.... idk

[@Procedural_Minds]

@@trauma2980 I'll definitely do an updated video on it for 5.3. The idea I have is to still have it all work the same way, but then just input it on the overall material level, instead of per layer. That way you still get the proper merge per layer.

[@rohaanallport677]

My personal input here: Displacement (in materials) is NOT a release feature of Unreal 5.3. Nor does it even seem to be considered 'Experimental'. You probably won't/can't find anywhere where Epic Games officially announced Displacement as a 5.3 feature. It's likely that some smart guy looked into the 5.3 code, saw the code, and activated it. If you've done any performance testing you can see that this is DEFFINITELY not a shippable feature (massive frame rates drops, overrides in instances don't work and landscapes brake apart after building). Also just plug your displacement into World Position Offset (WPO) (AKA the OG displacement and BETTER). And to answer your real question XD .... Yes you should definitely still use this strategy. The idea is that you're making an entirely new displacement map directly within UE. Which you would then use as a height texture in .....well anywhere really (use in the mesh displacement, or material WPO, as a mask or Ambient Occlusion, just to name a few.)

[@trauma2980]

@@rohaanallport677 Thank you for the answer 🤌

[@ijerofei]

Hello, could you sell or share this material system?

[@Procedural_Minds]

I am definitely considering putting the material system on the Unreal Marketplace, I just want to fix up some things and get a few more tutorials for it done so people know how to use all the different features. :)

[@ijerofei]

@@Procedural_Minds ok i will wait patiently

[@Procedural_Minds]

@@ijerofei If there is something specific you want from it though, don't hesitate to ask and I can make a tutorial on it at the very least. :)

[@isaac.3347]

Subbed, been looking for these kinds of guides for awhile now - thank you very much.

[@Procedural_Minds]

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful. If you have any requests of what you'd want to see a tutorial for, never hesitate to ask. :)

[@isaac.3347]

@@Procedural_Minds Awesome, I would love to see if you could maybe make a tutorial on how to translate this material setup to vertex painting (if possible of course!)

[@Procedural_Minds]

@@isaac.3347 You can absolutely have vertex painting used with a layered setup, and I can do a tutorial for it as well. Just keep in mind that Nanite doesn't support vertex painting. :)

[@isaac.3347]

@@Procedural_Minds Thank you! I am aware of that, yes. It is unfortunate that it's not supported, maybe one day Epic could intergrate it together.

[@Procedural_Minds]

@@isaac.3347 Yeah. I can understand why, since it's basically retriangulating every step, they need to redesign the way the entire vertex painting system works to basically not be actually vertex dependent but something else. Either way, I'll see about getting a layered vertex paint tutorial done for this weekend if I can. :)

[@OverJumpRally]

Great video, thanks!

[@Procedural_Minds]

Absolutely, glad you liked it! :)

[@mateuszabramek7015]

Didn't expected to see you here