Gaea to Unreal 5.1 - Texturing with Masks Tutorial

In this tutorial I demonstrate how to texture a Landscape using a Gaea generated mask.

[@cinemyscope6630]

Just as an FYI for everyone who watched the tutorial. The secret about the packing order in the packed Quixel textures are the last three capitalized letters in the file name, and they may not always be the same! When the file name for example ends in ORD, then it means Red=Ambien Occlusion, Green = Roughness, and Blue = Displacement. It seems that Red and Green are solidly uniform but Blue may be occupied by a different texture.

[@wco3095]

Thank you

[@jumpieva]

I was just about to comment about the ORD and saw this :) it's possible other textures are done differently but yea this is pretty standard with megascans assets.

[@moeaxy4605]

If you set your terrain definition to height 500,scale 4033,and the option range to Raw .You will get a landscape without adjust height.

[@Daniel_Vital]

Great tutorial! About the packed megascans texture, Red is AO, Green is roughness and blue is metalic ^^ Have a nice week

[@cinemyscope6630]

Thank you!

[@grantweaver]

Amazing tutorial, especially for someone who is new to Unreal and Gaea!

[@ytabhigan]

Great tutorial, your voice kinda reminds me of one of my old scary school teacher. I recently bought Gaea and didn't know what to do with all these different outputs. Thanks.

[@darklordstudios72]

ORD = R - Occlusion, G - Roughness, and B - Displacement

[@smfknj6010]

Watching this on 3/12 and I noticed you recorded it on 3/12! Crazy coincidence

[@cinemyscope6630]

It gets better - it's pure coincident that I also recorded and uploaded a new video today. Would not have noticed if you hadn't sent this message;)

[@smfknj6010]

@@cinemyscope6630 this simulation never stops getting weirder

[@bigdaddystrokes]

Hey, Thank you for the amazing tutorial, one thing I can't understand is why my landscape is split into like 42 parts while yours is a single mesh?

[@gaetangrey441]

Wonderful walkthrough, thank you for that. I followed the steps, but when I combine my materials into landscape layer blend all I get (on the landscape, not the preview sphere) is a black silhouette of the landscape. No colors seem to exist. Just blackness (use material Attributes is checked). What did I miss?

[@Syonide]

we love joerg

[@andreszulueta1645]

increíble material !!!! gran trabajo mis respetos desde argentina!!!

[@tbunreall]

you should be using the "flatten normal" node to adjust the strength of normals

[@lilkauzi]

I have a question, why is my landscape stuck as black??? I am so frustrated I just want to do this T-T

[@corgilife241]

Thank you so much for making this understandable!!

[@vladimirbondar8453]

Thank you for your short lesson!

[@salvadorcabrera4941]

oh fresh content to consume : F thx

[@paulzhu7786]

this is really helpful, thank you so much!

[@claudeloomes7985]

Great tutorial! Thanks man!

[@rileywalz7326]

I was having issues with my directional sun casting shadows on my landscape once the layer blend material was added (even when making all materials weighted) no idea what is causing it.

[@Preirin]

Thanks for this! You've earned another subscriber :) Question, tho. I have built a heightmap in Gaea and have brought it into UE 5.3.2. My landscape material is working just fine but when I attempt to import my slope layer so the mountains have cliff-rock material on the edges, it turns my entire landscape into that rock texture except for a few bumps here and there. I thought 'ok, I'll just import the slope into my grass layer and that might reverse the effect' but no. I added a texture to my flow mask and it worked perfectly. Any thoughts on how to properly import the slope mask? Cheers

[@cinemyscope6630]

Thank you! It’s been a while since I made this. At this point I’d export a splat map from Gaea, which is the equivalent of a packed texture node and then use the rgb of that node to layer 3 textures onto the landscape. Hope that makes sense.

[@JP-eo2pb]

@@cinemyscope6630 Would the packed RGB masked texture map require to connect to a lerp alpha input alongside two textures to blend their RGB channels or one of the channels to layer the textures? Does the packed RGB masked texture map require to import under the Landscape Mode's Layers too, or only use within the master material?

[@chandlerfrantz3140]

This is the second tutorial I’ve followed on this matter, and again, I just can’t get the materials to apply along the maps. Does this just not work on terrain over a certain scale?

[@cinemyscope6630]

The only thing I can think of is that you may have a landscape/texture scale mismatch. It could also be rotation. Try play with that and see if it helps. I'll soon do another tutorial with another technique getting a similar result.

[@christopherlopez2729]

ever use high res terrain mesh as the terrain for. Does Unread physic recognize the heighfield maps for simulations of water and smoke?

[@MelizzanoDaquila]

ORD Map Red Channel O = Ambient Occlusion Green Channel R = Roughness Blue Channel D = Displacement :)

[@cinemyscope6630]

Yes, thanks. I should re-do the video because it's been pointed out many times and I discovered the naming convention of the packed Quixel textures quite a long time ago. I'll probably wait till 5.4, hoping displacement will be back standard where it belongs without having to use a weird hack as currently required in 5.3. Thank you!

[@aether222A]

I am confused, when I import the file Unreal Engine has an error because it isn’t grayscale, then the map comes out all spiky. Why is your file not grayscale and works or how is your file grayscale?

[@cinemyscope6630]

This is too little info to diagnose from the distance, but in a nutshell, your hightmap is a grayscale image, whereas your albedo, normal, etc. are color images.

[@satyakimandal6572]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial! After adding the mask nodes for each texture, is it possible to further customize the layers by painting?

[@cinemyscope6630]

I demoed the manual painting process in an earlier tutorial. Another option would also be to use Quixel Mixer for this. In the end it depends on how close to the particular location your camera will need to be. In a recent build I created a second landscape within a landscape for individual control of the foreground detail.

[@satyakimandal6572]

@@cinemyscope6630 Is the manual painting after importing mask? Because I am able to paint them when I am not importing any maps. With maps being imported, the paint is not working at all.

[@cinemyscope6630]

@@satyakimandal6572 I think Mixer will likely be your best option for now as you can import all the masks and then add paint layers on top quite easily.

[@jumpieva]

so what is determining how high the snow is calculated, or is this all from the snow import map? i understand going to 10 was more about the 'under blending' right? but what if you want to taper off the snow coverage?

[@captainbusketttv3159]

All from the imported snow height map that Gaea generates. It is simply a mask which says "Put stuff where it's white/Grey and not where it's black." Grey would be the taper you're thinking of. You can adjust this with a custom mask. The reason the normal map of the snow was increased is that blending two of them together with the same strength makes them apply to both textures equally. Increasing the "top" layers normal map makes it override what is beneath it. I'm sure you could figure out a way to use the same height map that gaea made for the snow to slowly transition the normal map of the snow as well. That way "thick snow" wouldn't show the normal map of the rock (where a mask is very white) and the rocks would start to show through "thin snow" (where a mask is dark grey).

[@igorkirdeika4765]

The import size (4033 x4033) does not match the current Landscape extent (0x0), if you continue it will be padded/clipped to fit Message after import the snow map and don't load. Any tips over this issue? Thanks by the tutorial anyway.

[@cinemyscope6630]

If you go to ca. 29:30 I actually mention this. I believe it's a bug if UE was closed between the landscape Heightmap import and the mask import. To fix it check the box for the Heightmap import, even though it's already imported. That's fixed it for me.

[@igorkirdeika4765]

@@cinemyscope6630 Thank you for the reply.

[@sonnysingh5157]

@@cinemyscope6630 Hey I tried doing that but it still didn't fix it. When I import the heightmap with the masks all the textures disappear from the landscape and it turns back to the default checkered texture.

[@cinemyscope6630]

@@sonnysingh5157 This is very difficult to diagnose from the distance. It could be a simple error in the material build. Check that Weight Blended materials are saved and if you use more than 3 textures it's possible that you need to switch all the textures to "Shared Wrap" in the node tree.

[@kwitkari]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/jZm9qXemq92Arbs

[@subdgaming406]

If there any way to do this in ue4?

[@deim3]

what is that node on 17:58? All I hear is "n leftclick then s left click" - what?

[@cinemyscope6630]

Hold M and left click for the multiply node. Hold S and left click for the scaler node.

[@goosesuka]

17:44 name node ?

[@cinemyscope6630]

That's first a Multiply node (CTRL + M) followed by a regular Scaler Parameter Node (CTRL + S)

[@codingwithellie]

I have a 3070.. which.. I think should be enough but every time I apply a material to my landscape UI just crashes after running out of video memory.. Oh nevermind your scale was off.

[@cinemyscope6630]

You can allocate more VRam to UE. However, try reducing your texture size. 4K I stead of 8K for example. Also close other applications that may use more Vram.

[@codingwithellie]

I've already tried all of that sadly. It only happens when applying my MI to my landscape, if it's higher than 4k from Gaea. Very odd.@@cinemyscope6630

[@Rikitangoable]

Crank page file up to compensate for lack of vram

[@飞仔吖]

How many maskes can be used?

[@cinemyscope6630]

I think that depends on your GPU

[@opsxp23]

But how does it look closeup ground level???

[@cinemyscope6630]

That depends a lot on your textures. If they are smaller tiled and you use texture bombing to reduce tiling, and you add a few more masked layers it can be quite detailed. That said you probably still want to build out those areas that are important with Megascans etc. If you look in my channel I do have a couple more landscape tutorials on how to hand paint the textures and add detail with Megascans. They are 4.27, but for the most part this all still applies in 5.1.

[@BrodyRobot]

When I get to this point, if I don't also select a mask for the rock layer then it just shows up as transparent. What am I doing wrong? kzbin.info/www/bejne/ZoGYnHiQop1mo7M

[@captainbusketttv3159]

Could be plugging one of the RGB channels into the wrong slot. Can you share a screenshot of your blueprints?

[@sherifmedhat8625]

Awesome tutorial I just had one issue with importing the height field, which is unless I adjust the parameters for the landscape scale when importing, part of the height map texture gets omitted (the landscape is incomplete compared to Gaea's version) . And so I watched this tutorial to fix this issue, kzbin.info/www/bejne/e3e7eqBqidKAgas Other than that, the info you gave us is invaluable.

[@hyperpl5807]

Iam amazed how long and boring this was made, like seriously, you asking yourself what to do where, do you even prepared yourself? lol

[@NinjaSonar]

I feel the same about your comment...