Height Lerp Node | 5-Minute Materials [UE4]

Ay ay ay let's go! Today we're looking at the HeightLerp Node. This material function is another banger that will help your textures pop out and look 3-dimensional. It takes in a height texture and enables you to blend between 2 textures/colours using that heightmap, which allows for grass to creep in-between bricks or for snow to fill the gaps in stones. The transition can be driven by a scalar parameter, vertex paint or even by another scalar texture (or all 3!) so the flexibility is endless.
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Computer Specs:
Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's
Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine 4 - (Game Dev)
Blender 2.8 - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
Quixel Mixer - (Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (Chillax time)
Filmed using:
Sony A7s2 body
Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens
Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key
My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

First

[@denizkre8111]

niceee i just subscribet! i love the format. exactly what i needed, i appreciate your work and effort

[@cptraymond]

I absolutely love your work!

[@Mar-wr4fm]

Just wanted to leave a comment saying THANK YOU for this awesome series! I am in my last year of game development and I don't get thought things in depth unfortunately. I personally really love to learn things more on the background in order to tackle issues or even create new things, so thank you for making this awesome series! For every video I watch, I definitely leave a like and I am also subscribed Fantastic job and idea!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Thanks so much Mar :) I learn in very much the same way so I figured I’d make videos in the same style. Thanks for watching!

[@AcidAlfa]

Easy to follow and understand 👍best channel for material and shader stuff for sure

[@PrismaticaDev]

Glad you think so Acid :) Glad the response has been great - I just explain things how I see them haha

[@brokenhandle]

Thank you so much for this series, it's been absolutely eye opening and super educating.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Thank YOU Eden :) I've had a pleasure sharing this stuff with everyone - excited to share some of the more complex things!

[@brokenhandle]

@@PrismaticaDev you’ve got a dedicated viewer here!! Can’t wait. I also sent your animation playlist to a friend - I think he’ll absolutely love it. Have a great day :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@brokenhandle Thanks so much!! I'm really looking forward to fleshing out the animation series :)

[@silverknifex]

will be using this soon! cant wait

[@PrismaticaDev]

It's an absolute banger!!

[@flufflepimp2090]

You been my savior more times than I can count good sir

[@tamwyn0018]

Wow the node is so awsome

[@PrismaticaDev]

One of my favourites, for sure :)

[@Xaeveax]

I never knew this existed. Very helpful!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Glad I could be of service my dude :)

[@hpbecraft]

that lava shader is 🔥

[@Fokkusu]

This is amazing, I imagine they do something similar in Genshin Impact to freeze the water when you use ice magic over water, thanks for enlightening us!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yeah I imagine they use it but put the output into the Opacity Mask! I don't think the ice exists within the water shader though - definitely just a plane with collision and a world position XY-aligned texture (so that they all blend into one another)

[@Fokkusu]

@@PrismaticaDev yea thats a very nice suggestion for anyone wanting to do the same thing :) pog

[@alessioalonne4333]

GREAT!

[@AE_Surowka]

Thank you

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hope you find it useful! :)

[@cyberafterlife]

I love these videos dude, this and the bump offset video you put out have really come in clutch in my collaborative project at uni. Also while I'm here, at around 2:05 you change a parameter and have it update in realtime without needing to apply the material, how do you do that? It would save me so much time rather than having to go to an instance every time I wanna dial in a value.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey there! Really glad to hear that it helped you out :) As for the parameter, since I have the material on an object in the world it will update in real there, but not in the material viewport for some reason haha.

[@Tkonpk]

I feel like we're printing gold at this point

[@PrismaticaDev]

I think I have a tutorial stored somewhere for that ;)

[@bakedcheese4475]

Hey man love your content, I have learned a lot from your tutorials keep it up! kind of an offtopic question, but what monitor are you using?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Heya Cheese! I'm using an AGON as my main monitor - 35 inch, 21:9 ratio, 100Hz, 2K resolution and it's c u r v e d hahaha. An absolute game changer for productivity! As for my 2nd and 3rd monitors one is an old Samsung 720p TV and the other is an even older SoniQ 720p tv haha.

[@bakedcheese4475]

@@PrismaticaDev I definitely want an ultra wide for those productivity points xD. But Thanks man, have a wonderful day.

[@user-nm4gt9zx7k]

Hi! Is there a way to use the HeightLerp in conjunction with Parallax Occlusion Mapping? In fact, I'd like to blend 2 materials together (like dirt and pebbles) with POM applied to each of them. I've tried to create such msterial myself, but faced some issues.. Can you make a tutorial about it? I'd really appreciate that :)

[@mannythepirate]

These are the things

[@PrismaticaDev]

The things that go

[@YouWillDoAsYouAreTold]

great content :) +1sub

[@RomarioDev]

SUPER LATE BUT AWESOME VID BRO!!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

[@AgWhatsUp]

tried doing this on a landscape but it didn't work, any options I need on?

[@alinarangi7826]

Thanks, man for your tutorials, to use Height Lerp the object needs lots of Vertexes?

[@PrismaticaDev]

If you're using it with Vertex Paint, then it has to have "some" verts. By that I mean that a square with 4 verts wouldn't give you much control, but if you subdivided it even once it would get a lot easier. It's best to experiment and add verts where needed. For example, a lot of the Wall meshes I use from the marketplace were just 1 big plane, and wooden support beams were the same. So I divided them length-wise so the vert colour would be more detailed. But in general, the HeightLerp is there to actually hide the lack of detail haha

[@alinarangi7826]

@@PrismaticaDevthanks man

[@MarioAndYoshi1409]

Awesome! Is this node cheap on performance or should I use it carefully?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Extremely cheap - it's just a Lerp and a couple of multiplies. It's essentially free if you're re-using a heightmap or packing a heightmap in your texture (like the one I'm using with it in the Alpha channel)

[@MarioAndYoshi1409]

@@PrismaticaDev that's awesome, thank you so much for answering! i think I've said this a couple of times already, but you really are the best resource when it comes to material stuff man, thank you for doing all of this!!!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@MarioAndYoshi1409 No worries at all, I always reply to 100% of comments haha. Hope to see you in the next one!!

[@HomakHakerok]

damn you are a fucking legend

[@PrismaticaDev]

Not as much as you! Thanks for the support m'dude :)

[@pto2k]

Hello, I wonder where can I find this brick texture assets with alpha? I found some textures from Megascan but they do not contain alpha channels. How would you create height map for those? Thank you!

[@Martin00able]

You're explaying things really good! Can you make a lesson about auto landscape material? :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Already have! Check out my landscape auto-cliffs video :)

[@Martin00able]

@@PrismaticaDev Missed it somehow, thank you :))

[@lemonworm]

I really want a hard stylized noise and or height driven edge between materials and its basically impossible to accomplish with landscape paint. The wshy washy opacity of the paint is really frustrating to have to resign to. Is it possible/viable to utilize vertex painting instead? Or do you have any other suggested methods of creating a refinable edge between materials?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Sure do! You can use HeightBlend instead of WeightBlend to get some great blending going. Landscape painting is basically vertex paint, except there aren't many verts to play with. By using a height texture you can "break up" the grid-y-ness. I'll be doing an entire sub-series about Landscapes in the coming weeks, but feel free to google landscape HeightBlend in the meantime :)

[@lemonworm]

@@PrismaticaDev i have height blend w the maps set up but i still am having trouble avoiding the translucent landscape paint brush opacity. Id ideally like to have it set up so the "strength" of the brush fills in the height more, rather than controlling opacity. Even better would be if I could somehow mask the blend between painted materials, like you can with auto landscape, So i could use noise to define the edge

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@lemonworm Hmmmmmm... Mind sending me a screenshot on Discord? I'm sure we'll be able to get it working :)

[@lemonworm]

@@PrismaticaDev will do !

[@andrewbyrnes6389]

But how do you combine this with a world space tiling texture that uses parallax occlusion masking (like a brick wall)

[@PrismaticaDev]

So, the parallax occlusion function takes in a heightmap value - you’d just use the same value there as you would here and use it for the colour/normal. If you wanted the moss to actually “fill” the gaps in the bricks, you could add a Clamp to the parallax’s height value of which you could adjust the minimum clamp from 0 to 0.5 or something using the transition value

[@andrewbyrnes6389]

@@PrismaticaDev I’ll give it a try. Thanks for the tips. I think from memory there was some problems with the tiling because the worldposition needed a texture object and the height blend needed a texture sample but idk. I’ll give it a try again!

[@Jukerlaw]

Darn it i wanna test it so bad! Pls give the texture u use XD

[@Dhieen]

why dont you put your textures in the A and B of the heightlerp instead of a simple lerp?

[@JieDu-yj2vd]

Hi，Should the grayscale images used to blend textures be linearColor or masked？

[@PrismaticaDev]

Either should work fine as long as the output is 0 to 1 :)

[@JieDu-yj2vd]

@@PrismaticaDev Yes, I tested that they can all work, but I want to know which one is better and which one is cheaper?

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@JieDu-yj2vd in terms of performance they're all identical, so just have a look at the Memory usage in the texture details when you change the compression type :)

[@yiannibompotsis7219]

I am trying to figure out how to make a master material with 3 blending textures. Is there any way of making it??

[@PrismaticaDev]

You might want to have a look at my Vertex Painting video :)

[@vi8799]

How to blend 3 materials with it?

[@gursimransingh8726]

WHAT ABOUT THE NEW SKY ATMOSPHERE NODES

[@PrismaticaDev]

Eeee I haven't used any atmosphere effects yet :'( Haha I will get around to it eventually!

[@danlee7923]

It does not work with mip maps unfortunately

[@TheTrickyify]

Not first

[@FerlinDev]

First

[@PrismaticaDev]

First