Landscape Slope Blending Material - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 17

[@albertleonhart3093]

0:34 "We have a lot of material to cover today". I see what you did there. Awesome!

[@Madlion]

I like how calm and slow u speak. When playing at 1.5 i can still clearly understand your videos while cutting down on watch time greatly.

[@BenCloward]

Haha! Maybe I should just speak 1.5 times faster? :D

[@unrealdevop]

Lol I got to a specific point and ran into a problem, didn't realize 10 seconds later you would explain how to fix the PixelNormalWS error. Spent a good 2 hours trying to hunt down a solution XD. Your a Mat God, Lol.

[@TehKyros]

Glad I saw your comment I was about to start hunting for a fix too lol thanks for saving me time!

[@leoouyang1814]

Hi Ben, thank you very much. You explain everything so clear it is comfortable for newbee to follow! One warm tip, if you wanna preview some nodes you just can right click and select "start preview" SO you don't need to plugin the node to base color node every time.

[@BenCloward]

Thank you for sharing helpful tips!

[@CaCaCaKK]

I love you Ben! Your tutorial is always good,not only teach us hao to make ,but also includeing something about performance optimization,thats really FK-ing well!!!!!!!!!!

[@MortenKvale]

Hi Ben, thank you so much for making these tutorials! They help a ton for a guy looking to swap into games after 5 years in film.

[@carlossuarez9272]

In a couple of minutes i start this amazing tut. Thanks Ben..!!!

[@BenCloward]

Let me know how it goes! This tutorial builds on a lot of previous videos and I don't know how clear things are since I had to say "go back and watch this or that episode" several times. I'd like to get your feedback on that.

[@fortunacournot1321]

Ben, thank you Ben for this wonderful tutorials! In this tutorial you added a constant add and substract 0.5 node. I feel i have more control over location and sharpness if i ommit them.

[@BenCloward]

Sure - of course please feel free to modify this any way you want - especially if you can get better results with your changes. I'd like the tutorial to serve as a starting point, but I'm hoping that everyone will build off of this and improve it.

[@fortunacournot1321]

@@BenCloward Of course. This is a great help to me understanding this complex situations. I have one more thing: At 28:00 you removed the add node for the AngleMult. I guess this was just a mistake. The impact was that tesslation was just taken from one material.

[@railth]

Great tutorial as always! Cant wait for next week, been trying to figure out how to combine the slope technique with elevation for awhile.

[@xjuliussx]

this looks amazing, really apreciate all your episodes !

[@elk_h]

Gret stuff! Thanks again for sharing your knowledge, Ben.

[@SomeKindOfMattias]

Super nice! One thing one could do, perhaps, is use some curl noise (or Something, you’re the expert :) and break up the snow a little. Just so its not too predictable

[@A_B_M]

The default alignment of the cliff texture is incorrect, because the texture contains geological layers, which should be parallel to the horizon (or have a constant angle with the XY plane). Some kind of tri-planar mapping can help to achieve more realistic result in this case. Btw, as always, great tutorial!

[@shadowstart2oo4]

You are the master of shading, an excellent job, thanks for the tutorials and for your time, I still have many to do, greetings...👌👌👌🙌

[@DKJens44]

Thanks for this great Tutorial.

[@VladyVeselinov]

Hey folks, did you know there is an existing SlopeMask function? It behaves similarly. Loved this tutorial by the way, great to understand how this works.

[@BenCloward]

Oh cool! Never noticed that before. Thanks!

[@RomanNaumenko]

I'm not sure, maybe I used this function wrong.. but when I experimented with this function it kind of masks the slope from one or another side of the mountain only... Like if there would be a strong wind and one side of the mountain would have snow on slope, and another not... I didn't found any documentation about it..

[@PeterLeban]

Wait, I just noticed your terrain is 16k and runs buttery smooth with tessellation and all! :O I know you optimized LOD distribution and all, but still... I'm totally amazed and impressed!

[@BenCloward]

Yeah, I’m running an RTX 2070 though, I actually knocked it back down to 8k and removed the tessellation more recently just to give myself some more performance headroom so I can add other things. This next week I’ll be looking for additional ways to improve performance.

[@seansopata5121]

Really cool that Bridge is now built in to UE5 (the early access).

[@pizzaman11]

Great video as always, I'd love to see something on Virtual Textures in the future. They seem to have huge potential but very few resources on their implementation.

[@BenCloward]

Thank you for the suggestion! I’ll see where I can fit that in.

[@remon563]

Hi Ben, what is the MaterialScrambler node and where can I find it ? *edit* the answer can be found in Fixing Landscape Tiling - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 5: it is the "Make it Tile" node in SD, used in a new node so all channels get scrambled. Awesome.

[@jdpitt6]

Another great tutorial.

[@edoardosartori4619]

WOW, thank you so much.

[@bigolbearthejammydodger6527]

great tutorial

[@desktop328]

hmmm these videos always get me thinking. I could blend two cliffs together based on their angle then sprinkle some gravel the flats ontop. I really should focus on finishing the series though, i keep going off on tangents only half knowing what im doing. I do really like these tutorials. It seems like the correct/smart way to use unreal.

[@BenCloward]

IMO, your own ideas and inspiration that you get while watching are more important than the concepts I share. I definitely don’t want to suggest that what I’m presenting is the one best way to do it. If I can inspire you to play around with these things and come up with something new, I consider it a great success.

[@desktop328]

Youll be glad to hear one of my tangents bore fruit. Thanks to the tiling tutorial I got a nice rotational blend function that almost entirely eliminates tiling on ground textures. I probably wouldnt have been able to pull it off if it wasnt for the CR NOH texture format. Working out all those lerps with a texture samples for each map would have been a nightmare. I only had to worry about the base colour and the normal, the unpacker did the rest for me. All my functions are nice and neat, before they all looked like matLayerBlend_standard, lines absolutely everywhere covering the screen.

[@YASIR.K]

Thank you

[@MarioCardonaS]

Thank you, I was looking for this. Awesome video. P.D. Im a new suscriber.

[@riotboybroski]

THANKS SO MUCH

[@xantishayde-walker4593]

Hey Ben, been loving the series. Finally decided to come back and rewatch this to follow along. I'm having some issues though because whilst trying to use the video on Texture Packing, I'm not using Substance Designer or Photoshop. I'm attempting to use Gimp, with little experience and it's proving to be nigh impossible. I've looked at a video for learning Gimp from scratch, yet it isn't too useful when it comes to this specific use case and has me confused and frustrated. Is there any chance you could make a small video detailing how to do the CR and NOH packing in Gimp? That would be amazingly generous of you. Thanks again for all that you do for us. Have a great day.

[@BenCloward]

Here's a video that shows how to work with the red, green, and blue channels in Gimp: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r2HUanuZlsp-Y7s What you want to do is to take the texture data and paste it into the separate channels. So you'd put the red and green channels of the normal map into the red and green channels of the NOH. Then you'd put the occlusion (AO) into the blue channel. And then you'd add a new alpha channel and put the height data into that. Let me know if you need more details.

[@xantishayde-walker4593]

@@BenCloward Hey thanks. I was going nuts!

[@wpwscience4027]

@@BenCloward On the subject of using alternative programs to do your CR NOH texture packing. I've actually had a really nice workflow doing this directly in Unreal itself using their render as texture documentation walkthrough and tweaking the settings. I was wondering if there is any downside to doing it this way that me as a beginner is missing?

[@m4r_art]

Can you hand paint the slopes following this setup though? I think this great on final terrain. But what if you wanted to have that degree of art directing, would you be able to paint?

[@ALLYJUNIO546456]

Great series Ben, I just found it today and I saw all of your videos, thanks a million for sharing your knowledge. I didn't find any material on how to make the cr and NOH in mixer, could you share that with us, please?

[@BenCloward]

I misspoke in the video. The tutorial I was referring to is here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJDCe6ymmMubqtU But it's about how to use Mixer to break up tiling, not specifically about how to make the CR and NOH textures.

[@Albert-III]

Was anyone able to find the link to the video explaining how to combine the textures in Quixel Mixer that he mentions at 5:08?

[@darklordstudios72]

I still reference this video and several others! Always great. However, I am not yet able to figure out how to rotate my textures based on the slope or use a different rotated texture with a good blend based on the slope. Not just the slope angle but also the direction the slope is facing in the scene. Like if it is "west" use texture A or b if it is "east". Not really east or west but directional if that makes sense. I am working on building a desert and want it to pop!

[@davidmariscal3038]

Hi Ben, just following your series slowly whenever I find some free time, thanks for the great tutorials! One quick question, is it possible in your material function, MF_AngleBlend, there is a missing Add node using the input AngleMult for the Vertex branch of the function?

[@BenCloward]

Yes, that is correct. I fixed that in the version I posted for download. I can tell people that are really paying attention when they catch that mistake I made. :)

[@FilipePintoArt]

I actually spent about 1h trying to solve the issue going back and forth to see what was missing. I thought that was removed intentionally D: Thanks for you comment, helped out a lot!

[@davegaudet1855]

@@BenCloward ​ I hope this doesn't sound too much like a n00b question, but how do you convert the text files you posted into MFs that we can see in UE4?

[@BenCloward]

Make a new material function in Unreal. Then copy the whole block of text and paste it into the material function with ctrl+c then ctrl+v. When you paste into the mf, Unreal turns the text into graph nodes.

[@davegaudet1855]

@@BenCloward Awesome, thanks. I’ve been working with UE now for just over two years and it still seems like every day I have one of these “How did I not know this?” moments.

[@joeshmoe3340]

Hey Ben theres an error with the Matlayerblend custom function you provided in your link. It still has pixel input hooked to your normal.. so for those who copy/paste and have problems thats probably it. Thanks for doing these vids I requested!! Although I'm a couple weeks behind thanks to work, gotta catch up.

[@BenCloward]

Weird, I just tested it and the two normals are being lerped with the Alpha Vertex input in my test. Well, regardless I re-uploaded a new version that's simplified and uses the Get and Set Material attributes nodes instead. Take a look and see what you think.

[@joeshmoe3340]

@@BenCloward I didn't think about this at the time, but I'm a version behind you as im working on a mod.. maybe thats the culprit.

[@ethanwasme4307]

You can also get the normal map from your base or top attributes and by pass the custom blending :) can you show us how to pint blend based normal using layer weight nodes? Can already use a height lerp for that kinda blending

[@damz2289]

Substance Designer Turns NOH into yellow normals..is that normal?! Scrambled version is still ok.

[@JohnDowson100]

Amazing! Thanks for sharing! I was wondering, after you talk about Height Blending, will you show how to combine Slope and Height Blending together?

[@BenCloward]

Yes - that’s my plan.

[@JohnDowson100]

@@BenCloward Can't weit! :) Btw, there might be a way to workaround the impossibility to use Pixel Normals WS with height and normal map blendings. Let say you have rock for the slope and grass for the plane. If you import the normal texture of the rock in the AngleBlend MF you could use a Transform Vector node on it (set on TangentSpace to World Space) then add a Normalize node and then you could use that in place of the Pixel Normal WS to blend with the Vertex Normal WS node in the lerp ( just for the height and normals). This way you retain all the details.

[@jukai4091]

Hi Ben. Ty for that great tutorial, I found something I guess, at 27:41 min. on the bottom after mask B note. Im missing there the add note. This makes some weird heightmaps on the slopes :)

[@BenCloward]

Yes, that is correct. This is a mistake that I made. You need to make sure that both the pixel and vertex versions add in the AngleMult after the Mask (B) node. I have fixed this in the version of the node that I linked in the description.

[@elhalconlibertario2784]

@@BenCloward My Gooooood! I was going crazy with this for a Week! 25 hours a day trying to fix this! My Normals are all over the place and couldnt find the problem! The textures blend but the normals I get only the Top layer over everything! I noticed there was an ADD node missing but thought it was on porpouse for some reason! Im going to try this fix now and if it works im going o cry out of happiness! Cannot believe it!

[@elhalconlibertario2784]

Yes! It did work! Thanx a lot! U save my life! I was totally stuck! Still.... like if im getting now a bit very little bit of the cliff texture on my base texture! Is it possible that if my base texture have some rocks then the angle blended texture creep up over the edge of those rocks in the base texture? In using no tessellation btw! Thanx a lot again to both of you! And a very silly question.... on the links for the functions I get a bunch of text... how do i turn this into a blueprint? Cheers!

[@jukai4091]

@@elhalconlibertario2784 this isnt rly for a blueprint. It can be a material function or it can be in material it self. Just copy the text and Paste it.

[@elhalconlibertario2784]

@@jukai4091 Yes! Thanx so much! Thats whet I ment by blueprint! Amazing the results Im getting after the fix!

[@ChrisRadsby]

Hi Ben ! I had a question, if you make an auto-material for the landscape like this how do you deal with physical material for VFX and Sounds?

[@vinayakvk607]

This is the gaming pipeline to create terrain right

[@lyfzzfun]

Hey Ben, Great tutorial!!. I was wondering if there is anyway this method of changing the component size and LOD distribution can be applied in the case of of world composition via level streaming. The LOD distribution is greyed out for with level streaming, is there a way to enable it?. Thank you Ben!

[@butter_fly_games]

Hey, nice video, I did something like this in an older game I have created and had never find good information about one problem... What do you think is better for performance, having a lot of layers painted on landscape or an auto-material, like this one? Currently I´m only using a simple auto-material to design my landscape, but later I want create texture-masks in world creator 2 and import them as layers.

[@Xethavosh]

Why add -0.5 and then immediately subtract 0.5? Why not just add -1?

[@musoke65]

Hello Ben! Is there a video that shows how to pack channels on quixel mixer? The Your previous videos show for only Substance designer and Photoshop, AND I am a bit confused about the "2 near textures and 2 far textures" for snow at 6:33, how do I obtain them. As for CR and NOH I think I do understand.

[@DeanWinchester-ow2ug]

hi Ben, I am currently looking at your video and i am in adobe substance 3d designer, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make the 'MakeMaterial' node, can you please help :D thank you.

[@shadowstart2oo4]

Ben, one question, could you give me an idea how to use instead of the snow texture I have used a dark sand texture, more like volcanic earth, when using the dark texture it is not integrated in to the mask, it is as if it merged with the stone and I only see the stone, the sand only shows some bump but no albedo... it seems that with dark textures the top layer does not work... Any solution... ?😵‍💫

[@shadowstart2oo4]

Problem solved, by adjusting these values ​​I can use dark textures: Pixel NormalBlend (0.1) .AngleMult (-0.4) .AngleSharpnes(5) 🙂

[@ahrenpeng1398]

Hey Ben! I really learn a lot from your videos! I wonder that the height map I downloaded from Bridge is the EXR format which is nearly 200Mb，but another PNG displacement is much smaller. But When I mixed and used the EXR displacement in UE4 the effect was even worse. Why is that? Appreciate your response!

[@RCsFinest]

Awesome tutorial but slope blending aside is there a way to set certain areas that have certain textures?

[@BenCloward]

Yes, I show how to do that in episode 19.

[@samuelkilik8233]

will this work on a game using world composition

[@BenCloward]

Yes, but if you're going to make a very large map right now, I think it would be a better idea to wait for UE5. The rumors that I've heard are that world composition may be replaced by something better. Don't quote me on that, though. It's just supposition based on the fact that the a lot of the new features that Epic has been adding to the engine recently don't support world composition - so it seems like they're deprecating it.

[@samuelkilik8233]

@@BenCloward yea ue4 team needs to confirm on this one, i know a lot of people are stuck on there work since they heard some news on world composition including me,

[@Ruumablood]

Hey guys So, I found the core problem im having after going through all the vids with a fine tooth comb and testing and when I tested my rock cliff for example plugged into the landscape by it self like in this video and noticed my textures on cliffs and such have so much stretching.... I tested this on all my landscape layer functions I only have the 4 didnt really need the snow at the moment, Im currently in process of whats causing this stretch im seeing but till then if some one has any answers.. that would be great... Thank you!!! Uh... Yah I'm at a loss on this one, not sure why its stretched on the sides slopes etc..

[@eyeemotion1426]

Have the same problem currently, but I think that can be fixed by what is called 'Tri-planar texturing'.

[@morningsun6827]

I've been having trouble applying these techniques to landscapes generated at run time using UProceduralMeshComponent. Particularly the angle blending doesn't seem to work well for procedural meshes. Do you have any recommendations on how to make an auto landscape for a procedurally generated mesh?

[@hanskoehlerdesign6447]

Hey Ben, I love your video tutorials, for some reason no matter how I change my LOD settings I can't get the optimization that you have. Even when I match your values, the engine is still trying to give everything a billion triangles. Is there a box I need to check that I've missed? Thank you so much.

[@BenCloward]

Do you have tessellation turned on on the root without connecting anything to the tessellation factor root input? The purpose of the tessellation factor input is to control where the tessellation is applied - so you can limit it to only the area near the camera. It sounds like that's not working correctly in your material.

[@Restart-Gaming]

Hey my LOD Distribution is all grayed out?

[@whezker]

¿Is it possible to merge with traditional landscape material blend? I mean, this technique is awesome, but I wonder if you can paint over it.

[@BenCloward]

Yes, that is possible. I’ll be covering that in a future video.

[@whezker]

@@BenCloward Thank you Ben! Then I'm gonna do my research :)

[@unreasonablebastards753]

Great video

[@BenCloward]

From Photoshop, I'd use Targa (TGA) instead.

[@unreasonablebastards753]

@@BenCloward Thanks! :) That was what I sort of expected...but double the file size haha. It's odd that PS does not seem to support 32-Bit .PNG very well

[@unreasonablebastards753]

@@BenCloward P.S. Thanks for all the videos

[@BigRubberDucky]

Does anyone know why my shadows look so bad on my landscape?

[@darklordstudios72]

Just stumbled on this and looks promising but can't afford to get Substance Painter. Is that the only tool that can do that? Do you have to use that method? Looks promising though!!!

[@BenCloward]

Take a look at the comment I just pinned in episode 3. It shows how to create the CR and NOH textures in Quixel Bridge. kzbin.info/www/bejne/o3anoKxjg5aCerM

[@elhalconlibertario2784]

You can do it on photoshop to! Its explaind here in this playlist when he explains how to pack the textures!

[@darklordstudios72]

@@elhalconlibertario2784 Thanks! I just decided to subscribe to Substance so I could have all the goodies!!

[@blakehammock4133]

How do we handle UE5 not having tesselation?

[@BenCloward]

Just leave it out. It's really expensive in UE 4. If you're using UE 5.4, you could use Nanite tessellation instead. They just introduced that.

[@DKJens44]

Tesselation has not good Performance :( How can I convert this to Parallax Occlusion? If someone could help me that would be great.

[@BenCloward]

Parallax occlusion is quite expensive as well. If you're concerned about the performance, I recommend just not using tessellation. I've stopped using it in my latest version because the grass mostly covers it up anyway.

[@TolisPiperas82]

upload as file the final function

[@eel900]

RIP intro

[@KiwiHawk-downunder-nz]

When I resample in UE5 the editor crash's

[@Bluespace-publications]

No more tessalation in UE5 :(