Painting On A Landscape Auto Material - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 19

[@MR3DDev]

Best automaterial setup you will ever find on KZbin

[@BenCloward]

You're too kind, Manuel!

[@LeiluMultipass]

Hi, I can't believe that a professional gives us such good lessons without ever wanting to sell us anything. In a few weeks, I learned so much from you, while I knew nothing about UE4 and without paying a single penny. Thank you. PS: I learned a lot thanks to the Quixel and UE youtube channels too but they are far from being as educational and clear as you.

[@BenCloward]

Pay it forward! :)

[@nk361]

@@BenCloward oh we definitely will. I love the idea of giving help to those who are not already rich. Thank you

[@blakehammock4133]

Thank you so much for this!

[@QuakeProBro]

Yay Get and Set finally

[@DKJens44]

I Love your Tutorials, thank you.

[@scottcourtney8878]

Thanks so much for sharing this. I had a working auto material of my own design but couldn't figure out how to make it also be paintable. That combination doesn't get a lot of coverage in the usual tutorials taking one approach or the other.

[@QuakeProBro]

Instead of using the Layer Samples + Lerps to blend the displacement, I‘m using a second Layer Blend. The Layer names stay the same, the only difference is that I set them to Weight Blend instead of Height Blend. Works perfectly^^

[@ethanwasme4307]

oh!

[@QuakeProBro]

@@ethanwasme4307 :D

[@BenCloward]

Thanks a great idea. Thanks a lot for sharing it!

[@QuakeProBro]

@@BenCloward No problem

[@Bulborb1]

Ben this tutorial is something else! So incredibly helpful and useful for getting landscapes textured nicely, I really appreciate all the work put into this and will continue following the series. Regarding the displacement, would you happen to have any tips on how to adjust the Landscape Shader for use with Nanite Displacement? I have yet to read more about how it works but was wondering if you had any advice on implementing Nanite Displacement functionality into this awesome material. Much appreciated, and wish for you the best!

[@王洋-d1i]

happy new year

[@YASIR.K]

Thanks

[@lorryburger8165]

Thank you for all of this! You probably know this by now, but another way of tidying things up is to used a "named reroute declaration node" when spaghetti's are starting to go all over the place and then select it from the right mouse menu "Named ReRoutes" option

[@tandersen9282]

Around 12:37 I notice the paint looks square-ish. E.g. it does not blend with the adjacent landscape textures. Is that expected or is it a material/configuration issue? I am not using Unreal but have experienced this with some material configurations and to me it seems to have something with how the paint is added, verticies and something in the materials them selves. E.g. some materials blends poorly. Any idea what is going on here?

[@BenCloward]

Yes, that is happening because of the sparse tessellation of the landscape. The paint mask only has 1 pixel per vertex, and the landscape only has 1 vertex per meter. I have it set this way to save on performance, but you could increase the landscape vertex density to improve it if you wanted to.

[@DubXMrBug]

I love your Tutorials ! I have a question, what if we want to erase insted of painting ? I know we can hold shift while painting to erase but we can't do that on part that have been procedulary generated. In fact my goal is to export the layer info we created in this tutorial as mask for others software. I know we can right click on layer info in the paint tab and export as mask, but for the snow material for instance, it only create a mask were we painted and not in the area that have been already generated with our height and angled slope stuff...

[@davidwest7190]

Hi Ben, thanks for this awesome tutorial. I got it working perfectly using the paint tools. However i noticed that when i used a landscape spline the painted material was blended in all area with the auto material. I would expect to see the painted material in the middle only and then blended on the sides. I thought maybe i needed to subtract the auto material somehow in the spline. Any ideas?

[@williamweidner5425]

is there a way to paint on a new texture that isn't part of the auto material? lets say I build a landscape, but I'm building a town and want to paint in a cobblestone texture.

[@eggZ663]

Any ideas how to setup different biomes across a terrain in an efficient manner? Like going from what you have here to something like a desert (and possibly more)?

[@ethanwasme4307]

Layer sample node into blend node gives you the option to have normal or height blending when painting layers, almost never use the layer blend node now :P Height lerp or Alpha input of world aligned blend node (need to connect alpha input to the other 2 outputs though)

[@ethanwasme4307]

Also the normal of the previous layers still show up on the flat areas of the proceeding layers, is this happening in your mat?

[@BenCloward]

Hmm, not sure. Maybe? I bet it's because of the difference between the vertex and pixel blending masks. Some of the masks are really complex and high frequency while the normals are blending with a lower frequency mask.

[@benedikt5811]

great Video but I have a question. How can I add a material without it being in the automaterial first? Is that possible?

[@antoniopepe]

Fantastic tutorial Ben. I have one question on resolution of the paint. I found myself in the situation of having a very large landscapes and to stay with the right scale compared to other elements, there was a jaggedness between the various blends. the only solution would it be to rescaling all the landscapes or to use the virtual textures that restore resolution on the paint layers but not on the auto layers?

[@khalidalamin1674]

Amazing Tutorial.... Can you please show us the shader complexity of this material..... Please!!!!

[@BenCloward]

I think the instruction count is around 324 and it's sampling 39 textures. Is that what you meant by shader complexity?

[@khalidalamin1674]

@@BenCloward Yeah... I meant that.. Will you be add your RAIN_Function in this material in future? I wish it will be happen... And THANK YOU!!!

[@BenCloward]

@@khalidalamin1674 That's a good suggestion, thank you!

[@marcinesa1336]

hello :) Are you using virtual textures?? if so then maybe you will record some tutorial on how to add it to your project

[@BenCloward]

I'm not using Virtual textures in this tutorial, but Manuel (MR3D-Dev) just released a great tutorial on the topic. You can find it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/epqrg5JqbJpgY9k

[@gregoryfutrell4603]

What if I wanted to add other materials? Like sand for beaches or riverstones and still use the auto-material?

[@BenCloward]

You could do that, yes. You could either add it to the auto material using additional elevation blending, or you could add it as a layer to the layer blend.

[@gregoryfutrell4603]

@@BenCloward I will play around with it, thanks for the awesome videos

[@ronaldlee320]

Hi, When i link between layer blend and get mat attributes, it comes out error (LandscapeLayerBlend) Cannot mix MaterAttributes and non MaterialAttributes nodes

[@jahalost2301]

watch video well 😀 i also missed that part

[@unrealengine5-storm713]

When painting it only paints at half opacity unless it is weight blended. Even adding a 1 to the height to see if that is the issue it still only paints at half opacity.....and weight blended looks kind of bad so idk what to do :\

[@whezker]

As we say here in Spain, "pim pam pum bocadillo de atún"

[@BenCloward]

Y como decimos en los EEUU "Thanks for watching! Be sure to like and subscribe" LOL :)

[@whezker]

@@BenCloward You have my like and my sub since I discover your channel. Thanks a lot you are a great dev/teacher.

[@BenCloward]

@@whezker Much appreciated, Victor! Gracias por su apoyo. Digame si tiene sugerencias para videos en el futuro.

[@whezker]

@@BenCloward Off course I have a suggestion! I gess we could improve even more the terrain material if we explore some asset blending techniques. I Like to know what can be your preferences.

[@seansopata5121]

Some really nice free grass from Project Nature on the marketplace, however, be prepared to resize the textures. 8k is utterly absurd for grass and flowers

[@BenCloward]

I'm releasing the grass video this Thursday. I'll be interested to see how what I've done compares with the Project Nature assets. I used grass assets from Quixel Bridge. Let me know what you think of it.

[@LeiluMultipass]

Would it be possible to slightly lower the volume of the intro and outro to bring them to the level of your microphone please (or increase mic volume)? Before going to bed, so as not to wake up my girlfriend, I have to lower the volume at each new start of a video. xD

[@BenCloward]

Lol! Thanks for the feedback. I’ll do it in the next one.

[@AndreaFromTokyo]

too bad the hit on performance to have a layer based paintable landscape material is so huge. You can even notice it in this video

[@BenCloward]

Any suggestions for a better method?

[@AndreaFromTokyo]

@@BenCloward Lowering the landscape texture sizes does help a little, same as playing with the mip levels... still... i wish there was a way to "bake" the texture once finished modifying it at least... sorry but i too have no clues :| RVTs won't give enough resolution with large scale landscapes so i think that route is out of the question... if you find anything about it let us know please!

[@oswinlost8786]

@@AndreaFromTokyo I have used RVT on a 16k by 16k map on a nvidia 1060 FE and it seems to do the job without losing performance and to be fair to @Ben Cloward the edit itself is performance-hungry so I tend to use simulate game to do my testing yes the edit such's when you lose FPS but what counts is MS and World Comp and streaming distance When Ben gets to that Lesson :) Plus there are other ways to make Material in an array but I have not found a good tut on that and it above my UE4 level right now still learning like everyone else here too! trial and error is the way that I have found that works best and with tut's like @Ben's and many others content creators and good comments on their tut's help everyone. I like how @Ben is learning with the rest of us and applies what he reads in the commits. I have noticed that Unreal make you work for your performance and there is a lot of optimization that can be done with Material, Landscape, etc... before your final Master Material is done. Not an unreal expert

[@AndreaFromTokyo]

@@oswinlost8786 I was implying to use the RVT as a landscape texture like a "bake" of your actual landscape material but you cant use RVT as a landscape texture sadly, if you do so you will have huge stretching where steep slopes are plus probably everything will became low res etc... Obviously RVTs can be used for various other reasons!

[@nk361]

@@AndreaFromTokyo @Bem Cloward I think what you can do is, after you've finished hand painting a layer onto the landscape, you can right click on the layer in the paint landscape material layers UI and select export to file. Then you can remove what you've painted on your landscape material and instead use that exported texture as a mask to apply your chosen material to that area. (in blueprints) This way you can even texture pack those maps into the RGBA channels and get four material masks to add to your landscape out of one loaded texture. A bit complicated, but should be much better performance for you and the textures can still be changed depending on the player's distance as usual.