The Secret to Realistic Landscapes in Unreal Engine - UE4 Tutorial

Previous Videos:
Hide Texture Repetition: • How to HIDE Texture RE...
Auto Material: • How to INSTANTLY TEXTU...
The Unreal Masterclass:
www.unrealmasterclass.com
Download the free final landscape auto material:
www.unrealsensei.com/autoland...
Link to newsletter:
www.unrealsensei.com/signup
Follow Me -
Instagram: / zach.hunter
Twitter: / unrealsensei
unrealsensei.com

[@UnrealSensei]

I have gotten a lot of emails asking to go over tessellation. It is important to know that tessellation will be removed in UE5. Landscapes are changing in UE5 so stay tune for an updated version once the open beta is released

[@fish3010]

Didn't know this, It's a really nice feature but really really expensive processing wise. I assume they'll offer something linked to Nanite that will handle the details.

[@KenmoreChalfant]

What's your source on this? So are they basically just tessellating everything automatically now? The "virtualized geometry" they talked about in the demo video?

[@ivc42]

WE WANT MORE!!

[@MeatFloat]

@@KenmoreChalfant Tessellation was hardware based as far as I know. Next generation consoles (PS5, SeriesX) do not support hardware tessellation, hence the reason Epic is dropping this feature. And in addition, it has always been really expensive and still is compared to a more traditionnal LOD approache (or Nanite, now).

[@unreasonablebastards753]

@@KenmoreChalfant I wish. At the moment Tessellation has been deprecated with no replacement. I've heard that virtual height-field meshes will be used, but this isn't ready for implementation yet...pretty sad that they pulled the plug on tessellation without having a replacement actually finished yet (but that DOES appear to be what's happened!).

[@legacythegame]

This is now my go to channel for landscape stuff, great coverage keep it coming!

[@AchillesMele]

One of the best teachers in this space. Learning so much from you, my Auto Material is now complete, and I'm ready to learn more!

[@pixelators7522]

I'd say with very certainty your tutorials about landscapes are the best. Totally the best out there. In the end when I compiled all of them, it showed only the grey deafult color of landscape that we get at the beggining and that was because I'm a bit idiot and didnt thinked that I should plug the R of dirt texture into Multiply. Very good videos my friend keep up the good work

[@fahimkamalahmed3544]

Great tutorial learned a lot from all 3 videos of the series and very happy with the end result that I got. Thank you so much.

[@Anoobis_Entertaining]

As always quality like nowhere else! Thank you for your work.

[@ksottam]

You're really packing a lot of information in your vids! Finding these incredibly useful. Thank you!

[@loganankarberg2296]

This was a great tutorial series! I loved it.

[@Ahmed_Orabi]

Wait for more bro . Nice covering for this serious ♥️

[@user-cw3nb8rc9e]

You are the only person, proably explaining that flowgraph sorcery and showing what to do.

[@user-yuri665]

You're one of my favourite tutors, thank you so much :D

[@utkucamldap3242]

Helped A LOT !! Thanks for everything

[@arLutiK]

you picked your name perfectly, I love the way you explain !!! you rock !!!

[@echogaming1760]

Alright, This is the channel I go to when I need to figure stuff out xD. Best channel and you are amazing at your tutorials! THANK YOU

[@marcbulthuis9118]

You sir, are KING at this

[@yoman9446]

Another great tutorial!

[@gutozardy5568]

I am just a beginner migrating from Unity and this video helped me a lot! Thanks!

[@Gajd21]

Hi! Thanks for these vids, you're a lifesaver! Keep up the amazing work, and please teach us for some more Landscape tricks! :)

[@lacilaci]

Love your tutorials, been searching for quite a while for a good landscape guide. This is exactly what Quixel doesn't dive into in their tutorials.

[@UnrealSensei]

Important! This tutorial is for intermediate users of Unreal. If you are a beginner check out the previous videos and this one before watching kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZKZnJaJhZ2FZ7s

[@seijianderson8462]

Thanks for making these tutorials, they're super informative and clear. Appreciate your sharing!

[@TheSebledingue]

Thank you very much, nice result

[@philippholzherr4520]

still overwhelmed by all those nodes, but love your explanations. For a short while I feel like I know what to do :) Hope it will get better with experience

[@kaa5823]

This all i need!

[@AdiusOmega]

How long have you been working in Unreal, you are pretty confident in it and the understandings of how things work. I've just gotten started and honestly it's all a little....overwhelming and frustrating. I appreciate you making this tutorial and having it be easy to follow with great vocal posture to boot. Once again, thanks.

[@Titunito]

You are a real unreal sensei

[@MrEiiin]

real Great tutorial ! i remember doing so back when UE was UDK but a lot changed since then . about blending between explicit normal and alpha , there's a third option . If you want to use the normal of each material to make a nice transition but avoid patches of , let's say grass all over your cliff , you can also lerp between alpha and explicit normal using the blue channel of VertexTangentWS as an alpha. There's certainly a better way to do it but it worked pretty well for me ! take care everyone.

[@paolosamparese8495]

I usually put the "base reflect fraction" at 0 on the fresnel to have a perfect black to white transition

[@jdvroum]

Great vidéo ! I guess that the postprocess is also important for good result ?

[@alexandrubulgaru5664]

Thanks a lot!

[@YASIR.K]

Thank You

[@ibadur.rokhman]

Hi great tutorial, looks realistic !!! when I followed the tutorial. I got in trouble. I copy and paste from Material to Material Function but not all are copied and the warning "one more copied nodes could not be pasted into this graph!" can you help me deal with it thanks :)

[@williamminnaar6311]

Hi there, how do you change the terrain resolution in areas that I need more detail? I am building a city, and want to paint dirt around the edges of the walls? Is there maybe a better way to do this, so that the walls don't look stuck onto the ground? :Thank you again :)

[@nochnJAT]

good tutorials

[@markrennie86]

Having a little trouble with stretching on the harsher angles....does anyone have good tips on how to set up tri planar? :/ Would be a pretty neat video toa dd to this series as its pretty much the last piece of the terrain-material puzzle here.

[@tkenterprise]

In part 2 you said this one was going to be about Specular and Erosion would really love a follow up with the erosion part :D Thanks for getting me into landscapes!

[@Jake-co7rt]

Is there any way to use multiple texture bitmaps, at different scales, as a heightmap for Procedurally-Generated meshes?

[@mr2ti41]

Frez-null. Fray-nel. Toe-mae-toe. Toe-mah-toe. Good stuff!

[@z4pp3rsapper]

Cool tutorial. Why didn't you just create the spec control at the end of the layer blend, right before the output.

[@radpunch]

Really good videos, you cover a lot of stuff other tutorials don't. BTW Fresnel is pronounced fruh-nel with a silent S ;) Keep up the good work

[@UnrealSensei]

Thanks! Good to know didn't know it was French word. Definitely butchering it

[@GDi4K]

Thanks for the that :D

[@brushbendstudios697]

Don’t know if this has been answered. But how would a grass output be utilized here. The output seems to only work on the auto layer which puts foliage everywhere

[@sjnvisuals6038]

Plz do one about landscape displacement & tessellation.

[@bs_art3625]

I imagine I can do this exact same thing to any material right? I have metal in my scene that needs more specular highlights that it's not getting from the roughness or metalness...

[@Utopia2023Game2]

Yea I GOT that Thank u Allllot

[@skb1879]

Fuzzy shader node for the grass will make it even better.

[@my4127]

While following this tutorial, my camera was facing away from the directional light source and my global specular value was very low. This makes it seem like nothing has changed after implementing custom specular and fresnel. It took me a while to figure this out. Hope it helps someone if they think nothing is happening.

[@TheMargaritaVilla]

This causes an error in UE5. Grass alone, this works. But when I blend material attributes with dirt, it wont compile. Have you experimented with this in UE5?

[@FBI_Master]

same error any way to fix it

[@goldenwolf2621]

if you tried to add grass variation and gets you an error in the blend material attribute of the grass like me that is properly because you get the coordinates from RGB channel try to get it from R channel and it will work

[@marcoungar659]

Could you explain your solution a bit more detailled?

[@jak3legacy]

Question; why not just put a constant for the specularity?

[@S4nch3z86]

Grate tutorial but i have issue, my Grass MF do not compile I got SM5 error at BlendMaterialAttributes When i use Dry grass and Grass in one MF When i use Only grass or dry grass it's ok

[@Arengan]

Hey, I want to add another material to it just like painting somewhere else but when I added it and connecting Material Function to Layer blend it has a error. Deletes all the texture at the landscape. I guess it clutches with auto material but I don't know hoe to fix it, Anyone know how to fix?

[@Arengan]

I guess its because Unreal sees more than 2 material now, Can we add 3 different materials?

[@Maartenyt]

When i put BlendMaterialAttributes into Result in the grass Materialfunction it gives me an error, something with float

[@karmakazegaming1427]

Bro.... how long have you been doing this? Wow

[@theenviornmentartist2475]

Why not just directly make a parameter for the specular value? I know you're clamping it to 0.5 to not let it exceed the value but wouldn't this be simpler with just the parameter hooked in directly? Or is there actually a difference?

[@InDieTasten]

He is sampling the red component of the grass texture to only make the parts of the texture specular, where the texture has a lot of red component in it. That way, individual grass strands can still be reflective up close, while the overall texture - viewed from some distance - isn't as specular, which would otherwise cause the ugly effect of looking very plane.

[@enkienki1256]

Question: what if You use specular materials/textures from Megascans ?

[@UnrealSensei]

Good question, you could use a spec texture although people tend not to since it unnecessarily adds a new texture slot and the texture parameter node is one of the most expensive. Also that specular texture more so meant for use with a none PBR material workflow

[@obnoxiousbong]

Epic should be paying you man

[@itsthehawke]

great content right there. my question: why is the terrain so glossy, you can see it against the light source. i was playing around with landscape materials earlier this year and i got the same result. you reckon how to get rid of it?

[@daeuslamb8191]

I think I followed this exactly, but when I apply the specular changes in my material instance, the entire material vanishes and I'm back to grey tiling across my entire landscape. Really appreciate these detailed videos, by the way!

[@TheAculusi]

Make sure your mask channel, only RED is checked!

[@mic007129]

Nice work with that tutorial! I have been doing game dev for a few years now on Unity and I'm amazed to see how Unreal work. I have one question and so far I can't manage to find the answer. I want to work a workflow using World Creator, do the landscape + biome placement via this tool and then use some Auto-Material to paint those biomes with more details inside Unreal. So my questions is how it work if you have more biomes for a large open world? Can I have multiple Auto-Materials and have them applied per biome? If yes, I'm guessing I can work a way to blend those biomes too?

[@paulchen9145]

Unfortunately this does not work for me. All the changes to specular just don't do anything. Using the switch to turn the specular clamping on and off I can see no difference at all. Any ideas?

[@PixelThrills]

Auto Landscape not working after open again the project... How can i fix that? Edit: I fix it. Now i have one more question. How can i add new material to auto landscape

[@slenux]

Scalar Param = 0 to the Specular Proooofit!

[@elstinopacino]

Can anyone tell me why my specular DOES NOT change at all? I've recreated the steps about 5 times now on different materials in my scene and none of them show any difference afterwards

[@elstinopacino]

Answer: In your landscape material connect the Specular of BreakMaterialAttributes to the Specular of M_Landscape output

[@ethanwasme4307]

Global normals help to break up the rays too

[@matheus-kirchesch]

Why the red channel specificly? Just out of curiosity

[@UnrealSensei]

Because generally every ground texture has a good amount of red values to them. They are lacking in values in the blue or are way to strong in the green. If you think another channel looks good you can use that

[@matheus-kirchesch]

@@UnrealSensei Ok, so it would work if i add'ed every channel together and divided by 3? thanks for the info btw it's good to know

[@nothinhappened]

Loving that your tutorials go the extra mile in level of knowledge over other typical tutorials. But I wish you wouldn't skip forward to later steps then briefly summarise what you'd done after. I'm a bit bewildered by these blueprints and as soon as you skip a step I'm lost. Cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate baby steps and choo choo train sounds while being fed.

[@jaymike5062]

Unfortunately this method won't work with Displacement materials on the landscape

[@CaCaCaKK]

nice ，you helped me find my question

[@UnrealSensei]

The basic lowering of Spec does work on Displacement. The fresnel way of lowering spec does not work in displacement appears to be a bug that hasn't been fixed yet answers.unrealengine.com/questions/523865/displacement-not-work-on-landscape.html

[@jaymike5062]

@@UnrealSensei That is strange. I usually work with displacements in my landscape and when I tried to blend them together this way it was throwing me errors. I tried to work around it but it never worked

[@Turanic1]

my problem is that overall unreal landscape ain't detailed enough, you can only go 8129x8129 texture map which doesn't have enough pixel data to transfer from software like world creator etc

[@mavencore3557]

"Fresnel" lol

[@jolanpiep]

Uhhh... you might want to Get and SetMaterialAttributes at the end so you don't have to do this in EVERY separate Material Function...

[@ukaszkondek807]

Ok, so I'm writing this comment like 5th time, changing it as the situation develops. So I've encountered some problems with this setup, basically, "BlendMaterialAttributes" was giving me an error: "[SM5] (Node BlendMaterialAttributes) Coercion failed: Mateiral float3 Local50 = (Local49 * Material.ScalarExpressions[2].y);" Resulting in not working material when I was combining Grass with Dry Grass (Rock alone worked just fine), so I'm not sure if @Unreal Sensei covered it in the previous tutorial (I may update this once more when I find out), but I had to change settings in "BlendMaterialAttributes" which seemed to cause the problem from "Blend" to "Use A" and "Use B" respectively. I hope I didn't break something at a later point but for now, everything seems to be working just fine. Please give me a shout if You something about this. Cheers!

[@rickpage44]

I had a similar error. When I followed the connection off of the “Alpha” input to the BlendMaterialAttribute” node and looked a little closer at the video, I had connected the “RGB” output of the “noise” Texture Sample to the Multiply node instead of just coming off of the “R” output. Errors went away after correcting the connection.

[@dissuxx7422]

@@rickpage44 I realize you wrote this almost a year ago, but thanks man!

[@TorQueMoD]

The roughness is what controls the glossiness of your materials in a PBR setup. You shouldn't need to use specular if you use the correct roughness settings. Also, (and I'm really not trying to be a jerk) the S is silent in Fresnel. I used to say Fres Nell too :P

[@HalkerVeil]

Or, use a PBR that isn't crap.

[@user-cw3nb8rc9e]

Awesome tutorials, seriously. One comment only. Please make these videos in 4k 60 fps. It would be a whole lot different in terms of what is visible. Watching you from 49" 4k HDR monitor. 1080p is not good enough for all these tiny flowgraphs zooming across the screen ;)

[@dontonipz]

+1 Sub :)

[@spacepirate9882]

I've seen many people using the red channel of their diffuse texture as a rougness/specular map but I don't get how that would make sense. Why would being less red mean less shiny !? It lower the intensity of the grass specular below 0.5 just because your grass is green and a bit lower diffuse than 0.5, so it means a red channel lower than 0.5 If you use this on a brighter reddish diffuse texture, it would lead to a more than 0.5 value, even if your reddish material is more rough than other materials, it would be more shiny. Also the fresnel trick won't really work. It's breaking the specular at close range because it's based on the camera angle while the problem only happens based on distance. It still looks wrong even after lowering the specular because the problem is something else. In real life, the grass represented by your textures are grass blades pointing out of the ground in different directions and they all have around 0.04% reflectance (0.5 specular value in UE4) but their own shadows makes them less reflective on shadowed parts. You can't fake the grass out of the ground with textures, so you generaly using a texture showing grass flattened on the ground and using grass mesh for grass blades pointing out of the ground. First problem : If you're targetting realtime rendering and not cinematic, you probably cull your grass meshes in the distance to not burn any GPU, so you're loosing their geometry and shadows/self shadows. Second problem : to fake the geometry of the grass flattened on the ground, you probably use a normal map that is faking self shadows, lowering reflectance on shadowed pixels (increase the intensity of your normal map, you will see that it becomes less reflective). But you're probably using mipmaps, which mean extra low resolution for your normal maps, so you're loosing almost all self shadows from grass in the distance because normalmaps are flat. To fight the second problem, You can increase the sharpen of your normalmaps mipmaps, so they will be less flat in the distance and add more self shadows. Instead of using cavitymaps used to fake micro occlusions, you can use composite textures docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Textures/Composite/index.html To fight the first problem, you can use a "BlendAngleCorrectedNormal" node to blend your normal map with large scale normal map of grassy ground. What you want is to make your grass material less flat in the distance, not lowering the specular, so you sill get specular highlights.

[@gaelromanet]

I am totally on the same page regarding landscape creations with Unreal Engine 4. I came to the exact same conclusion... even went further... both normal maps and specular maps are totally useless if you strive for realism. In my DISMAL Survival project, I do NOT use any specular and normal maps. Pointless! I wish I was living in L.A... you would be my very best friend!

[@MrSpronkets]

I think this is a large improvement, but it still looks glossy in my opinion.

[@Grumbledookvid]

So much work just to get something looking somewhat good...

[@curtisnewton895]

come on dont use question marks in variables

[@curtisnewton895]

what's that shit about "breaking pbr" ? specular can be adjusted depending on the material you want to achieve, there is no "breaking pbr" besides you're feeding 0.5 out of the blue, that's not breaking pbr ? this makes no sense

[@raavenstark5905]

The nods things is way too long and complex omg, i just want to make a drag and drop lol

[@TheEclipse1989]

Lmao Fresnel.pronounced Frenel.. Btw the 0.5 spec setting is not PBR, there are spec values for grass and other materials. Because you cant break energy conservation with metalness/roughness. EPIC even mentioned it in their documentation: "When you're editing a non-metallic surface material, there are times when you'll want to adjust its ability to reflect light, specifically, its Specular property. To update a Material's Specular, input a scalar value between 0 (non-reflective) and 1 (fully reflective). Note that a Material's default Specular value is 0.5." docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/index.html

[@plasid2]

Dude what for you complicated so much, just turn off specular complete