UE4 Tutorial: Vertex Painting (AAA Games)

[@fl260]

You explain stuff in the best possible way. Subscription was really a no-brainer.

[@beastmodejelly8654]

liar

[@Dustyg99]

Very impressive combination of effects in an easy to understand material. Video is quick and to the point, awesome vid, thank you for putting that together.

[@underscore00]

Thank you! Glad you like it :)

[@Aidy]

Awesome, thanks for this. Vertex painting has always been a mysterious thing for me, and all of the answers and tutorials on how to use it are either outdated, too long, or just don't actually tell me what I need to know. Bonus thanks for the assets!

[@underscore00]

You're welcome :) And thank you for the kind words!

[@wolf-tr3bp]

This is such an amazing tutorial even for an absolute beginner like me, thank you so much! My workflow is going to be much quicker now thanks to Vertex Paint!

[@jeanpierrevargas8872]

I created a Custom material function from this tutorial. Hope to use it a lot! Great tutorial!

[@ug674]

Keep it simple love your teaching style sir

[@tildo2001]

i´ve been looking for this for so long to keep my first project, thank you so much

[@primitivepatterns]

Excellent explanation, I learned so much- thank you!

[@samantha-draws-stories2176]

You my good sir, have just made a students day by saving them from remaking there whole model :,) thank you!

[@lilgreenhen]

Fantastic, straightforward video, thank you!

[@PeterKLee]

Thank for making a great tutorial! I love that you explained everything I want to know :)

Congratulations for such a useful tutorial!!! Many thanks!!

[@froggyworld]

Awesome thank you for demystifying so much of this stuff.

[@underscore00]

You're welcome! :) Im glad you're getting something out of my videos :)

[@deadsec3554]

i was looking for this last year :) thanks

[@pingu_pox]

You just blew my mind, instant subscription!

[@dangerousmindgames]

My grass texture is doig the reverse (6:00) of what yours is. Its avoiding the cracks. When I put a negative value in the blend power it just creates a donut shape of grass. With a hole in the middle. Can you tell me why its reversed? Thanks

[@spacescan3d]

fantastic work!! many thanks

[@crazyguy7585]

love ur tutorial bro awesome keep uploading more :)

[@10yearslater_]

This is an amazing tutorial! I learned so much, thank you! Do you think you could make a video on how to use trim sheets to tile modular assets?

[@alintapordei7514]

thank's for the video! is there any way that you can save the blend as a texture/material? and use it to different mesh? thank you!

[@Cine_Coverop]

Well explained. Nice voice. Great tutorial. Subbed! (I really rarely say that)

[@underscore00]

Thanks! Much appreciated, there's lots coming in the future :)

[@zephyr887]

Love this and working perfectly. Just wondering how you would set up AO in this situation? Only thing not explained that I was missing.

[@josephvanwyk2088]

Lol - when other tutorials hammer on about neatness in blueprints, I understand now what they mean. Regardless - thanks, I finally learned the thing I asked myself "how to" on day 1

[@arcitek66]

Watched tutorial and seems very good for someone like myself getting a handle on UE4. Probably a stupid question but where did the plane come from in the beginning of the tutorial? It is full of subdivisions and I was not aware that UE4 could do this to their ground plane mesh. I think the only way to tesselate was with a material or something. Was the subdivided mesh imported from a 3D program? Thanks!

[@berkokten4444]

Great stuff, i wanna use a masked texture how should i approach the opacity mask? if i use my masked texture it just makes the stuff invisible other than that texture

[@imagine-games6677]

yay carepackage & tutorial! awesomeness, thanks

[@Alex_River]

Great Tutorial! Do know of anyway how to detect which paint value that is under the player? Getting material or physics material is easy but getting the specific painted vertex color value, 0 or 1 seems much difficult. Want to make walk sounds work on right material :)

[@Ali107]

Is there a way to paint in-game using blueprints?

[@CosmicMetallMusic9919]

In a color paint mode surface plant are always white, brush are no paiting floor.

[@Bazinga73904]

Very cool effect. I was wondering how you could paint this style on a landscape sculpted in unreal?

[@benhardwiesner6963]

unfortunately those 2 things do not support each other. When you're using a landscape you need to work with landscape layer blends. Generally they do the same. They also allow for neat blending via heightmap... the biggest difference is that instead of lerping 6 texturetrees one after another everytime you just plug all into the same node. In the same way you're not limited to 3 colors. All the landscape stuff is a far easier alternative for the same job... But in my experience it comes with a higher performance demand. Only way to use classic vertex paint on landscapes is to import them as actual meshes...

[@treebeard7121]

Just finished this and compiled some notes, this had been the best indepth video for this topic that I have seen. I have one question, about 7:50 in the video, while working on the Specular group of nodes, you originally included a couple of Denaturation Nodes, that you quickly removed when an error popped up and it was my impression at that point the fastest solution was to remove them. My impression is that de-saturation is how rich the colors are, but may have something to do with noise or am I mistaken? I'm interested in a material that gives some control of noise in the material, and I'm wondering if you have a tutorial that covers this? Thanks!

[@underscore00]

Hi, thanks for watching, and for the kind words :) The desaturation nodes are to remove any color from the resulting specular information, but this is non-critical to the end result and I did the most expeditious thing during recording in order to not waste time. I dont often use colored specular maps anyway, so I just brushed past it. The solution is super simple, and i still kinda kick myself for not realizing it at the time, is to put a desaturation node directly before the material attributes node, after the lerp. Then you can plug a scalar into the fraction node and have control over how much color is reflected in the specular channel. I hope that helps! I dont have anything specifically on noise in materials, although its touched on in my Paper2D videos. You can basically multiply your diffuse map by a noise map and have basic control. I can elaborate on this if youd like :)

[@liamboehning4398]

Super useful tutorial, thank you!! Question, what should I keep in mind when putting together the blended height map? I want to blend a wet road with a dry version of it and I’m not sure what that height map would look like. Thanks!

[@underscore00]

Thanks for watching! My advice to you is to look at real-world examples of how water interacts with roads and try to imitate that effect with your texture. A lot depends on how flat and clean the road is, but for a basic guide, you want low points to be black and high points to be white. I hope that helps! :)

[@liamboehning4398]

@@underscore00 Yes it definitely does, thank you so much!

[@unrealdevop]

Hey could you please help me, I for one can't get help with Unreal for the life of me. Even on the Unreal Slackers discord channel with over 10,000 people you can ask a simple question and no-body ever even acknowledge's your existence....I was originally working through this lesson on the Unreal Learn channel and I can't get the vertex colors to paint. I can fill it with either black or white but I can't paint one on the other. It's only letting me have a solid color. When I fill it with black and try to paint white spots on it nothing happens....

[@unrealdevop]

I figured it out, the mesh has to have a specific number of verts apparently and I was using the default box with next to none. I tried importing a tree and it worked fine.

[@Donttouchmywaifu23]

I love you, you saved me

[@massimiliano382]

how many textures can i blend ?? in this tutorial there are only 2, can you merge example 6? or am I bound for strength by blue, green and red?

[@gutspraygore]

Awesome. Bookmarked.

[@-CornDawg]

You're good teacher anyway !

[@treebeard7121]

A little late to the party, but I have a question. I just dragged the ground mesh (from your package) into a new projetc set up for third person player, moved the player start over to this mesh, slightly above, but if I hit play, the character falls right through it. This is before I've done anything else, just emulating what I saw in the video. Any ideas why this might happen? Thanks.!

[@underscore00]

The party never stops, my man :) This is happening because there's no collision on the mesh. If you open the ground mesh you can generate a box collision for it, or you can add a blocking volume in the main editor viewport. Let me know if you need any more help!

[@treebeard7121]

@@underscore00 Thanks for answering, I'll try this. :D

[@kblin517]

"Wait for it to compile" me: aight imma get a coffee, make dinner, take my dog for a walk and take a nap

[@Obscurainc]

Is there a plugin/downloadable project file that has the nodes for vertex painting in it for this, so we could just copy and paste our mesh to it and not worry about plugging the wrong nodez 🤔🤔

[@mr.sunshine4432]

Hey great tutorial but i have a question. My wall (object i'm using) is a plane with a texture on it. Meaning; there are not allot or only 4 vertices in it. Because of this the vertex paint is showing up all weird and covering a whole part of the surface instantly. is there a way around this or do i just have to increase the vertice count in blender? thanks in advance

[@brewster9235]

I think you'll need to add vertices one way or the other. Since the painting relies on where vertices are, you're going to need more of them in order to paint more!

[@MrGunnermanhaz]

How would I go about making adding a 3rd texture? would I repeat the step but use a green channel for it instead?

[@MikeSn0W]

I thought you needed to set a value node for the "Tessellation multiplier" input to activate the world displacement :o

[@deluxepopper]

Yeah.. This is exciting learning to turbocharge creativity.. Again as i have asked in another video of yours.. How much does this tax system performance? Excessive drawcalls when the game get's bigger could be disastrous if you need to kill your darlings in the end.. Love the idea and execution of this tut. Keep it coming..

[@RohanGulig]

HEY PLWASE HELP --..... i did vertex painting but after then i created terian ... with fill word .... and then i tried to paint .... it cant when m trying to paint ...camera moves...with click and drrag .... please help... sorry for the english

[@andersbrynildsen9026]

Would this work with Physical Materials also, or would I need multiple VertexPaint materials and meshes set up? I want to alternate between different frictions on the same surface. I.e I paint in my sand with one friction, and then paint in my asphalt with a different friction. Either way, great tutorial!

[@blackswan6386]

hello sir can you help me, i cant add a texture to the paint window below. its red. i added a texture to my landscape and now i want to overlay it with some other texture, just like you think you can paint of. but i cant add. there is 2x paint option, but i cant. can you please explain the step how to add a texture exactly for painting on surface ? i watched serveral videos but noone is talking about that, all are doubble clciking and its there, but it dosent work in my case... help. thanks sir for sharing knwoledge

[@sergiovelandia3d370]

Thanks a lot bro ♥

[@markjackson7621]

Nice tutorial! I have question which is, why can't I plug both normal maps into a Lerp node and mix them with the alpha channel? Isn't multiplying them with a straight blue colour by 0.5 first going to reduce the normal map strength by half for both normal maps? Just wondering it's necessary to do it this way. Thanks in advance if you find the time to help a newcomer like myself :)

[@cristiangambadori220]

Sorry for the long text, but i'm trying to figure out the correct usage of this tool. I'm using 3 ways vertex paint on modular walls and floors, but the problem is that the shader complexity is quite bad. My planes got 128 triangles and i have these planes covering whole levels, if i switch to shader complexity and quads and i watch some parts of the level from far the shader complexity is completely red. i've tried to use lods for the planes, but the paint changes and it's too noticeable. So my questions are: -should i use vertex paint in large levels? -is 3 way blend materials too much for this kind of purpose? - is there an alternative to vertex paint to add moss and other type of textures in a procedural way? thanks

[@izvarzone]

If you have 60+ FPS then it's ok. Moss could be automatically added by using blue channel of world space normal as a mask (up vector)

[@Sae-ez3dx]

Hey, bud thanks for this tutorial. How we can create a heightmap from the base?

[@brianwatson77]

So that part where you get the error when you try to lerp just the red channel, I'm getting that and unfortunately I need to because of the way I have my AO, Roughness and Metal packed into one texture. Any ideas how to not get that error? It doesn't seem to let me lerp just one channel. Is there a grayscale lerp? I can't find one.

[@underscore00]

Hi! The error is caused by feeding mismatched value types into the lerp, but the lerp should work with anything so long as the inputs match. In my case, I could've moved the desaturation node to after the lerp. I just tested it out and made this: i.imgur.com/DdF6lEt.png Which works fine. Are you using a texture as your alpha? The error could also be being caused by using something other than a 2-vector - so even if you have a black and white mask texture, make sure to use the R, G or B channel as the alpha instead of the white RGB output. Hope that helps!

[@ahtiandr]

So basically this acts like a height lerp if I am correct. Good video ! Thanks!

[@smatthews1999]

@ 2:34 when I click my mesh and select RGB Channels the whole scene turns dark, as well as my mesh.

[@smatthews1999]

Unlit Mode kind of works, but not Lit Mode (like you have)

[@smatthews1999]

Ok as soon as I click off Paint, and go back Place (in modes) then it looks all fine. I wonder why I can't click on Paint and see it render in Lit mode?

[@BarbaNeggra]

Thanks!!

[@underscore00]

You're welcome!

[@synthlord9544]

no matter what i do, it wont draw or erase on my plane, it is selected and i'm in color paint vertex mode????

[@ulus2109]

thanks bro

[@danecustance2734]

Sweet thanks.

[@beetheimmortal]

Wow, insta-sub on this!

[@underscore00]

Thanks!

[@TheUkuleleXD]

Amazing!

[@circle2867]

how would you go about adding a third and fourth texture?

[@alexflare9134]

Could you do this with more than 2 materials?

[@KadeMarkoux]

How heavy is this on performance?

[@__foo__]

Can have more than 2 textures to paint?

[@TheParasone]

I dont understand what the heightmap does. I dont want to paint heightmaps for my own textures, how do i leave it out ?

[@Djmixtacy]

Im still a huge noob but isnt this method super expensive for performance? Tesselation and the many subdivisions. I'm struggling to find the best optimized method for textures vs drawcalls. Maybe you could enlighten me a bit? For example i made a house which has wooden beams and tiling bricks. Would it be best to have one texture set for the entire model or multiple tiling textures which fill the entire uv space so they can also be used for other models in a single drawcall? Greetings sir

[@underscore00]

On tesselation: It only appears at close distances so unless your tesselation value is really high, you wont notice a hit to performance. On subdivisions: UE4 can render millions and millions of polygons while mainting high frame rates - actually high-resolution textures have a bigger performance impact than complex geometry. For your house model, if the whole asset is UV'd to the same 0-1 UV range, you can texture the whole thing with one texture file. This way the GPU only has to make one draw call, instead of one for tiles, one for bricks, etc etc Hope that helps! :)

[@RG_Gaming03]

@@underscore00 You just answered me so many questions with that one comment, thanks!!

[@HollyVanHart]

✨ Appreciate your sharing! 💖 😍 🌟

[@Defenceless_baby]

how do u create the Color mode u set to blue?

[@peter486]

Vertex paint is the way to go. Dum qustuon but its 2 materials per channel right? + the alpha.

[@danverochraner6659]

What about mixing 4 materials?

[@mikeue4729]

How much different textures can i use per vertex pain material? I mean like you do landscape painting, can i use 3 or more? For example : Grass , dirt , mud , sand & snow?

[@underscore00]

The limit is 16 texture samples in your material, but for vertex painting you're limited to the R, G, B and A channels of vertex color. There's a good page in the UE4 documentation about this topic: docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/UI/LevelEditor/Modes/MeshPaintMode/VertexColor/MaterialSetup/5Way/index.html

[@Spyro_2076]

How dense does your mesh have to be for this method to look good?

[@cezarzbughin3362]

i didn't understand how it works. u just said "we add a node here" without explaining what the effect will be, or why that is a necessity , and no explanation of the code behind which is hidden inside the engine. it is useful for people who already know how to use and work with materials, but not for me.

[@underscore00]

Sorry! This is an intermediate/slightly advanced kind of method so some basic material knowledge will definitely help. I recommend looking at my videos on PBR Materials, Car Paint, Hex Material, Carbon Fiber, Crystal Material and Earth Material, and you should get all the knowledge you need :)

[@MustafaBerkeGureltol]

can we add more than 2 layers?

[@underscore00]

Yeah! You can use the green, blue and alpha channels of the vertex color node in the same way as the red channel. It can be a bit tricky keeping track of all the colours, but it's definitely possible.

[@peter486]

cant you do more than 2 channels? R G B + ALPHA?????

[@abbasabbasov6583]

Thanks.....

[@shaishavpathak]

um im kinda new to ue4 howd he make the lerp

[@underscore00]

Sorry for skipping over the shortcut! I'm trying to get better at that :) you can make a lerp by holding L and clicking the graph, or you can right click the graph and search for 'linear interpolate'. Hope that helps! Let me know if you run into any more issues :)

[@Oragani]

How about you explain how to make the lerp next time...

[@underscore00]

I actually do in almost every video I use one - I guess this one slipped by me. Anyway, you can hold 'L' and click the graph to get a lerp, or find 'inearinterpolate' in the palette window. You can also google 'ue4 lerp node' for more info.

[@IGarrettI]

wait, so displacement is used in games? I thought it's too demanding

[@ulsd]

polygon count is getting less demanding. if you use tesselation wisely it will still run smooth.

[@IgorBgd]

It is good practice to use tasselation only in really close area near the camera. That way not whole huge meshes are tasselated but only just their closest parts (think of really huge grass area where you want only 10m in front of your char to be tasselated)

[@benhardwiesner6963]

Here and there yes it is. But if you use it, make sure that it is worth the performance cost. You should not think about it as the timeefficient alternative for creating multiple LODs. The polys cannot be generated equally good as a moddeler would be able to. Tesselation does not like optimized meshes very much. It needs somewhat equally sized quads to look as good as possible. So you'll sometimes end up slapping an optimized LOD over a tesselated mesh. On the other hand there are things like rocks. The tesselated details at low tesselation values again wont look exactly as planned. But every single generated poly adds logical detail (rocks are random. It makes sense that its not perfect and thus it looks natural.) In AAA one advantage just isnt reason enought to use it. Today its mostly just used where it truely is best for the job. Since displacement is driven by a single heightmap, tesselation allows for high interactivity. Nothing else is able to procedurally generate mesh. To name a few examples: The mud in Red dead redemption 2 uses tesselation because it needs to interactively generate true mesh for the footsteps. Nothing else can do that. Optimized as shit, this barely scratches the fps. Snow in tekken works the same but they ridiculously crank up the detail... Beautiful effect, only possible with tesselation. In their case the foreground level design is so subtle/empty that the game can simply live with the performance hit. In general AAA will not use it to save time... There are places where tesselation still is the best for the job. Implementing it efficiently and optimizing it can take as long as creating multiple LODs but done correctly it wont hit performance so much at all while contributing gorgeous effects... GPUs have dedicated hardware for tesselation itself. Performance hits come from the bare amount of polys you add and manipulate with it. Its just soo easy to tesselate too much. Put differently it is sooooo hard not to tesselate too much. Please just do me a favor and DONT EVER USE IT WITH A NORMAL MAP PLUGGED INTO DISPLACEMENT lol ^^ You're better off using some AO-Roughness mixing if you desperately want to cut a dedicated height map.... but dont do that too ;D I know you're not stupid but thats just hillarious imo ^^

[@Nulledmind]

You sound exactly like Fitz.

[@underscore00]

I get that a lot XD

[@AlexanderCZ]

Can Vertex Paiting be used in Landscapes ?

[@underscore00]

Yes, but not using this method. Actually, if you check out my latest video, I do some landscape painting :) or you can check out my first video on landscapes where I explain it in more detail.

[@underscore00]

Lol forgot to leave a link! Heres my original landscapes video where I mostly talk about landscape painting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/epbNgYCibciDZpI

[@AlexanderCZ]

@@underscore00 Thanks.

[@thedarkdetrak507]

good goobb

[@DJL3G3ND]

what

[@jellynonotthatone8924]

the like littorally moved it from 1,4k to 1.5 k (499)

[@notlocal6925]

how get Lerp 1:53

[@underscore00]

Hold 'L' and click the graph, or right click and search for 'linear interpolate'.

[@notlocal6925]

@@underscore00 thanks

[@parth1350sharma]

I can't understand just because the tab are misplaced. I think I should first watch the beginner tutorials. I thought textures in unreal engine would be as easy as blender

[@TonOfHam]

Despite popular opinion, this is not a AAA technique. Yes it has been used in some AAA games, but it is not a performant way to get this effect. It's cool though, especially messing with it in the editor.

[@stanwildin3D]

doesnt work for landscape:(

[@underscore00]

No, this method only works for meshes, and landscapes are a different kind of component. The good news is you CAN paint landscapes! I've made a few videos about landscapes, here's the one I did about painting: kzbin.info/www/bejne/epbNgYCibciDZpI

[@__foo__]

doesn´t works ue4.20.0 help

[@underscore00]

I'll look into it. I made this with 4.19 and only just updated the engine.

[@__foo__]

underscore ok

[@underscore00]

I just opened this project in 4.20.1 and the vertex painting is working perfectly :/ There might be something else going on in your project. Are you making sure to paint only with the red channel?

[@__foo__]

underscore yes but this issue is only with ue4.20.0, ue4.20.1 and ue 4.19.2 and 0 with all projects

[@JamesPound]

My question is, why do I need to make a blueprint to do this? I tried Unity years ago and this was a feature built-in.

[@AnimGraphLab]

!!!!!!!!!

[@marcinnawrocki1437]

AAA is not enough anymore!

[@DJL3G3ND]

then how about AAAAAAAA

[@meMaggatron]

Tutorial's nice, but I'm sorta sad you're charging $5 for the materials you used...

[@vivalajustin]

"If we make a lerp" *doesn't let you in on how to make a lerp*

[@underscore00]

Sorry for that! I try not to assume any knowledge on the part of the viewer, but sometimes things slip through :) You can make a lerp by holding L and clicking the graph, or you can right click and find 'linearinterpolate'. Hope that helps!

[@noneprivate5111]

PAINT TOOL NOT PAINTING DID EVERYTHING YOU SAID

[@vladolaru803]

This might be a bit late, but you should make sure that the surface you are trying to paint onto has enought vertices

[@redpandajg_9015]

Why cant you make it free to download, i dont wanna play 4 dollars for some textures

[@jorge_781]

A 450 nodes material to create a floor with grass. No wonder certain games run like shit.

[@ДаниилДовгий-ц5д]

wanted to put 100 likes but I cant

[@IDMENTAL]

SHIT why it is nessesary to be so not user friendly unreal engine)

[@benhardwiesner6963]

Uhm AAA titles certainly will not plug a normal map into tesselation. This is such a massive performance hit for basically adding wrong detail. Normal maps write down at which angle light can hit that spot. By how they work BW normal maps can never look like somewhat correct heightmaps... They use the same information in an entirely different way. Exactly wrong for the purpose of the other. Cheating here and there to create cool results is nice and all. But tesselation is not a performance easy gimmick. You're not faking that there are more polys, you're creating them in realtime. That certainly is not worth being used with wrong information that looks kinda cool in some conditions.

[@underscore00]

Thanks for the comment :) the purpose of the video was more to show usage, not provide game-ready solutions, as every project will have different demands and restrictions, I cant make a catch-all video for all applications :)

[@thomaspatterson140]

Thanks for everything. But plz do slow down when adding things. Some of us are new and cant keep up with your speedball wild style. Yeah. Slow it down big boy. Stop spamming nodes in and teach. The people here, needed help. Not a grand champion race runner.

[@jaylapointe1654]

You could have slowed the video play speed, or used the magical pause button. Apparently they didn't exist in 2019.

[@thomaspatterson140]

@@jaylapointe1654 just slow down when adding things. Become a teacher or dont teach. Again thank you.