How to HIDE Texture REPETITION in Unreal Engine - UE4 Tutorial

landscapes they are a pretty big deal because they are literally the groundwork from which everything is built on top of so if you have a bad looking landscape you'll probably have a bad looking scene so this is part one in a new tutorial series that will go over all the secrets to creating photorealistic natural looking landscapes just like the ones you're seeing right now now we've all been there we want to create a nice looking landscape so we go online we watch a couple of tutorials and this can be the result yeah this is pretty bad but this is how most first landscapes go like if we look down on the ground we can see that this texture is noticeably tiling over and over again also the placement of the materials are all wrong we wouldn't see grass at an 80 degree angle like this and not to mention this entire formation of the landscape kind of looks like plato and the gloss is all off grass and dirt wouldn't really be this shiny well in this series we will fix all those issues with landscape starting with that gross texture repetition so in this video i will go over four tips to hide any texture repetition so your materials will stop looking like this and start looking like this tip number one and this tip might be a little bit stupid but i have to say it use a good texture okay a bad texture is a bad texture no matter how hard you try you want to look for textures that are seamless so they tile without any noticeable edges and textures without any identifiable landmarks for example if you have a grass texture with a rock slapped right in the middle that texture will be repetitive no matter how hard you try so you're probably wondering right now where can i get high quality nice textures well that's where mega scans comes in mega scans is a complete library of surfaces that have been scanned from real life specifically for use within unreal engine by epic games themselves and all of these textures are completely free so go through find some great textures and just use those i think for the rest of this tutorial i'll be using grass uncut and grass dried also i already have a landscape set up here you can download the landscape right now link in the description below also i made a landscape material in an instance if we go into it this is just a very very simple landscape material i have grass right here and dried grass down here but i'm just going to call it dirt right now to make the parameter naming easier and a layer blend which we then break material attributes that's why i can edit these material attributes after the blend and finally just going into the material if you have no idea what's going on in here or how i even got these textures into unreal in the first place i would suggest you go check out the unreal engine beginner tutorial right now where i will go through the process of importing mega scan textures into unreal and create a material that's almost identical to this one tip number two use a macro variation texture essentially what this is is one texture being tiled three times at different scale so you have your small detail medium detail large detail and you overlay this onto your landscape and what this does is it just breaks up the texture and adds random black splotches everywhere which is great for adding color variation so first things first you want to find the gold material located within your starter content you want to open up the gold in the starter content and let's steal these nodes right here ctrl c and control v so immediately we'll notice that there's three textures tiled at different sizes this is for small detail medium detail and large detail and then we have multiply to add all these details together and a reduced node because by default this is way too dark and then i'm gonna go at it at this location because i want this affecting my entire material not just one portion so hold m connect those nodes up and here is before macro variation and now here is after macro variation and immediately that is such an improvement the landscape is already looking a lot more realistic just by adding random black splotches everywhere tip number three use a distance blend to control the sizes of your texture so if you're far away the texture will be larger and if you're up close the texture will be smaller okay so we will use the distance blend node so right click distance blend and i'm going to promote both of these to a variable so right click promote to variable and to actually see what this is doing i'm going to plug the result of this into base color so i'm back in my world and i have my material instance open up that's so i can see what the parameters are doing so the start offset will control where this blend starts so how far until it starts blending between the textures so right now it's at negative one thousand i could change this negative five thousand to make the blend really far i think i'll split the difference and make this negative two thousand for now blend range is really cool because this controls the fall off or how blurry or sharp this edge is so if i just increase it you can see slowly we're getting more of a nice fall off so i think i'll leave this around 10 000 yeah right there so let's set up our distance blend to be used with our grass material i'm going to come over here and bring this over to my grass and connect this back up come back here i'm actually going to duplicate these uv landscape cords plug them up and name the new one uh let's do grass far and i found a setting of 0.05 to be good and graph size we're going to leave that 0.25 and call this near so now i'm going to plug this into my textures and if you notice it would just override where this is so we have to duplicate each of these textures which is kind of annoying but whatever now once you have it duplicated we're going to plug in this uv landscape cord into our new textures and finally use a lerp that's connected to this distance blend that will actually drive which texture is being used and we can already see within a little texture previews that the grass size far is already larger than the smaller one so this is great this is what's going to be blended between the two and finally connect them back up into their respective slots so now if we're really close to our landscape we get the small texture and if we go far away or look into the distance we can see that we're getting the larger texture right now this is set up as a very subtle effect if we go into our material instance i could change this to make it a lot of like a lot more obvious so go grasp our size make this to 0.001 then then you're seeing the difference but now this looks bad so i'll just bring it back to where it was tip number four vary your landscape with multiple materials so if you've ever been outside it's been a while but if you do go outside you'll see that the ground is not just made up of grass it has other textures other materials on it like dirt piles of leaves sand so you want to mimic that in unreal to do so i can use my paint brush and a dirt layer selected and just manually go through this entire landscape and paint in variation spots but that would take way too long so instead what i would do is use this purlin noise texture in my starter content drag that in my landscape set up the landscape chords i'm going to rename this to dirt blend size and i found a value of 0.01 to be good i'm going to plug this into a blend material attributes node with a being grass and b being dirt and plug this into the grass layer and we can see we're getting some nice splotches of dirt everywhere now i actually think these splotches are too small right now so i'm going to go bring this up to 0.001 okay this is much better so now we get some nice material variation as well as adding a nice layer of color variation to this landscape so i could fine tune this blend even more by adding a little bit more notes so something i like to do for pretty much all my black and white macs is let's get out there go back in landscape use a multiply node to control the amount of variation and then use a power node to control the contrast okay so i set both the amount and the power to one that's how by default it's not making any changes to this blend and now if i go to mount i can control how much dirt is being brought in and i can also control the contrast of that dirt with the power and now we can see it's turning purple right now and that's because the dirt layer is being layered on top of itself over and over again and that's what's giving it this weird purple effect i can fix that by going into landscapes right click bringing in a clamp node and just hooking it up like this now i can see that my power amount is added in contrast and my blend amount can add even more dirt or take away dirt so now i have a lot of control over that blend okay so right now i think this is way too sharp it's kind of like a more like a planet texture than actual landscape texture so i'm going to bring this back to where it was and decrease the amount to one so just the defaults and i highly encourage you not to just use a simple dead grass texture but actually go in and layer even more different types of grasses different types of dirt to really get a realistic result okay so we are done so don't forget to check out part two in this series where we are going to make an auto landscape so it will automatically materialize your landscape also check out my other videos and don't forget to like check out the channel and subscribe goodbye

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 129,307

Rating: 4.937602 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine, tutorial, landscape, repetition, texture, ue4, hide, texture repetition, texture seams, unreal, photorealistic, free

Id: yCRzOdo4b68

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FancyForkDev]

For the distance blend, lerp the grass size near and the grass far parameters before plugging it into the first multiply. That will let you avoid all of the texture duplication steps.

EDIT: Disregard. This doesn't work as I expected.

[u/UnrealSensei]

Just posted part two Auto Landscapes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP8eHwVEA0o&feature=youtu.be

[u/leonardom0]

Omg this video is 100% for me i can’t believe someone made it 🤧😭

[u/bestue4noob]

Well made. Go on!

[u/HatLover91]

Blender guru did a video on how to tile textures. But its nice to see something tailored to Ue4.

Ninja Edit: Good work. Video was informative and crisp. No fiddling around with crap.

[u/UnrealSensei]

Hello I am relatively new to Unreal Engine tutorial, my goal is to post a new tutorial every 2 days!