How To Paint Landscapes in Unreal Engine 5

today we're going to be showing you how we can take our Landscapes to the next level showing you how we can paint textures onto them this is going to be an extension of my landscape and water tutorial if you haven't seen them already be sure to go ahead and check them out but today we're going to be showing you how we can set up a landscape material with various different layers for things like grass Rock mud Etc without further Ado let's go ahead and jump into Unreal Engine 5 and get this started thank you just before we get into the tutorial I'd just love to take a moment to tell you about our first person and survival game courses where you learn to build a game in just one week the link for which is in the description down below for now though let's hop into one reel so the very first thing that you want to do is make sure that you've got a landscape that we can work with for me what I've got here is just a very simple landscape which is just something that I've generated using the height map and with this I can see here I've got some rocks and I've got some mountains but then most importantly what I've got here is some sort of Sandy beachy areas that we can paint onto now the very first step then now that we have this is actually setting up a material that can be assigned to this landscape the way that we do this is by creating a landscape material right click in your content browser anywhere with some empty space and create a brand new material I'm going to call this m underscore landscape mat with that done go ahead and double click this to open it up inside of this landscape material this is where we're going to be setting up all of our layers like I said layers for grass Rock gravel whatever it is we're going to be doing it in here and we're going to be using a special blueprint node to do this for those of you that aren't familiar with materials yet just a very quick round up we have our preview in the top left hand corner where we can click and drag and see our material and what it's going to look like we have our inputs for things like color roughness normal ambient occlusion Etc and some material properties down in the details here but what we're going to do is go straight into the landscape magic so I'm going to right click and I'm going to be using a very important node called the landscape layer blend now this is the most important piece because right now with this material you're only going to be able to put one input in and we need this to be broken down into layers and that's where this landscape layer blend node is going to help us so with this what I can do is I can go to my layers with this selected and press add element and you can see here I can add as many different pins to this as I want and I can get these different names the way that I do this by going to index and I can set my layer name for each of these indexes each of these index is just a layer so layer name I'm going to set this to the first one which is grass and you're going to see with our landscape layer blend node here the first one is now going to be called layer grass perfect let's go to index one which is the next one the next one I'm going to have is Rock the next one is going to be gravel and then the last one well you could set this to absolutely anything that you like for me I'm just going to have this as a um for me I'm just going to have this as a Sandstone you know just something a little bit different actually you know what I know exactly what I'm going to have that be I'm going to set this to be a sand for the beach and once I've done that I can then take my output from my landscape layer blend and put this into my base color and now what I can do is I can simply just put a different texture into each of these layers simple so bringing in these textures could not be easier now if you're using an Unreal Engine project where you're using the starter content you should actually have a lot of these textures already so let's go ahead and drop these in to add these Textures in I can right click in the blank space again and I can search for texture sample an easier way to do this is just where you've got Blank Space hold down t on the keyboard and then just left click and I can do that four times so I have four different texture samples and don't forget I can click and drag on these just to move them and keep it a little bit tidier but what I need to do here now is because I need to get inputs in here for each of the different layers I need to go into my texture sample and I just choose the texture now for the first one I'm going to search for grass and I can see I've got grass that came with a starter content called T underscore ground underscore grass for the next one I'm going to search for rock and again all I'm doing here is just going to the details with the texture sample selected and then in the drop down I just click on that and search for it and again I can find rock underscore Basalt underscore d That's my rock next one next one is our gravel click on the drop down and what we're going to search for is gravel as simple as that and again we have a texture for this and then the last one what we can do is we can just search for a piece here now we don't have a sand but I do have a sandstone and that will have to work you can of course download different textures from the mega scans library or even just download them from the unreal Marketplace very easy to just change this to any texture with that done though what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my RGB and I'm going to put this into each of the layers and making sure that this is the correct pins is really important because what's going on here is we have our texture sample we're taking the RGB which is the red green blue value so we're basically just taking the colors here and we're putting that into each of the layers just make sure that all of this is correct then we're going to go ahead and press apply and then we're going to press save for good measure on this material so we definitely have it ready and saved to work with so at this point we have our landscape material set up and quite honestly that was the hardest bit we can take this a lot further and I'm going to show you how to do this but now we're ready to paint and have some fun let's jump in so to be able to paint this onto our landscape what I need to do is go up to the top left hand corner we're going to go to our landscape mode again and inside of here we're going to go over to the paint section and you're going to notice there is currently no layers in here and the reason for that is because we've not set our landscape material to be on our landscape to do that all we're going to do is go back to our selection mode click on the landscape go to the details in the right hand side here and then what we're going to look for is our landscape material we can just simply drag and drop this in and you can see Unreal Engine is going to highlight this in blue for us we're going to give this a couple of seconds and you're going to see that the landscape has gone completely black don't worry this is okay the reason it's gone black is because there's currently no layer information telling the engine where it should be painting the different colors because we need to do this with a brush so for us to set up that layer information all we do is go to the top left hand corner go to landscape and then inside of here you can now see we have our various different layers the first one is grass to create this layer information you can see the plus icon go ahead and click on this and press white Blended layer normal and just save this and what we're going to do is the exact same thing for each and every single one of these layers and at this point we're ready to paint ing onto this landscape could not be easier all we have to do now is just use the brush that you can see there and just left click and paint or shift and left click to remove this let's do it so let's start off with a couple of things first thing I need to choose the rock or the layer that I want to paint with and then I'm going to go up to the top now up here I have a couple of important settings first of all make sure you're in your paint mode then use your brush size and turn that up or down to define the area that you're going to be painting with you've also got your tool strength to allow how to define how quick this is going to be and you've also got the fall off to control how smooth of a brush this is going to be with a low brush fall off if I just go ahead and press left click on there you can see we've got some very hard edges with a high brush fall off you can see if I left click on this it's a lot more smooth now perfect so like I said use your tool strength use your brush size and your fall off to determine how this is going to look at this point let's just go ahead and start painting some stuff so with this if you feel like you're moving too slow as well feel free to adjust the camera speed up in the top right hand corner when it comes to landscape editing I like to work with something like six but now what I can do with this paint tool selected I can just hold down left click and I can start painting in my different layers so you can see here I'm just painting my rock with this rock material now with this so we know how to paint our Rock and that's fantastic let's take a look at painting another layer on here so what we might also want to do is paint in some gravel so let's say we wanted to have a path that goes up from the beach up to the mountain all we do is Select our new layer we're going to go to brush size and we're going to turn this down adjust our fall off and then we can start painting it on as it compiles shaders you're going to see sometimes it goes black but that's not to worry but most importantly what you're able to see here is we can use these different layers by simply just holding down that left click there just choosing the different layers as we go now another thing that you might want to do is just press play so you can see how big your brush is and what it looks like so I've got my mountains here and the mountains look like the correct size but my path is just huge so what I'm doing is just pressing Ctrl z turn in my brush size down a little bit and then just repainting it and just adjusting until I get where I want to be so what I'm going to do is just test this again now I'm going to press play and you can see here we've now got a pretty nice path and if you wanted to you can really take this as far as you like you can put your sand on the the edges here you can do absolutely anything you like so what I'm going to do is just very quickly turn my brush size up and just start painting some Sandstone onto the edges I know it should be more like sand but I just just want to have some level of variation I'm sure off the back of this tutorial you are all going to have lots of fun just painting your Landscapes trying to get them to look the way that you want what I'm also going to do here is to turn my tool strap down a little bit and just blend in a little bit of gravel here and there when it comes to landscape painting though you can honestly be here for ages I'm not going to teach you anything more about how you can actually paint this on what I want to do now is show you how you can take this landscape material a step further so you can get rid of things like the shine which just doesn't look that great and what we're also going to do is just show you how we can utilize another set of layers but for our different inputs like our normal maps to get fake depth let's do that so what I want you to do is open up your landscape material again so feel free to spend as much time as you like painting this but what I want to do is just start setting up things like normal maps and getting rid of the shine open up our landscape material now inside of here we have a set of layers for our base color now for any of you that do want to do more complex things with our materials and use different texture types such as metallic specular roughness emissive Etc all I need to do is Select my layer blend node press Ctrl C to copy it and paste that in and then put the output of that into the next set of textures you're going to do in my case it's just normal Maps and what I'm going to do is add in four more textures just by holding down T and left click and I'm just going to find the normal map for each of these so the first one is grass so I'm going to search for grass again I'm going to choose grass underscore n which is a normal map now for those of you that don't know what normal maps are normal map just allows you to get that fake depth so I'm going to put that into my grass the next one is my rock again I'm just going to search for Rock and I can see I've got Basalt underscore D which is diffuse which is color but then I've got n which is depth same thing for gravel click on that and search for it and I'm just going to use the normal map for this and the last one which is my sand Stone and I'm just going to put that in and let's take a look at let's take a look at the difference as I get into this so if we get close to say the Sandstone here in my camera and then with my material I go ahead and press apply you're going to see straight away what it's going to do it just gives us that fake depth it looks really good in the reflections and a lot more realistic so with this we can use these landscape materials with layers for different properties to really get them to come to life now the next thing that you're probably wondering is Luke how do I get rid of this really ugly shine easiest way to do this is to just use the roughness value now you could do this per layer if you wanted to and it would be exactly the same as what we've done here but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to add in a constant which is just a numerical value and set this to 1. and I'm going to put this into my roughness and what this is going to do is it's simply going to tell the engine this should have no shine it should be completely rough and because we're not using layers it's just going to do it for everything if I go ahead and press apply now and then minimize this you can see that shine has now gone it may take a minute to take effect if you're preparing your shaders down in the bottom but you can see now we don't have the Shiny Rock all of this is now coming to life there's only one last thing that I want to show you how to do which is really important which is showing you how we can adjust the tiling of our textures because you probably saw there we can see it's the same texture repeated over and over and over again if we make this bigger it's going to be a lot less visible let's do it so inside of here we can see this tiling especially on the grass here if I go ahead and press play you can see it's the same texture just repeated over and over again we want this to be less often and just be bigger the way I can do this is by opening up my landscape material again and with this let's just do this with the grass for now the way we do this is by adjusting the UVs and we can do this by using a node called landscape layer coordinates and with this I'm just going to put this into the UVs then what I do is all I need to do now is just adjust the mapping scale here if we go ahead and press apply to this and then set our mapping scale to something like 10 and press apply you can see it's now much much bigger probably a little bit too big so I'm going to set this to five then I'm going to press apply see how it looks jump in and you can see instantly this is looking great but again we still got this tiling over here on our sandstone so what I might want to do is just do the same thing and again we can do this per layer the way we do this is just by taking a landscape layer coordinates node and putting it into the UVS of our texture sample go ahead and press apply if we look at this now you can see it's much bigger however you're probably going to notice the detail on the normal maps are now Incorrect and the reason for that is because if you're adjusting the coordinates and the UVS on the diffuse you probably want to do it on everything else so with this what I'm going to do is I am going to take my landscape coordinates here for my diffuse for the grass and I'm also going to make sure I plug this into the UVS for my normal map for the graphs same thing over here for my landscape coordinates for my rock go ahead and press apply press play and you can see the normal detail is now correct and so is the diffuse at this point you should now be a wizard with Landscapes you're going to understand how to sculpt them from my previous videos how to add water around them but now you're also going to know how we can work with painting these and making them look really good here's an example of the landscape here that I've painted of course it's not what I've quite got right now and what you've seen here but when it comes to things like this it's all about taking the time to do it and anything is possible as always though I hope you have enjoyed it stay awesome keep creating vertis signing out foreign

Channel: Virtus Learning Hub

Views: 52,919

Keywords: game dev, landscape tutorial, unreal engine tutorial, game development, unreal engine 5, ue5, how to make landscapes unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 beginner tutorial, landscape painting unreal engine 5, landscape painting ue5, virtushub, landscape painting unreal, landscape material unreal engine 5, how to paint landscapes unreal engine 5, unreal engine beginner tutorial, unreal engine 5 landscape tutorial, unreal engine 5 environments, realistic environment unreal engine 5

Id: ZDD-JMcfEII

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023