Landscape Grass | 5-Minute Materials [UE4]

hello and welcome back to five minute materials landscape edition today we're going to be looking at landscape grass types and the grass output node and how you can procedurally place grass and other small foliage onto your landscape wherever you paint certain layers so the first thing that we are going to do is we're going to create a new asset it is in the foliage sub section and it's landscape grass type let's call this grass tutorial tutorial apparently so if you double click on this and you'll be greeted with this big empty looking screen but you'll notice there's a little plus icon here so this is going to add an element and then when we expand that you can see a lot of properties so we're gonna grab a grass and so now i've got this grass here it's a really wonky color but we're not gonna worry about that for today's video you can set the density of the foliage so anywhere between zero and a thousand there's a bunch of other settings like call distance you'll especially want to play around with this because obviously having a lot of triangles on screen at once can kill your frames per second there's scaling so you can set a minimum scaling so let's go like 0.5 and 2 just so we get a huge variety of stuff random rotation you'll want on all of the time most of the time align to surface makes it sort of always orient out from the landscape so if there's a hill on your landscape the foliage will stick out this way or you might want it to go straight up then we've got receives decals we'll keep that on for now cast dynamic shadow we want to turn off for grass because it can cause a lot of issues and you don't necessarily need dynamic shadows on huge dense grass so now in our landscape material which we set up last video what we're gonna do is get a grass output node and in this grass type we're going to get our grass tutorial layer and we're also going to hit it again and expand this thing and let's make one for our dirt layer as well so what are we going to put into this node well all we're going to do is get landscape layer sample and we're going to type in the name of our whichever layer we want this to appear on and so what this is going to do and this is important if we were to get this grass layer sample and just plug it into the base color then you'll see what we end up with is a black and white mask so wherever there is grass it will be white and then as the grass starts to turn into any other layer so dirt or sand it becomes black and then eventually it is completely black so keeping in mind how these samples actually work is really important and we will be using this in a lot of other videos and then we just plug the grass into the grass we hit save and we're also going to put a zero into the dirt my bad okay so we've got the grass assigned and we hit save and what the okay so i've done goofed um and i set my scale to 32 apparently i just wanted it to go to two there we go all right now you can see we have grass everywhere except where there isn't the grass layer so it isn't going to be on the sand and it isn't going to be on the dirt this is obviously a little bit too dense so we're going to scale it down to 200 and while this does look completely ridiculous and i would not ship this game we can see that it is functioning now we could create another grass type so this one's going to be called i don't know whatever number two and on this one let's get some rocks or something we'll get some rock small and let's get another one so you can hit plus again and it will create another one so you can have multiple meshes in the same grass type let's get a let's get some bushes so then if we were to go to our landscape again and into here we sample our dirt layer and you know what just for the sake of this video let's get our dirt layer plus our sand layer so you can add them together and so now that we've plugged them in we have to go to our grass and make sure that the thing is selected that we've made before so grass tutorial one you can see we've just got some rocks everywhere we've got these bushes just jutting out in both the sand and on the dirt so there are pros and cons to using this procedural foliage stuff obviously the main pro is that you don't have to paint this by hand you can just sort of paint your landscape and it will place you know a selection of foliage that you've set up by itself now the downside of this is that none of these meshes can have collision and so if you did want to place down you know big rocks that had collision you would have to do that with the foliage tool so just keep that in mind when you're using this this is designed for things like grass and bushes that don't have collision you can't use this for trees or anything if you did want to paint things on just a specific layer of your landscape with collision let's say i've got all these trees here down here where it says inclusion landscape layers i can type dirt and i'm gonna set the density of these to one and now i can just paint in big broad strokes and it's only gonna paint these trees on the dirt layer so that can be very powerful and these all have their collision enabled so a player can you know bump their head against this that's the grass output node all summed up that's about all the uses you can get from it it is quite limited but at the same time it can save you a ton of time when it comes to designing your worlds and stuff like that and because all of this foliage is placed procedurally you don't actually have to store the location of all the instances of you know the grass it will procedurally generate it every time you know you load the level or something so if you think about it if you've got like you know a billion grass instances that would cover your entire landscape it doesn't have to actually store any of those locations anywhere it just generates it as it needs to so if you found this educational and or entertaining make sure you hit like and subscribe to the channel to stay up to date with all the new videos that are coming out about landscapes and materials and animations and if you do want to say thanks for the tutorials we do have a one dollar patreon tier now so feel free to check that out in the description below if you have any questions about these tutorials or you need help with unreal engine 4 or 5 in general uh feel free to join our discord it's full of helpful members from all around the world and we always try and solve everyone's issues so with that i say goodbye goodbye [Music] you

Channel: PrismaticaDev

Views: 62,037

Keywords: ue4 landscape tutorial, ue4 landscape material, ue4 landscape painting, ue4 landscape, ue4 grass, ue4 noob, ue4 level design, ue4 level design tutorial, ue4 landscape grass output, ue4 landscape grass type, ue4 landscape grass node, ue4 landscape grass type collision, ue4 grass collision, ue4 foliage tutorial, ue4 foliage optimization, ue4 foliage collision, ue4 foliage no collision, level design, ue4 procedural generation, ue4 procedural foliage, ue4 procedural grass

Id: uUOcs20Dkcc

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021