UE Made Easy: Landscape Material

welcome back everybody and today we're going to be taking a look at creating landscape materials the easy way this is a simplistic yet impactful Approach at creating your first landscape material this is also the same sort of process which I've used creating landscape materials on such shows as the Mandalorian series avatar Last Airbender and many more how often when we're creating Landscapes do we try to find resources different videos go onto the marketplace and there's beautiful stuff on the marketplace and there's a lot of great content out there however often times things may seem over complicated especially if this is your first time jumping into Unreal Engine or you still getting familiar with it so this is my way to sort of showcase how to create something that is not only going to work that is going to be simple to understand but also something that you can actually use on Productions you don't need over complicated materials and assets things of that sort to create really high quality environments uh ultimately what you need is really just a good combination of materials lighting um and of course different assets references things like that so let's go ahead and Jump Right In Here we are in Unreal Engine and we just have a very simple light setup as well as a scale model having a scale model in your scene first and foremost becomes really important creating believable environments first starts with scale as well as of course your references and everything but you want to make sure that everything is going to be to scale it's something that the brain unconsciously or sometimes consciously really picks up on and recognizes and so having a scale model is very important um you can download these from the marketplace you can Google search free you know human scale obj um and you know use whatever sort of scale model that works for you um sometimes people even just use cubes uh yeah let's go ahead and talk about this material I'm going to make a new material I already have one for landscape in here so I'm just call this landscapes and I'm going to right click in here and we're going to go to material and we're going to name this mm for master material underscore landscape and then let's go ahead and open this and we see here you know we have our material output node right here and what we're going to do is we're actually going to go over here to this use material use material attributes and we see it condenses it all into one little pin the reason being is because what we're going to be plugging everything into is what's known as a landscape layer blend and the output is only one pin now you can go in here break material attribute and plug it in like this it would render the same sort of result um just like if you plug this all back into a make material attributes and you know did this sort of thing um so there's many ways to get to the same results it's one of the reasons actually why it's one of the double-edged swords really of unrel engin in that there's so many ways to do the same sort of thing get the same sort of outcome and it can be kind of confusing especially when you're first getting into this stuff um what I will say is there's no real like right or wrong way of doing it as long as the outcome is the same ultimately it just depends on what you're trying to achieve the sort of functionality so this material we're going to be making is going to be U somewhat of more of a base sort of material this is going to be the material that you're going to use uh as a sort of foundation for which you can build upon and we'll add some sort of bonus um bonus stuff here towards the end of this video as well so first and foremost um we're going to add some layers the amount of layers these layers are going to dictate the amount of layers you're going to be able to paint in your actual landscape and so here we see they're all named layer none uh one thing to remember is unrine um when you're using UNR engine naming conventions are really important now things don't have to be particularly spelled you know a specific sort of way or whatever however if you're going to be linking things um you want to make sure that they have the same name also just organizationally you want to make sure they have the same name so this one we can name base this one let's go dirt and this one let's say moss and the other things we see here this blend type there's weight blend Alpha blend and height blend the most common ones you're probably going to use is either weight Blend or height blend uh the difference being is weight blend more so takes in consideration the sort of weight of the brush uh whereas the height blend uh will actually take into account the displacement map uh or whatever sort of mask you have that you're using for it uh but actually take that into into account to actually blend between the materials so for this we're actually going to use height blend and we see now we have an extra pin for both the reason being is the height is sort of calculated separately that displacement blend is handled separately and so we you know want to make sure that we are going to be plugging our displacement stuff into here and our actual you know all of our materials um into here so first and foremost we're going to want to do is right click and we're going to grab a texture sample you can either do it this way or if you've already downloaded materials from Mega scans then you can just grab in grab the textures from Mega scans and you can bring them in all right so I just went ahead and grab some textures from Mega scans from surfaces just drag them drop them in here and the next thing we want to do is I'll hook these up first and then we'll take a look at this one um so this one so for your normal map first and foremost you want to convert this to a parameter and we're going to name this base underscore normal you can also just do base and then like space you don't necessarily need to do the underscore um I grew up using the underscore so for me it's like second nature I convert to parameter base Ard and we know this is Ard because that's actually the name of it um well it's O uh occlusion roughness displacement uh the a also occlusion ambient occlusion Ard or o doesn't matter either one's perfectly fine uh and then same here so base albo if you're wondering how do we know to name it base I'm just naming it based off of whatever the layer name is so whatever your layer name is you want to make sure that uh your nodes are going to be have the same sort of naming convention uh so with this uh this texture for those you that may or may not know this is what's known as a channel pack texture so if we go in here and swap through the different channels red ambient inclusion green is roughness B is the displacement so o Rd RGB and so let's go ahead and give this some parameters actually so the ambient occlusion to be perfectly honest I don't really use the ambient occlusion that often uh but the roughness I'm going to actually plug this into a power node you could also use a cheap contrast node if we open the cheap contrast node it's it's built differently but it does essentially the same thing personally for creating contrast in the roughness I found that the power node seems to do a bit better with that and I'm going to hold s on the keyboard and left click to create a scalar parameter scaler parameter is what you're going to use whenever you just need just an arbitrary number value so if you need to add you know an intensity slider on something or a number value and you want to be able to control it in your material instance that's when we're going to be using the scalar parameter and so this one I'll name it base rough contrast just give value one then I'm going to hold M as then multiply and left click to bring in the multiply node the multiply node is probably the most common node you're going to use to combine different things there's also like subtract add divide we're not getting into those today uh but things like the scaler and multiply are probably going to be the notes you're going to be using the most throughout uh your sort of material development and this one and hold s again left click for another scaler I'm going call this base rough int for intensity give a default value of one cool so now that is set up and we can even uh copy paste this so contrl c contrl v plug that into the displacement so we can have bit more control over that and call this just rename this base displacement cont contrast and base displacement intensity and leave it all the same uh the normal map we're going to pull out here we're going to use a flatten normal and with this we actually have to reverse it because what this node actually does is if I you know plug this in and we start cranking up you know the values or whatever it's actually going to reduce the normal map intensity and one thing you can technically do is you can give it negative numbers however we tend to want to stay like if if we want to make something stronger we want to give it positive values and you know weaker or less intense we want to give it you know those those lesser values so uh to keep everything organized we still want to use positive numbers so we have to invert this and the way we do that is with a node called a one minus node like so and then we could just rename this to normal int intensity you know if you want to spell it all the way out you can and then for the albo one thing I actually like to do and you can set this up manually as well one thing I like to do actually is you know we have mega scans we all use Mega scans you know it's it's very accessible to all of us who use Unreal Engine and there's a lot of great stuff that they actually built into Mega scans and so what I tend to do is I'll just grab the aspects of their material that work well within my own workflow and I'll just adopt that into my material so for instance if we open up their Mega scan Master material and open up this you know they have all these different controls in my opinion the ones that the control that sort of makes the most sense is this the albo controls these are really great and you know like I said we can make this or we can just control C control V uh what I will say is when you are working in a production setting um often times you are working in a way in which you need to provide quality and you need to provide quality pretty quickly especially if you're working in Virtual production uh where things are constantly changing so you know this you know which again you can build might take you 30 seconds or takes you 2 seconds to just hit control C control v um personally I like to just copy paste it and then just rename it so base base uh next thing we want to do is we want to grab everything and in the group right here we want to change this to group base and same with these changed it to group base so this way in the material instance they're all together and as far as tiing goes there's a few ways you can tile things um the classic way is using a texture coordinate plugging into multiply giving it a scaler naming it like base tiling and you'd plug this into the UVS like so and the the other way the two other ways is you can use a texture variation node where you'd plug this into here and this Ard You' basically just grab a texture sample you can copy this one paste it you need to convert it to a texture object and if if you want to know how like how do I know that is if you actually look at some of these functions that are sort of built into the engine in parentheses they kind of tell you what they want they want you to put in here so height map t2d means texture 2D this parentheses s is scalar this is a vector 4 and SB is static bull so to like turn it off and on but yeah so that's how you kind of know like how what to put where um so for this one you want to make sure that it's named the same as this as well so we convert that to parameter base Ard plug that in and what this one is going to do actually here let me showcase it like this real quick make material attributes so we are going to plug this all into a make material attribute so we can actually plug it into something uh if you are going to be using the displacement feature in 5.3 then you would plug this into displacement of course um let me go ahead and do this okay so right now this material is using the classic base sort of tiling and I'm just going to put this on a plane real quick to make it easy like so and if we go over to materials Landscapes and if I put that on here I'm going to tile that a few more times tile of three okay let's do a tile of like five okay so if we put it on here um we see how we're getting this tiled pattern and this texture variation node can be a really quick and easy way to um to create breakup and variation now you can um sort of right click on these promote these two parameters as well but for right now let's just plug this shifted UVS into here hit apply and we see how that tiling is broken up now and one thing that you will see and it it may or may not be super apparent it's kind of apparent right here but it'll create these sort of lines what this is doing is it's using the sort of algorithm to just sort of break up and warp the actual placement of the material um which again can be effective if you want to break up your tiling so if this is something you're struggling with you know you're you're seeing a lot of repeating P patterns instead of using instead of just using this which again classically this is kind of you know like material 101 like your first toab material you do this um if you just plug it into a texture variation node and create a texture object it's it's really that easy I mean of course you can like right click on this promote the parameter you you know hover over it the base is 3.24 uh variation level for this one right click on this yeah so we can add these so we can add these scalar parameters and have a bit more control over the variation breakup so if we go back to our material cre material instance we put that material instance on here then go to it we see now there's this variation level variation scale so you can play around with it and see what it's like actually doing to the material if you'd like so yeah but the but again like this is pretty easy to set up you just need this and that if you are using a channel pack texture you want to make sure that this mask Channel this one actually if you promote to parameter it'll give you an error um so we need to actually for this one we need actually type it in so it needs to be a constant 4 Vector is what it needs to be and We Know It needs that because V4 so it needs four vectors and for this because it's the displacement channel uh we need to use the blue Channel you can either plug blue in here or you can give the blue a value of one and plug this into there whichever one you want to utilize works and we hit apply we see now we see now how that's working so with this let's go ahead and move this over here grab that landscape layer blend again two three base dirt or let's have the base the base will be dirt this one will be moss and then this one will be a path the path will be for a little extra demo thing at the end so with this we can plug this one into layer base and the height which by the way I rename these two blend so base blend contrast base blend intensity cuz that's what it's actually doing and it' be a lot easier as we're going to the material instance to understand that cool so we got that and we can organize this all a little bit if you'd like go in here and with this we can just copy this paste this and from here you just do same sort of thing and kind of rename things I'm not going to switch out the materials here I'm going to end up switching them out in the material instance um but for this just name this one moss and I'm just going to copy and paste that and that's really all we need to do as you sort of duplicate through here is just change the names and the grouping of it so change all Moss the variation scale you can leave that uh in its own thing it kind of knows where to go this change it all to Moss there and again these sort of materials you can add any sort of functionality to these materials you can you know add slope angles water lines and splat maps and you can really you know go pretty wild with these materials and add any sort of functionality to it um these work these work as really great foundations and to be honest again often times this is really the extent you generally need to go with um as we go through here and we sort of add these things like so I mean there there are cases for example on Productions where you know maybe you do need to add additional functionality and you need to create uh you know more complicated materials things like that however you know again we tend to be working against the clock when we're working on you know different shows and things like that uh you know you might get handed you know 47 sets in eight months to do it and which sounds like a decent amount of time uh however it quickly becomes the case that that's no time at all so so you need to work pretty quick usually and so what I'm getting at is if you don't need a particular sort of you know function in your material then there's not really a need to do it like you don't need to over complicate your materials um in order to make something that looks good I I I feel like often times we mistake complexity for good when often times it's really these like simplistic approaches that um that really just seem to work you know it's um just creating these simple materials knowing which materials will go well together and why you know which comes from looking at reference by the way and then of course just building something that's aesthetically pleasing something that looks good uh ultimately so go and finish this up and then plug all of this in like so and later on we'll go over a bonus tip on how to organize this make this all look a little better uh but for now we'll just plug this in and this will be our landscape material so hit apply let's go ahead and get rid of that plane let's go ahead and bring in a landscape go ahead and put the material instance in here and go ahead and hit create and here it is over here it is glowing and that is because right here we don't have any landscape layer info so when you're doing this you need to make sure that you are creating um creating your your layer info and so for this we're going to use white Blended layer um I'm just going to save them here to make it quick layer save save save like so cool so now going bring my scale model over here as well and again you know working with the scale model is great because then you can kind of determine how big or small your texture should be so for example we're looking at this texture is really tiny right now so we can go ahead and we can adjust that and you see how everything is under um you know base Moss path and then there's the texture variation ones the way to get these these groups um that's what we are doing over here so down here under material expression group uh that's that's how we that's how the material instance sort of organizes things uh so do keep that in mind and with this we're just going to go through and I'm just going to swap out some of the textures some Mega scan textures here like so and let's find some sort of moss I don't want a grally moss I might use the grally Moss for the base yes and so we see here for example actually that right here under the base group there's only base so we can go back here and we see that you know as we're going through renaming things we actually put that in the Moss group and this in the Moss group so there we go base so now that's fixed there we go cool so yeah so let's actually use this ground might work a little better and we will use another Mossy ground that one change these not that one okay use this one this one and here and then path I'm just going to find I believe I have a cobblestone there we go cob Stone normal and the O perfect and then from here we're just going to adjust the tiling real quick go down [Music] here base tiling tiling set that to let's say one look a bit better we can maybe make it even a little bigger five okay let's turn to look better what I tend to do also is instead of going in and painting uh because you see how it does that it'll do this sort of um like it'll like calculate the component that we're painting on what I tend to do first is I'll just go in here and just fill layer uh just to almost like preload it onto um onto the environment so for here I'll do the same set this tiling to.5 and then same with the Cobblestone right click fill layer and sent that to.5 all right there we go awesome so now that we got that going go back in here fill layer and I'll paint in some of this moss and actually if I go in here and under blend and start start changing some of these values for the blending we'll actually start to get more sort of height blend if you will and so that's what the sort of contrast and the blend intensity were all about and it would appear that for base I put everything under the Moss group so let's go ahead and change that that and with this again we have the same controls that we did with uh with mega scans for the alido so going here going to unlit mode for example and we can change some of these values increase the brightness maybe so let's try to match this grass to this sort of grass a little bit so we could do that change the tint give it a bit more like yellow like so um bring down the saturation a little bit and maybe reduce that contrast just a tad just a tad more okay let's see we could refine it a bit more but ultimately that's how you would refine it is going throughout beo controls make sure you're in unlit mode maybe even add a bit more yellow okay okay we'll leave it as it is for now go in here back to landscape start painting this a little bit and then same with the path so we can start painting that path in like so oops get rid of that and turn that brush size down and increase that blend intensity and contrast as well so now we do that we got a bit more contrast in that blend so you see this for example the rocks are sort of still kind of on top if we like reduce this back to like one and zero um it's just a bit more like feathered on the edges so we can like so so this is really for a landscape material really all you generally need to do to be honest again you can make it as complicated as you want you can add Splat maps you can um you know do something in Gaia export those um those masks and utilize those however you want you can create auto sloping which we can do here in a moment you could do so many different things to this um but again this is just a good sort of Base to start with and it's also you know a simple way to get into landscape materials so go down here exit out so a little trick I wanted to show to you guys that especially if you're new to Unreal engin um probably don't really know about this but if we get rid of that real quick um let's say we were making a path so we're like doing this sort of thing and we can go through and reduce the size of all of these side followup 200 and 200 so as we're doing these spline Paths of course you can use geometry by all means use geometry for your paths however one thing that can happen is if you're using the landscape grass output and so let's say we're populating grass on um you know on this texture but we don't want it on the path one uh we can actually separate it with this path so to demonstrate that just very quickly if I were to go in here add a landscape grass output and a landscape layer sample and we'll sample base plug it into here grass and just go ahead and make one of these real quick materials Landscapes go to foliage landscape grass type base plug it in and I'm just going to give it like one grass type just for the sake of this demonstration oops like a thicker grass there we go save okay apply okay so now we have all this grass in the scene and we can run into an issue where if we have an actual piece of geometry I will just make one real quick modeling rectangle place it down and just give it a little bit of geometry just big transforms cool okay so if we are going to use that for a spline mesh and so we select the segments we add a spline mesh component paste okay so now we have this meshine here and one of the problems is the grass is you know encompassing you know this sort of pathway right it's not respecting it so the best way to get rid of this actually is within your segments so you can select all your segments you're going to type in layer and under layer name we can change it to that path layer and we see how now that path is actually encompassing um encompassing the segments here so I mean we can even get rid of the mesh itself and just have that be the material like so and then to get rid of the grass what we need to do is add a another one and we'll just leave that there and we'll use a landscape layer sample because this one path and then we can actually subtract these two there or sorry rather into here so we don't need that second one can redo that like so and subtract it hit apply and so now the grass will spawn everywhere except for the path that you made like this and so again all it is is you're sampling that first layer and you're subtracting it from your path layer and then in your landscape bline your segments it's under layer you just type in layer layer name name it to path and now you have this path that if we go in here and we start moving things around we see how it's the grass is going to like procedurally conform around all of it like so now as a bonus tip one way in which we can organize our landscape materials and this is more often what I do with my landscape materials or how I build my landscape materials is go in here right click create a new folder and we'll call this functions and we'll go into material material function name this MF base copy paste that rename it MF Moss and then MF path and going to go into our Master material and I'm just going to open up all of our material functions here as well and so all we need to do is take all of this right here and just copy it paste it into base out right here and this goes into the output results and we can copy this paste this and name this one height I usually increase the sort priority otherwise the height will actually end up being on top as far as the sort of order and we'll plug this blend into here and if we want to use displacement then we can plug this into actually we could just plug this into displacement like so then hit apply and it's going to be the same for the other ones as well so we will grab Moss right here like so and do this again so the reason for doing this is really for the sake of organization and especially if you are working on teams you want your whatever you're creating you want it to no matter how simple or complex it is you want it to be easy to read easy to understand so that if someone had to go in and adjust something that it's you know it would be a lot easier for them to navigate and understand exactly what they're looking at uh for those of you who are unfamiliar with material functions I remember for me it it was took me a bit to like understand like what's the use case of material function when do I use it why do I use it how do I use it uh the best way to sort of reconcile that is to really think of material functions kind of like as containers so really like if you just want to at least initially CU you can do a lot of intricate things with functions but initially just think of them as containers like ways to organize whatever it is you're creating and so in this case for example instead of having that instead of having this big um you know material branching tree that you know even though it's quote unquote like more simplistic uh you know there's still a bunch of nodes just here and if someone were to open this I mean they'd probably be able to navigate it and change things but um also it just doesn't look that great to stare at um so instead we just grab our material functions and we need to plug in our hit apply for the path one like so and I need to increase the Sorting priority we go cool and then with this we just plug it in like this like this like this like this like this and that and so ultimately when you open up your landscape material with the functions it would end up looking like this which just looks a lot more clean it's a lot easier to look at a lot easier to manage uh again if you're working on a team and someone opens this it's not going to be like it's not going to be like overburdening um you know when we see like a bunch of spaghetti pretty much what I like to call this this when we see a bunch of spaghetti like this we seem to We tend to just like not want to look at it cuz it can look chaotic and and like clutter um but yeah the the functions they just act as a um as a container and so we still have the same exact material except now it looks a lot cleaner and it's going to do you know the same stuff and then we can 5.3 we can turn on the nanite another little little tip if uh you are doing landscape or nanite landscape and you get this uh currently as it stands so maybe in a later update this will be fixed um but the displacement is actually adjusted here so you can decrease that magnitude so and maybe even a little bit more .25 maybe .5 cool so that's it for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial I'm going to be making more tutorials like this moving in the future uh more videos to sort of break down the uh complexities of unreal inin and make things hopefully easier for every one to move forward in developing your own art pieces yeah see you guys see you guys in the next one

Channel: Dallas Drapeau

Views: 18,336

Keywords: unreal engine, ue5, avatar, avatar the last airbender, landscape, environment, tutorial, education, film, virtual production, environment art, concept art

Id: EreqAM0EkN8

Length: 43min 34sec (2614 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023