UE4 - Landscape Auto-Material Overview

hey everybody this is luke with red six studios and I'm here to show Casey landscape auto material that I've been working on I know that there is quite a few auto materials out there on the marketplace however mine is very clean the low instructions and it's very performance oriented especially when it comes to large-scale landscapes so I just want to go ahead and dive right in here and show you what's going on so under landscape materials we have auto material here ever Master in art and since so we'll look at the master so if you're familiar with my other work as far as the landscape master material version two the functions and all that stuff are very similar it's not the same so you'll be mmm you'll know exactly what's going on with these with these nodes and and how they how they function the biggest thing to realize is now I have macro variation per function layer as opposed to it being globally controlled as as before so now each material you'll be able to do macro variation for each individual material if you are not familiar with my landscape master material version 2 you can check out my other videos and I kind of go more in depth about these parameters and how to switch out textures on the fly and changing the colour of textures and stuff like that so in this video on I won't be going over that so I've added two additional layers with this material added sand and I added snow and the meat and potatoes of this entire material is right here where I added the Auto slope function that I created I also gave the inputs to be able to also change the the angle of the material as far as you know the angle that which texture starts as well as the sharpness the way it blends as well so that's all right here and everything else has pretty much the same as far as a suitable foliage and the tessellation so let's take a look at the material instance really quick like I said if this is unfamiliar to you you can look at my videos however if look by looking at this you'll be right at home it's all very similar all the parameters that change are all right here nothing nothing too different between 18 and 23 is the macro variation again it's as for every single material that has that so the up here the auto material functions is a function that I added that the 20 number is the number of blending so 20 is is the blending of between two textures if I were to put this up this say 50 or 100 it's gonna make that line very very crisp and it just won't look very natural but you can play around with those numbers to get a result that you desire if you go like to a 10 or a 5 something along those lines you're gonna notice that there's just going to be a long transition of blending before the actual full-on material so the minus 7 point 7 and minus 8 point 5 is the actual angle at which each one of these materials actually start so this is a very touchy number so if you were to change this you want to go in 10th increments so as opposed to seven point seven you go to seven point eight seven point nine or seven point six you don't want to like add on like ten or five or something like that because what's gonna happen is it's gonna pull out the texture and it'll just be one giant texture as far as that's concerned so just be wary of that when you're when you're messing with it so let's go ahead and start a new landscape so we're gonna start a new landscape let's go sixteen sixteen create let's go ahead and change the lighting something about one natural so we go to eight we'll change the temperature to 45 100 moveable for all you open-world fans and we'll go cascade shadow map so go to a far distant shadows at four and let's add on a skylight perfect and let's just change this a little bit like that and also changes okay so let's go ahead and let's click on our last gate let's add our landscape and it should turn black here and we're gonna go to our landscape we're gonna go to paint let's just add on all of our layers and one thing that I like to do is once I get all of my layers in here I like to just click on the landscape one more time and just bring in the materials one more time alright so now when I'm going to show you is something that I've added is of some alpha brush Maps so the traditional way of sculpting is this using this circle thing so but what I what I added was the ability to do massive landscapes that mimic what you would do in rolled machine or in World Creator by creating certain types of brushes using alpha maps from those from those programs so when you go under sculpt you have the circle tool brush so you're gonna go up here you can go to alpha and you notice it says texture it has a brush I added six brushes so one two three four five six so we'll start with number one we're gonna go to tool strength we're gonna put that at ten and under brush size we're gonna put that at twenty thousand and I'm gonna show you what happens with one keystroke so basically we're just going to just click one time on the landscape and there you go I just created a massive mountain with one click of the mouse and as you can see the way the blending works so I have my rock layer and I have blending down into my my dirt layer and then finally my grass layer so the auto material is fully functional and working so all I have to do is this make another one right next to it let's just click boom and another one over here just like that simple easy so let's uh click on underbrush here so we'll go number two instead of ten let's just uh let's go to five actually four so what we can do is this click and we want to make some hills so because the brush strength isn't so high you won't get mountains you'll get more of some hills just like that so something definitely more organic doing it this way and you get some very very beautiful results very very quickly and this also works so we're clicking so this is uh let's go to another like a brush six and let's bring this to ten and well actually we'll go to go to five and so if you hold shift and click it'll indent and so you can you know create some ravines just like that look no effort at all so now you get these ravines you can fill it up with water you know whatever your heart desires whatever you're looking to do it's all there for you very simple one thing I do want to mention though is so if we have our tool strength set at ten our brush size if we set this to high if we go to like fifty thousand you got to keep in mind that you're gonna you're basically blowing out the alpha map so if I click it it's very large but what's gonna happen is you're gonna get this like stepping effect so as you can see you get this like weird stepping effect it's not a huge deal what you can do is you can just use the smooth tool and smooth out some of that that you would need but as you can see it kind of just says that almost like a canyon type of look but again you can you can modify it in any way that you want however I notice that a good number for the brush size is not to go over twenty thousand if you don't go over twenty thousand it's generally a really good result every single time but just wanted to let you know about that so again if we go like that's 20,000 with that same that same one it's not as big but it looks it looks a lot better so yep so it's a simple tool it's uh it's for you now you can paint on all the layers that you see here so let's let's change these brushes something reasonable and you know for instance let's do two dirt here so let that a shader compiled I also added a a snow layer as well so as you can see we can paint on some snow pretty basic stuff so now I have is all nice and super shiny looking good see they're so good nice nice fluff going on as well as you know painting the pathway so let's go to dirt and a little pathway and I'll show you I'll show you how this works with the grass maps as well because we do have a procedural grass so get a little path going so I will show you how to do some procedural foliage now so under landscape material under foilage you have auto material you have grass and grass - so grass one and I incorporated this grass these grash meshes from another pack that's on the marketplace this is not included within this pack the pack is just for the material but this is showing you how to add your own grass measures or whatever measures that you would want so we're going to grass and as you can see grass procedurally-generated only on the grass layer not on this layer here so aggressive pursuit generated not up on any of these rock surfaces or anything like that just on the on the actual grass itself so if we wanted to again you know expand on this path you can belt like that nothing and then same with snow as well if you add snow so if you added snow it's the same thing it does not actually create grass on that snow layer you see here so it's all right there one thing I did do is the rock the paintable rock layer actually left where snow can't our grass can generate because it gives it a really good organic look so if I were to you know bring some rocks in with the grass you know walking this path I mean it looks very natural looking with the with the grass kind of going around the rocks looks really good as you can see so I also added a sand layer as well so I compiled there for a second as well as a foliage removal tool so let that compile as well so gives us the ability to just remove the foliage where we don't want it but same with sand you know for those beach goers I was requested a lot of sand texture so I added the sand sea here so no no foliage it was in the sand there you go and let's just say that for whatever reason we didn't want foliage on this rock thing right here we just want to get rid of it so you just click and drag and as you can see the footage remove removal tool works just click and drag and it gets rid of all the foliage that's in that area if you wanted to add it back for whatever reason just bring out the foliage removal tool you can hold shift and click back over the area and it puts it right back it's like that so all that is there for you it's leaving it up to you you can also use the Alpha Maps that I used to create these we can also do that with our texturing as well so to do that you can go to our circle brush here under paint under alpha and then it come brings up the same brushes and we're able to texture the same way with those maps so as you can see it's a little bit different as far as the circle is concerned so we can actually just bring up the brush size a little bit so you can do splotching and not so much of a pathway so you can just splash it up this is probably a bad one to use actually we can use something like this so that washes it up you know removes the foilage that's on the layer so it gives it a good good nice effect so so yeah there you go look for it on the marketplace it should be should be out there pretty soon I should be submitting this probably sometime in next week I'm thinking so take a look Thanks

Channel: RezTech Studios

Views: 48,614

Keywords: Develope, Material, Auto-Material, Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, UE4, Landscape, Auto Landscape

Id: Yx0LBaqzvWQ

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2018