Now Out - "UE4: Complete Guide to Auto-Landscape Materials" Tutorial Course

Category: News/Updates, UE4

November 16, 2020

The tutorial course is complete!

You can now texture huge, open-world landscapes automatically without ever having to paint texture layers.

What is Auto-Landscape Material?

Auto-Landscape Material is a material with a set of rules that controls at which angle of the terrain a landscape texture will appear. When you apply auto-material on the landscape, it textures the entire terrain automatically and will change the texture based on slope/angle.

Download the Course

Download "UE4: The Complete Guide to Creating and Using Procedural Auto-Landscape Materials" here...

The Tutorial Course Contains

3.5+ hours of tutorials
15+ videos
Project Files
No external software required, everything is done in UE4
Digital Download

You Will Learn

How to create auto-material based on terrain slope
How to create auto-material based on height
How to create 2 and 3 texture auto-materials
How to control edge blends between textures
How to set up the ability to replace textures (Albedo and Normal Map)
How to spawn foliage automatically on a specific texture
How to manually paint additional texture layers on top of auto-landscape material for additional detail
And much more...

Tutorial Roundup

If you want to get started with Auto-Landscape Materials here are 3 tutorials I've released on the website.

Questions and Answers

Few questions been asked about the tutorials, problems with landscapes and how-to do certain things with auto-landscape materials.

I want to go through the questions and give you the answers.

"Can I use Quixel Bridge Textures with this course?"

Yes. In the course I use Starter Content textures since they are readily available with any new Project you start in UE4.

However, you are free to use any terrain texture you want to use. Especially after you create a Material Instance, you can swap to any new terrain texture you want.

"How do I paint over my auto-landscape material with a different texture? I added the landscape blend node, but that only allows me to paint on the auto material?"

You have to use Landscape Layer Blend node. First layer will use Auto Material connection and will be applied automatically to the entire landscape.

Second layer (or any additional layers after the first) will be the texture you want to paint on top of auto-landscape material. You should keep all texture layers you paint on the same Landscape Layer (if using editable Landscape Layer feature).

In addition, it’s best to choose LB Weight Blended and Weight Blended Layer Info. Since all this is very involved, I cover how to do this in detail in the tutorial course.

"What really bothers me is the optimization. Whenever I plant grass, the fps goes down. Solutions?"

This is natural with foliage. Here is what I would try:

Spawn less dense grass
Control cull distance where grass starts and stops spawning, this can be done inside the Landscape Grass Type if using a Grass Node
Switch the LOD sooner one with less triangles

"How do you handle UV stretching on steep terrain, z-axis wise?"

Best way is to use Static Meshes to hide the stretching on steep terrains.

Other ways are to use Retopologize tool under Landscape Mode panel can somewhat help with that but it doesn't solve it completely.

You can also try tri-planar mapping where you can project a texture on Z-axis but I haven't tried this with landscapes yet.

"Does the course explain Auto-Height Landscapes with more than 2 layers (Paint Layers and Foliage-Layers)?"

In the course I explain how to add auto-height texture with auto-landscape material. This allows for a texture to be applied ON TOP of your terrain textures and at a specific height in the world. You could use the auto-height texture setup used in the course for 2 or more paint layer landscapes. So in short yes it covers that, just not directly.

"Finally! Like everyone who has tried to make a decent landscape knows how important the Master Material for it can be, we know what things we want but don’t know how implement them."

Thank you. I agree. I had the same problem. I was trying to find a good solution creating auto-landscape materials. But I kept hitting lack of information. I couldn’t find a consistent comprehensive way of doing so that explained everything I needed in one place. From start to finish. So I had to figure it out myself.

I needed my auto-landscape materials to do the following:

How to create 2 or 3 texture auto-landscape material
How to avoid normal map artifact errors
How to add roughness texture controls
How to control blends between textures for soft or hard edge transitions
How to eliminate landscape texture repetitions
How to add manually painted texture layers on top of an existing auto-landscape material for more refined detailing
How to add a texture to your terrain automatically based on height
How to automatically spawn foliage on your auto-landscape material

"How is the purchase delivered (Download on Demand)?"

The purchase is download on demand. After checkout you are emailed a link where you are able to download all the zipped videos onto your computer, including project files and a bonus.