UE4: Complete Guide to Auto-Landscape Materials

What You'll Learn in "UE4: Auto-Landscape Material"

• How to create your very first, simple and ready to go auto-landscape material
• How to create 2 and 3 texture auto-landscape material
• How to properly add normal maps to your 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 create a full material instance for maximum re-usability so you can apply this auto-landscape material onto any landscape and tweak it how you want it to look
• 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
• and much, much more within the 3.5+ hours of tutorials

How to Texture Huge, Open-World Landscapes?

Weeks ago I created a set of large landscapes in UE4.

The terrains varied in size from 1km x 1km to all the way to 8km x 8km - all untextured. I used Photoshop and Terrain.Party to generate these heightmaps.

Next step was to begin painting landscape textures. However, if I were to manually paint texture layers, the landscapes would NEVER get done. It would take days if not weeks.

Instead, I textured all these landscapes in few minutes. I did this by creating and using Auto-Landscape Material.

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 changes to another texture based on slope/angle.

You don't even need to create texture layers. You simply create the Auto-Landscape material, define the rules and apply the material on the terrain. You landscape is now textured.

I could re-use this material on any terrain I want with Material Instances. I would adjust few parameters for angle/slope, height, change Albedo, Normal Map and call it done.

What would have taken me days, now takes me minutes.

Here is a landscape that is untextured and then with auto-landscape material applied onto it.

Take a look at this video. I had 8km x 8km un-textured landscape. I used Photoshop to create the heightmap and bring it into UE4. To texture this terrain, I applied Auto-Landscape Material and tweaked few properties. Terrain is now textured.

It doesn't mean you should never paint manual textures again. There are times and projects where you will still need to paint everything by hand. But for large, open world environments with huge terrain sizes, you should take advantage of Auto-Landscape Materials.

You can extend the functionality for any Auto-Landscape Materials by including the ability to paint texture layers on top. This will allow you to manually add terrain texture detail in specific areas of your environment.

Once I figured out how to create and use auto-landscape material for my landscape work it changed everything. I can now create huge outdoor environments very quickly focusing on environment design rather than tedious texture painting that no longer needs to be done.

9 Things Every Auto-Landscape Material Must Have

Creating a simple Auto-Landscape material is easy but often it isn't enough for most landscapes.

Here are 9 things every Auto-Landscape Materials must be able to do.

1. Must Assign a Texture Based on Slope/Angle

The basis of any Auto-Landscape Material is the ability to automatically texture terrain based on its slope (angle). This can be done few different ways in the Material Editor.

But the most reliable way I found is to use World Aligned Blend node. This material expression is the foundation of all Auto-Landscape materials I create.

2. Must Have 2 or 3 Textures

Auto-Landscape Materials can have 2 or 3 textures that will automatically change on your terrain based on slope (angle).

2-texture Auto-Material is the simplest and most effective.

3-texture Auto-Material is a bit more involved. First texture is used for flat areas, third texture is used for angled slopes and second texture is used to blend between the first and third texture.

3. Must Assign a Texture Based on Height

World Aligned Blend node only works based on slope or angle of the terrain.

If you want to assign automatic texture to the landscape based on height you'll have to use Absolute World Position node and combine it with World Aligned Blend setup. This will give you the ability to assign a texture at a certain height of the terrain.

Such as snowy peaks on a mountain:

4. Must Have Ability to Paint Textures Manually

Auto-Landscape Material by itself does a great job texturing your terrain automatically.

But you can have more control if you add manually painted texture layers. This will allow you paint extra textures on top of automatically generated ones such as extra detail or roads and pathways.

5. Must Have Controls to Blend Between Textures

Auto-Landscape Material by default will have a soft blend between textures. It will work most of the time but what if you want a hard edge blend?

You'll have to set this up in the Material Editor by adding Edge Intensity adjustment with a Power node then using a texture Mask for natural appearance.

6. Must Spawn Foliage Automatically

If you have environments where foliage isn't required, Auto-Landscape Materials will work as is.

But for environments where you also need to spawn foliage at the same time along with Auto-Landscape Materials then you need to add this functionality.

This will allow you to spawn foliage on your terrain, automatically without having to use Foliage Tool or Foliage Volumes, unless of course you want to.

To do this you have to use the Grass node. Very powerful technique and this alone will save you a lot of time by automatically spawning foliage across your entire world.

7. Must Remove Spawned Foliage on Manually Painted Layers

You will run into a problem if you have foliage being spawned on the terrain automatically when painting texture layers manually, it will not remove the spawned foliage. You must add the ability to have foliage removed as you manual paint texture layers by using the One Minus node and Landscape Layer Blend node with Multiply. It is a bit tricky to setup if you don't know how but once you do, it is easy to re-use across any Auto-Landscape Material.

8. Must Tile Correctly Near and Far Away

Biggest problem with landscape materials is texture repetition. This applies not only to Auto-Landscape Materials but to any landscape materials.

Terrain textures look good near the player but at a distance, the repetition becomes extremely noticeable. There are many tricks you can implement to reduce and eliminate this repetition.

First you need to set up to control tiling. Then you need to control tiling for different distances of the same texture. For textures up-close near the player and textures far away at a distance. And on top of all that you should use Macro/Micro trick explained in this tutorial.

Your Auto-Landscape Material should have all of the above tricks implemented to completely remove any noticeable texture tiling.

9. Must Have Properties for Material Instance

You want to create Auto-Landscape Material once and then re-use it over and over again for different projects and on different landscapes.

Here is a list of all parameters I have set up in my Master Auto-Landscape material:

• Edge Intensity
• Edge Mask Texture
• Edge Mask Channels
• Edge Tiling
• Roughness Controls for each texture
• Changing Albedo and Normal map textures
• Adjusting Albedo tint and shade (brightness and darkness of Albedo texture)
• Changing color on Albedo textures
• Tiling for near and far away textures
• World Aligned Blend slope/angle controls
• Ability to turn on/off Grass node (foliage spawning)

You will learn how to do all this and more in "UE4 Auto-Landscape Material" tutorial course.

Learn to Create Your Own Procedural Auto-Landscape Materials

I no longer paint texture layers from scratch on landscapes I create. I start with the Auto-Landscape Material. Then if I need to, I add the functionality for manually painted layers on top of Auto-Landscape Material.

Of course there will be times when you still need to manually paint all texture layers. And truth be told, I still do that when my landscapes are small or very stylized.

But if you are creating open-world environments where the landscape size is huge then you should NOT be texturing your terrains by hand. You need to create and use Auto-Landscape Material.

Here are few results from using Auto-Landscape Materials in UE4.

If you want to learn how to create your own Auto-Landscape Materials from the very beginning following every step in the process then download this tutorial course and I will show you how.