Overview

A set of highly customisable shaders for rapidly creating complex, physically accurate and multi-layered materials. Believably texture environment assets in Unreal Engine 4 without a second spent in Photoshop, or craft vast but minutely detailed landscape surfaces.

More Info: Here.

Landscape Basics

World Machine is the recommended tool for creating your landscape, however the landscape shader functions entirely fine without it, just skip the next two steps then uncheck the "Use World Machine Weightmaps" checkbox on your instance.

- In your World Machine project, create two bitmap outputs using the channel combiner, the first one taking its inputs from your Erosion node (Red: Flow, Green: Wear, Blue: Deposition), and the second taking inputs from Snow (Red), Glacier (Green) and Slope (Blue) nodes. A macro for generating Glaciers can be found Here. If your environment doesn't have snow or glaciers, simply leave them black and uncheck the "Use Snow" and "Use Ice" options on your instance. The end result should look like this:

- The recommended resolution for baking your maps is 4096x4096 for each. Once World Machine has finished building them, import the FlowWearDeposition and SnowGlacierSlope maps into UE4 and inport your heightmap using the steps outlined Here.

- It's recommended to make a separate high level instance for each environment biome you wish to include in your project. Already included is a Tundra biome instance, this can be found asProceduralPack/Instances/ProceduralPack_Instance-TundraLandscape. Right click on this and select"Make Instance". Apply this new material to your landscape then drag and drop your imported maps to their respective slot in the "Core" group. Your landscape should now be ready for use. Layers can be painted as normal using the Landscape - Paint tool.

- If your maps don't match up correctly with the landscape, select Manage mode in the Landscape tab, then choose the Change Component Size tool. Note down the Overall Resolution, then in your landscape material instance, change Landscape Map Scale to match that resolution.

Creating your own Biomes

- There are 7 layers available for use. The first three, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary assume nothing of what type of surface you use on them, dirt, rock, gravel, grass will all function the same here. The next 4 layers, Moss, Ice, Water and Snow are recommended for use with their specific element, since they're each optimised for that specific purpose. Feel free to use Moss for grass however. Any of these four can be entirely disabled if you do not wish to use them, simply uncheck their Use checkbox under their group in your instance.

- "Use World Aligned Sampling" is an useful but extremely costly setting, for use with landscapes with sheer slopes to prevent textures stretching vertically.

- By and large the function of each tweakable value should be self explanatory, but in the case it isn't feel free to email me and ask.