To Develop A Terrain Material

As the environment artist it’s my duty to produce the materials for everything, and the biggest and most time consuming one thus far is the Terrain (Landscape) Material.

Setting up a basic material is a simple one minute thing, and it gets the job done most of the time. Setting up a landscape material on the other hand is a very time consuming process that never appears to be finished. So I started with a basic material setup, 3 layers: dirt path texture, a rocky cliff texture and a grass texture, then the normal maps… black spots whenever normal maps meet, great, let the fun begin.

Removing normal maps would have been the fastest route and so I did. We ran for about 5 builds without them but it just looked wrong so I decided to go back to find a way to add them again. It just looks wrong to have a huge landscape with flat textures all over it.

Research, research and more research, unreal forums and answerhub were a great source of info, after hours wandering around them I finally found the issue in the landscape (even increased performance in the process): Texture Sampler Type.

This setting’s default in unreal for some reason is a terrible FPS muncher, so I changed it to “Shared sampling”. No more HDD hitches, normal mapping black spots, FPS and frametime both stabilized. Great! Now to add more layers and roughness maps, oh boy how this looks like now…

There’s no going back now. Redoing the entire thing would be faster than the original was but even still it would take too much time. It looks like a spaghetti monster but it works! I’ll still crunch and get it properly clean and organized because there are old layers that I don’t need anymore and some badly implemented macro textures around.