4: Materials Layers - Next-Gen Landscape Material in Unreal

God-Tier Landscapes Part 4: Next-Gen Landscape Material using Material Layers in Unreal

Not just another terrain auto-material.

The fourth video in the God-Tier Landscapes series. In this episode we look at Material Layers in Unreal. A paradigm for creating complex materials in unreal introduced in later versions of UE4. Which is absolute godsend for environment Artists creating landscape shaders.

There's a lot of outdated landscape materials out there, and a lot of resources which also deserve to be deprecated when it comes to discussing the creation of terrain materials.

In this video, even complete beginners can learn how to create a landscape material, which as of writing, is easier to work with, understand and more powerful than the vast majority of the shaders on the marketplace. Never buy a landscape material again with this guide on getting the best out of materials in Unreal.

Please like and subscribe if you enjoy this content and find it useful, it really provides me a lot of encouragement to keep on going and make more.

If you have any suggestions for future content, I'm all ears.

Unreal Official Material Layers Documentation: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en...


Chapters
00:00 Recap
00:54 Intro and start of Part 1
02:32 P1 Enabling Material Layers (in older versions of Unreal)
03:38 P1 Setting Up Master Material
04:25 P1 Setting Up the Material Layers
10:58 P1 Setting Up the Material Layer Blends
13:58 P1 Piping Lanscape Layer Samples through the UVs
24:10 P1 Plugging in the Textures
24:24 Start of Part 2: Planning Next Stage of Iteration
25:40 P2 Add tiling controls
28:08 P2 Detail Texturing
39:54 P2 Fixing "Background Layer" showing through other layers
42:50 P2 Fixing the Specularity with Fresnel
48:20 Start of Part 3: Discussing Future Steps and progress so far
48:56 P3 Slope Based blending Layer (Cliffs)
52:19 P3 Directional Based blending Layer (Snow, Sand)
55:20 Outro