Week 2 Day 3 - Landscape Layers, Automatic Grass, Fog

Today we hit a few very important points:


1) (Optional - do this if you want to eliminate ugly texture tiling in your game) How to import a material into a material. Sadly, there's no easy way to do this in UE4 (you can't just drag it in). So what you have to do is A) create a "Material Function", B) Copy/paste in all the stuff inside the material you want to import, C) Create a MakeMaterialAttributes node. D) Hook up the pins in the MakeMaterialAttribute node in the same way the output node was hooked up before. E) Hook up the MakeMaterialAttribute to the output node.


Then in your landscape material, you drag the material function you just made in, and hook up a "BreakMaterialAttributes" node to it. This will make the base color and normal map from the texture available (as well as anything else like roughness that was set up in the original material).


2) How to add fog to a level. You already should have an AtmosphericFog item in your level that controls things like the size of the sun disk and far off haze. You can drag in an exponential fog, and click on the "volumetric fog" option to get some realistic looking fog into your game. Play with the settings until it looks good to you.


3) How to add layers to a landscape. A layer allows you to paint one texture on top of the other textures in your landscape using the Landscape Paint tool. You add a "landscape layer blend" node to your landscape and create a layer for your default texture then new layers for each extra layer you want to allow painting on the landscape. I added "road" and "meadow" layers.


Connect the output of the node to the base color. Duplicate the node and connect the output of it to normal.


Then feed in three different base color inputs, one for each layer. Default will get fed the old input to base color. For the road, I imported a new texture sample and picked gravel. For the grass layer, I fed in the base color output from the grass material function. Do the same for normal maps.


Then save and back out to the world. *Your landscape will be black*. Switch the material out and then switch the material back in to fix a long-standing bug in UE4 where the layers don't appear. In other words, change the material on the landscape to something else, and then change it back to your landscape material. That forces it to update the materials.


Then go to the Landscape Mode, click on the paint tab, and then open the layers area. Click the + next to each layer and create a weight-blended thingy and hit okay for each one.


Once you've done that, the map will turn back to normal and now you can paint roads and stuff onto your map using the paint tool. I painted some meadows areas as well for the next step.


4) How to automatically add grass to a landscape. First, make a foliage thing in the content browser, and select one or more grasses or flowers you want to automatically appear in your meadow. Watch the video for some recommended settings, but you'll need to play with the density settings and scale yourself to see what works for the foliage you've picked. (You can import different foliage packs from the marketplace.) Save it and back out.


Then go into your landscape material and create two nodes that you'll hook up to each other. The first is a landscape layer sample node, and that will feed into a landscape grass output node. On the landscape grass output node, on the details tab you will need to select the foliage thing you just saved. On the layer sample side, pick what layer you want to automatically spawn foliage on.


When you do this, you will see flowers and grasses or whatever appear in your world where that layer appears.