Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

[Renzatic]

Yeah, modeling a big specimen tree may be in my future, with you help,

Ask away when you're ready!

Does it matter how many textures are built into a material, or does it only matter how many textures are applied to the landscape in a scene? In other words if you wanted to make a master master material, but you are careful and only utilize say only 4 in a quadrant are you goid to go?

General rule of thumb is to use as few textures as possible to achieve what you want. For example, your forest road scene only needs a dirt texture for the road, grass for the open parts, and a forest floor texture for where the trees are the most dense. Most of your ground textures are gonna be covered by foliage anyway, so just put in what you need to make it look natural.

Anything extra is extraneous detail (this is what the cool kids call a tautology). Things you'll need to transition from one biome to another. Like if your forest runs into an old gas station, you can throw an extra texture or two for the transition from grass to concrete.

Now the big question is how many of these landscape textures can you have in a scene? Can you slap two landscape meshes together, each with their own landscape texture with a shared texture or two between them to help with the transition? Would that be more efficient than just having one mega-landscape texture with everything you need on it? That, I can't answer. You'd need to hit up the UE forum for that.

So now I am picking suitable textures, and testing them and one I used before on the FirestvRoad is bugging me. It’s a dirt texture with roots showing. In the Forest Road project it was a nice dark brown, but in this landscape material it is very light, I’m not sure what is causing this difference. However the landscape material has a built in tint color and I’ll probably use that to darken it up Although there are setting in the material regarding ambient occlusion and diffusion which I can play with and see what king of effect that has.

That's just the nature of colors for you. It looks one way when you're staring at it on a webpage, but another way entirely when you have it in your scene, up against other textures, under certain lighting conditions.

It's easy to fix. Just play with your hue, saturation, and values on your diffuse textures until they all mix together. Fortunately, that's easy to do. Don't even have to use Mixer for it.



...it doesn't help that UE gives everything a goofy name for their nodes. Instead of RGB, which is what every other program out there uses, they call it Vector 3 DERP DERP DERP!

The only downside to this is that I think it might be destructive (IE, it changes the base texture permanently.) You can edit HSV at the material node level, though it's slightly more complicated.

Image Adjustment

Functions for making adjustments to existing image textures, such as shifting contrast or hue.

docs.unrealengine.com

 

[Renzatic]

Hey @Huntn! Did my first Channel pack today. I have to admit, it's nice only having to deal with three textures.

 

[Huntn]

Hey @Huntn! Did my first Channel pack today. I have to admit, it's nice only having to deal with three textures.

How did you do it? I think I mentioned that Megascans is now channel packing roughness, height, and ambient occlusion as a matter of routine In their ‘“ORD” designated texture sample.

At this point in time, I am cycling between 2 tutorials, and in my project I have sorted out which textures I want to use for my landscape material, 2 dirt, 2 grass, 1 rock. I’m still stumped what makes all of the textures I’m picking look extremely light in this project. What seems to be saving me is a color tint node included for each texture, where if I want a darker brown for dirt, I pick a dark brown in the color picker. But somewhere I’m thinking buried in this material‘s complexity is a reason why, that I am oblivious to, or not understanding.

I’ll watch the video you posted on this soon. Yes, I would think that a texture where these qualities can be easily adjusted for the environment would be a convenient thing, increasing their usability. In one of the tutorials the teacher said that the color tint node is to keep all similiar items looking like they belong together, and not,out of place say the hue of rock in a landscape.

 

[Renzatic]

How did you do it? I think I mentioned that Megascans is now channel packing roughness, height, and ambient occlusion as a matter of routine In their ‘“ORD” designated texture sample.

I called it ARM, for Ambient occlusion, Roughness, Metallic. All you need to do is paste the textures into their respective color channels. You end up with this weird puke green and red image that you save out, then plug into your material like so...

I’m still stumped what makes all of the textures I’m picking look extremely light in this project.

I'm facing the same problem myself. Everything I pop into Unreal seems to be lighter and more washed out than it is in Blender.

I think it might be due to the way it handles roughness. Either that, or the default lighting is washed out by default.

This is the way my truck looks in Blender, vs. it how it looks in UE5. It's a lot smoother and more saturated in the former.

 

[Huntn]

I called it ARM, for Ambient occlusion, Roughness, Metallic. All you need to do is paste the textures into their respective color channels. You end up with this weird puke green and red image that you save out, then plug into your material like so...

View attachment 16579



I'm facing the same problem myself. Everything I pop into Unreal seems to be lighter and more washed out than it is in Blender.

I think it might be due to the way it handles roughness. Either that, or the default lighting is washed out by default.

This is the way my truck looks in Blender, vs. it how it looks in UE5. It's a lot smoother and more saturated in the former.

View attachment 16582

View attachment 16583

The Forest Road project when I was vertex painting and you could vertex painting landscapes (UE4) did not have this issue, so I’m thinking there is something to do with the material.

Now as far as these channel packed textures you made, what did you start with, something you got from Megascans or make yourself? And where exactly, what program did you place these textures in their respective channels?

Regarding channel packed textures I thought they were called RMA, roughness, metallic, and Ambient Occlusion. I think the Megascan‘s ORD, is Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Displacement (height). But I liked having roughness equate to Red because it was easy to remember.

 

[Renzatic]

Now as far as these channel packed textures you made, what did you start with, something you got from Megascans or make yourself? And where exactly, what program did you place these textures in their respective channels?

I made it myself for the truck, though I've recently learned that Substance Painter can channel pack for you automatically. What I did was use Krita, but GIMP is actually a little more straightforward about it, allowing you to copy images directly into their channels, rather than doing this weird layer based version of it.

It's not at all difficult. Like I said before, it's about 2 minutes worth of work. At most.

Regarding channel packed textures I thought they were called RMA, roughness, metallic, and Ambient Occlusion.

It's all just the order the textures are placed in per the RGB sequence. It seems RMA and ARM are the two most common layouts, but you could do MAR or AMR if you wanted to, so long as you remember which texture is in which channel.

Though for simplicity sake, I'd pick one standard, and stick with it.

 

[Huntn]

I made it myself for the truck, though I've recently learned that Substance Painter can channel pack for you automatically. What I did was use Krita, but GIMP is actually a little more straightforward about it, allowing you to copy images directly into their channels, rather than doing this weird layer based version of it.

It's not at all difficult. Like I said before, it's about 2 minutes worth of work. At most.





It's all just the order the textures are placed in per the RGB sequence. It seems RMA and ARM are the two most common layouts, but you could do MAR or AMR if you wanted to, so long as you remember which texture is in which channel.

Though for simplicity sake, I'd pick one standard, and stick with it.

And Megascans apparantly made up their own standard?

I need to study this, what I think I need to do is pull out one of these images and see what there specs are, resolution, size. I know there are 2k, 4k, and 8k textures. What I don‘t know is what that equates to exactly.

 

[Huntn]

Ask away when you're ready!



General rule of thumb is to use as few textures as possible to achieve what you want. For example, your forest road scene only needs a dirt texture for the road, grass for the open parts, and a forest floor texture for where the trees are the most dense. Most of your ground textures are gonna be covered by foliage anyway, so just put in what you need to make it look natural.

Anything extra is extraneous detail (this is what the cool kids call a tautology). Things you'll need to transition from one biome to another. Like if your forest runs into an old gas station, you can throw an extra texture or two for the transition from grass to concrete.

Now the big question is how many of these landscape textures can you have in a scene? Can you slap two landscape meshes together, each with their own landscape texture with a shared texture or two between them to help with the transition? Would that be more efficient than just having one mega-landscape texture with everything you need on it? That, I can't answer. You'd need to hit up the UE forum for that.



That's just the nature of colors for you. It looks one way when you're staring at it on a webpage, but another way entirely when you have it in your scene, up against other textures, under certain lighting conditions.

It's easy to fix. Just play with your hue, saturation, and values on your diffuse textures until they all mix together. Fortunately, that's easy to do. Don't even have to use Mixer for it.



...it doesn't help that UE gives everything a goofy name for their nodes. Instead of RGB, which is what every other program out there uses, they call it Vector 3 DERP DERP DERP!

The only downside to this is that I think it might be destructive (IE, it changes the base texture permanently.) You can edit HSV at the material node level, though it's slightly more complicated.

Image Adjustment

Functions for making adjustments to existing image textures, such as shifting contrast or hue.

docs.unrealengine.com

I watched the watched the video on changing color texture, brightness, and saturation and thank you! I’m wondering if I should be embarrassed I did not know this. None of the tutorials I’ve looked at focused on, or even mentioned this aspect of texture manipulation, and I have not spent much time looking at textures in UE at that level.

So for myself, the question becomes how is the best way to change brightness on a texture. When I was getting all of these light materials, I’m still suspecting there is a setting somewhere in my material. What I’ve been doing is using the color tint node that is included for each texture, so if my brown is too light, I slap on something like a chocolate brown color to darken it up, but then what I’m doing is trying to override the color‘s inherent color by mixing in this new color. The good thing about the color node is it’s easy to change the appearance of the texture while looking at the scene.

In contrast, changing the brightness of the texture itself, is not so hard, and it might be better because you are not mixing in a new color to tint it, just changing it‘s basic quality.

The issue as I imagine it, is where you have a texture that is composed of both brown dirt and green leaves (like I do, it’s called a Forest floor texture) and if you color tint all of it a dark brown, this has a negative impact on the green leaves. So I’m excited to try the brightness adjustment.

My tendency would be to leave the original texture alone, duplicate it and modify the copy, and make some notes about the brightness, and saturation specs of the original texture.

What I really need to figure out (at some point) is how such a texture is composed using brown dirt and green leaves, I suppose these two items are mixed, but how does it keep the definition of the leaves, and know where to apply green, how the leaves are defined and like wall paper and tiling , how does it not get funky looking edges where the edges of the texture meet (thinking of landscape)? Obviously with these questions it’s currently above my head and I don’t need to know this at this moment.

 

[Renzatic]

Accept Megascans apparantly made up their own standard?

Yeah, ORD would be better for landscapes, which is Megascan's bread and butter. You don't really need metallic maps for grass, dirt, and bark, so they probably just give it a black procedural, and replace it in the channel pack with a displacement map, which are very handy to have for landscapes.

I need to study this, what I think I need to do is pull out one of these images and see what there specs are, resolution, size. I know there are 2k, 4k, and 8k textures. What I don‘t know is what that equates to exactly.

All the textures in the channel pack are going to be the same size, and they'll likely be 8-bit greyscale.

As for size, 2k will serve you in 99.9% of all situations. 1k can even get you by, if it's fairly small, and people won't be smashing their face up against it. 4k and 8k textures should be saved for situations where you either need one texture for a large amount of space, or are cramming a lot of details onto a single texture.

It's all about the details that higher resolutions provide you, but also an understanding that there's a point of diminishing returns. General rule of thumb is that if it looks blurry and rough, you could probably use more resolution. If it doesn't really look any different with a 4k texture than it does with a 2k one, then use the smaller texture.

This is definitely one of those things that you might struggle with, but will pick up on naturally when you start practicing it.

 

[Huntn]

Today I think I am done screwing around with this UE landscape material. It's got 6 textures, although I'm not exactly sure I'll be able to use all of them. Under Viewport Lit>Optimization Viewmodes>Shader Complexity, you can see a color representation of your scene. In a relatively small, practice landscape, when I had one texture painted over the entire scene, I got a green (good) image. Then as an experiment I dabbed in 5 additional textures, in a small space and it turned red.

I think the key here are shaders that are applied in close proximity to one another in the same quad. My guess at this point is that if 6 textures are used, they must be spread out so as not to place too many in a quad, and the quads can be quite large. More experimentation if forth coming. I'm working on relative small scenes so it's possible can get away with more shader complexity (more competing textures). More to come...

 

[Huntn]

Well I just figured out that you can no longer Vertex paint on a landscape in UE5. Or I'm losing my mind, because of the projects I played with, such as the Forest Road, I vertex painted the landscape... I think. Well I know I did not use a landscape layer on it.

Ok I'm am starting to put together a scene. I have several free tree packs and the one I purchased for $30 a while back. I need to take a close look at that one, but I've decided for this first scene I want a large specimen tree, like the big oak, with large branches all over, not the kind of tree with a very tall trunk, before you see the first limb.

Anyway I was wondering if your Blender tree automater could be set up to create something like, something beyond a generic tree? I wonder how hard it would be to create in blender? No asking you to make me a tree...

View attachment 16293

View attachment 16294
​

One other question, the the Forest Road project, the guy I was following, he basically said to take any tree mesh and make it as big as you want. Could there be an issue with ending up with leave larger than they should be? Or would the leaves stay the same size? Or would it be the idea that probably no-one would notice?

@Renzatic I mentioned trees a while ago. For this UE setting I'm working on, I feel the need for a big fancy tree with low hanging branches. The options are to buy one or try to make one, and based on the latter, I wonder if you would recommend any of these as "novice doable".

Make Artistic Trees in Blender:

Stylized Fantasy Tree in Blender:

Make a Photo Realistic Forest in Blender:


I looked at the make a tree video link you posted that seems similar to one of the above, while I realize this maybe over my head for Blender, because I also think some animation would be needed, and then there is the issue of exporting it into UE. I've got some tree materials from other downloaded trees, that I maybe able to adapt, but this is all a pretty big challenge at this point.

Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?

No this is not my sneaky way to talk you into making me a big tree, just advice.

 

[Renzatic]

@Renzatic I mentioned trees a while ago. For this UE setting I'm working on, I feel the need for a big fancy tree with low hanging branches. The options are to buy one or try to make one, and based on the latter, I wonder if you would recommend any of these as "novice doable".

Make Artistic Trees in Blender:

Stylized Fantasy Tree in Blender:

Make a Photo Realistic Forest in Blender:


I looked at the make a tree video link you posted that seems similar to one of the above, while I realize this maybe over my head for Blender, because I also think some animation would be needed, and then there is the issue of exporting it into UE. I've got some tree materials from other downloaded trees, that I maybe able to adapt, but this is all a pretty big challenge at this point.

Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?

No this is not my sneaky way to talk you into making me a big tree, just advice.

I'll talk you into making trees tomorrow, when I have more time.

 

[Renzatic]

Regarding the last video, does blender have ready made saplings in the program?

Yup. The Sapling addon comes with Blender by default, you just have to activate it. You do so by going to Edit, Preferences, then hit the Addons tab, and in the search bar along the top right of the window, type Sapling. When it pops up, just click the check box to enable it. Then, just hit Ctrl-A, go to curves, and you'll see the new Sapling trees.

It's okay. I think it's better for distant trees, but fails a bit on close ups. If you really want something that looks good in Unreal, but won't cost you an arm and a leg, I'd use the Megascan Trees. Since Quixel Bridge is built right into UE5, I think the only thing you'll have to do is search for them from within it, and they'll be ready to go.

Though you can build your own, which I'd recommend to some extent, since it'll teach you A LOT about shading, normal transfers, and whatnot, but it is a very, very broad topic that'll require a lot of concentration on your part, especially if you're trying to build realistic trees without having too high a poly count.

 

[Huntn]

Yup. The Sapling addon comes with Blender by default, you just have to activate it. You do so by going to Edit, Preferences, then hit the Addons tab, and in the search bar along the top right of the window, type Sapling. When it pops up, just click the check box to enable it. Then, just hit Ctrl-A, go to curves, and you'll see the new Sapling trees.

It's okay. I think it's better for distant trees, but fails a bit on close ups. If you really want something that looks good in Unreal, but won't cost you an arm and a leg, I'd use the Megascan Trees. Since Quixel Bridge is built right into UE5, I think the only thing you'll have to do is search for them from within it, and they'll be ready to go.

Though you can build your own, which I'd recommend to some extent, since it'll teach you A LOT about shading, normal transfers, and whatnot, but it is a very, very broad topic that'll require a lot of concentration on your part, especially if you're trying to build realistic trees without having too high a poly count.

Thanks. The other day, I looked for trees at Megascans and just found tree stumps. I’ll look again.

 

[Renzatic]

Thanks. The other day, I looked for trees at Megascans and just found tree stumps. I’ll look again.

Also, I just came across this. It's basically a streamlined, simplified form of my trees, which use geometry nodes. Great for showing you how to grow fractal based objects like trees and plants.

 

[Huntn]

Also, I just came across this. It's basically a streamlined, simplified form of my trees, which use geometry nodes. Great for showing you how to grow fractal based objects like trees and plants.

I found the Megascans tree pack, it‘s over in the Epic Marketplace. I’ve downloaded it, but don’t think it will suffice with the trophy (is there a better term?) tree I’m looking for. I’ll check out this video. Thanks!

 

[Renzatic]

I found the Megascans tree pack, it‘s over in the Epic Marketplace. I’ve downloaded it, but don’t think it will suffice with the trophy (is there a better term?) tree I’m looking for. I’ll check out this video. Thanks!

Hero tree, maybe? Your hero object is usually the focus of your scene, the center piece that will be calling for the most attention.

And geo nodes are fun because you don't necessarily have to have top level modeling skills to produce something that looks great. You just need to know the nodes.

Look at what this guy did with them. Near infinite complexity from just a scant few assets.

 

[Huntn]

Hero tree, maybe? Your hero object is usually the focus of your scene, the center piece that will be calling for the most attention.

And geo nodes are fun because you don't necessarily have to have top level modeling skills to produce something that looks great. You just need to know the nodes.

Look at what this guy did with them. Near infinite complexity from just a scant few assets.

Center-piece tree!

 

[Renzatic]

Center-piece tree!

The tree what which you look at most!

 

[Huntn]

The tree what which you look at most!

I’m willing to throw in a large substitute tree for now. I saw one for sale at the Epic Market Place for almost $300. No thanks.