Terrain texturing has me stumped! Creating a material instance crashes the editor. If you've had any success applying material to the terrain please share your process and ideas. Thanks.
This is one of the reasons I have abandoned and uninstalled the editor for now. Even if we overcome all the other issues and get a network and infrastructure/scenery assets placed what’s the point if we can’t paint and blend the terrain. Cooked or not we should be able to bring in terrtex from the existing routes and paint in the same way as TSC or Trainz. Failing that, can DTG make the uncooked terrain assets from one or two routes available for download so these can be brought into the editor and freely used. We don’t need that many to start with, a few grasses, scrub, crops, soil/sand, ballast, tar and some rocks plus maybe forest floor. Basically what you would see in the terrtex box using a texture set from a TSC route.
I used this video for basic materials, works well. Just use TSWs textures to begin with, that's all you need really.
Perfect! Thanks so much for the tutorial. This is exactly what I needed. I setup a quick test and now I can tweak the appearance all I want. I'm using the Antelope Valley textures.
I would also use the Texture Variation node. It's very easy to use and helps get rid of the repeating pattern.
Yeah. Landscape materials can get really crazy really quickly as you can have slope-based materials blended together using hand-painted landscape layers and god knows what else. Las but not least, Landscape Grass is also a widely used feature in TSW routes: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/BuildingWorlds/OpenWorldTools/Grass/QuickStart/
I'm getting a tad confused here. Are we saying you can use reference and paint textures from the TSW routes or not?
We can use any textures from official TSW routes but we can't use the already made landscape materials (and have to make our own instead).
So how does that differ from TSC or Trainz where you pick a terrain texture from the palette, paint and blend as necessary on the terrain. In other words what's the difference between a terrain texture and landscape material, that's the bit I'm not getting?
Definitely - Use the video above (the one that I posted) as a tutorial and you should have textures to paint. Just choose any textures from your route library. Here's an example, using only the basic functions in the vid above, you can get nice results
The best answer is probably "with great power comes great responsibility". You can get miles more advanced texture blending setups (things that the editors you mentioned can only dream of) but you do have to set things up yourself. edit: Sorry for a somewhat basic answer so here's a better one. A terrain texture as you know it from other train sim editors is just an image that can blend on top of other textures using a relatively simple, fixed blending system. Typically just using an alpha map. Unreal's Landscape Material also allows for this kind of blending (with a pretty basic setup) but on the other hand, it's fully programmable using the material editor. You can create new, much more advanced ways to blend things and use other variables like slope, height or world position to change the final result using procedural effects.
Yep, it's an unreal thing. You basically have to create whats called a landscape material to cover your world. You can then program in various textures into that landscape material to then paint onto your terrain. It's seem awfully complex at first but don't be put off, it becomes easier and it's not that bad really. This explains all, you just need to find textures to use. Just have a root around your route content folders to find some, there's loads.
Whenever I try to paint my landscape with a different material layer than the first one, a part of my landscape tile goes completely blank. So it's all grass now Does anyone else have this issue or know how to fix it?
I believe the material for each tile only compiles with layers that are used on it in order to reduce shader complexity. This means that every time you add a new layer, it has to re-compile which can take a while. You should see the "compiling shaders" text printed in your viewport or in the bottom right corner. Also a 2 minute Google Search found this. A complex material can easily have more texture samplers than what UE4 can support, which is an error that only shows up when using it in a certain way (aka after painting more layers and using more textures that way). Make sure the "Sampler Source" in your texture samplers are set to Shared. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/landscape-changes-material-back-to-blank-geometry/337361
This is a good tip, when I was practicing in UE4.26 this was driving me crazy. If I had a pound for the number of times I did a google search for an Unreal Engine problem....(or rather me not having a clue problem)
Almost 3 months after the active conversation in here, I just found this thread by searching the forum for threads about painting the texture. And altough I'm a bit late let me tell you this: This thread is so informative for a variety of reasons (solving OPs question, providing extra tips + solving errors). It's really unbelievable that it wasn't pinned and has been ditched in the dust. I want to thank everyone for their participation in here. But I also have a few additional questions/notes regarding things in my head currently for you all. 1. Need to explain a bit more about that, so hold your breath for a second. Let's start. One thing I'm thinking now about almost day 1 of my route creation process (and also waited for DTG to answer this) is: Asset referencing/copying. Now in the forum we talk about a while about the concern "I'm using assets from XY route, so you others need to have that DLC to use my route." thing, ....but...!!! When we take a look at the folders of the route plugins from DTG, we can see that every asset has been copied into one of the respective folders of the route project itself. They do not use references to assets in other DLC folders -> the assets are copied. Coming back to the textures and material topic, I found out that for assets (normal meshes) you can indeed change the reference to mesh in the World Outliner and rightclick "Reference Viewer". However, things are different for landscape material files and the contained textures. I can't see a way to change the reference to a texture later on with the material file on its own. Therefore I'm thinking about whether it might be the better choice to (just like DTG does) create a "LandscapeMaterial" folder in my route plugin, create a subfolder "Textures" and now maybe a folder called "[route that you have the textures from]" and copy all of the textures from the original to there and use then the references to these in your landscape material. Doing so might be better if you pak your route when it is finished or (for some unknown error) lose the reference path to the textures in the original route. I created a landscape file with 19 layers yesterday from the Niddertalbahn textures laying in Niddertalbahn/LandscapeMaterial/Textures and it took me 2 hours to create it, but today while having a night to sleep over and think about it, it might be benefitial to redo my landscape file and only use references to the copied textures in my own route folder What do you think about that? 2. Yes, I had the same issue yesterday. Plus another similar one, where the tile (or only parts of the tile) become a completely different material or even black out and you cannot repaint it with another material. Really annoying. Luckily, I didn't saved my project file, loaded and repainted the terrain. Thank you very much Thomas for the tip: One question: What would you recommend to do if that error already has happen and I had saved my project file (making the paint error almost irreplacable). I thought about deleting the tile, right? 3. Did anyone here went the stormy way of using the slope technique from Unreal Sensei linked by Deimos? The result looks absolutely impressive. I might want to try that but I'm afraid of it with almost no knowledge in the material editor yet.
To me, there is quite a bit more than 3 questions so I'll just try to answer what I see. You can easily change texture references in the individual "Texture Sample" nodes and even make bigger changes to how that particular landscape layer is put together as long as it plugs into the same input of the Layer Blend node. Just don't touch the naming and layer order in the Layer Blend node and I think you should be good. You mean coyping files over in order to remove a dependency? I don't think that's allowed as as requiring people to have routes from which you've taken content is sort of part of the deal. As for removing dependencies to avoid issues, I think that ship had long sailed. To me, having a link to a DLC is no different compared to having a link to the game's core (or any core plugin like the European Content Pack) and there are already dozens if not hundreds of those if you are counting inheritance or even simple use of core features. I would try to fix the errors in the material and see if the textures pop back in after re-compiling. No reason to mess with the landscape tile. Quick tip for this one (or for working on a landscape material in general), go into the Layer Blend node and set all of the preview weights to 1. The preview will show nonsense however the material editor's error checking will now show issues for all of the layers and not just the first one. If you fix all of them, you should have no issues with getting the material to show up in the viewport under any circumstances. No I haven't ( at least in TSW editor, I did in regular UE4) and don't feel like it's very appropriate when you goal is to get your textures close to the real thing. However that doesn't mean there isn't a way to use it. Some games do use an auto-material and then have separate layers to override things. For example you could have a material with a layer that automatically blends together grass and rock and then have two more layers to paint grass and rock directly to replace the auto-generated result. This should be great for non-permanent stuff like snow though.
I'm hoping material functions will be available with the update. Without them, material blueprints get jumbled up very quickly.
https://forums.dovetailgames.com/th...eating-a-material-function-work-around.77834/ And when you are into the functions blueprint disable live update.
