Unreal Landscape Material

Intro

It’s been a long time since I last worked on materials in Unreal. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of Unreal’s material editor. Back when using Unity, you could define your own lighting model for shaders, which gave you complete freedom to create whatever you wanted. With Unreal, it’s just a material editor, not real shaders. And with the node-based system, even simple calculations can end up looking like a tangled mess of spaghetti. That said, I have to admit that Unreal’s material editor, with its extensive library of built-in functions, makes prototyping incredibly fast. The Layered Material functionality combined with the Landscape system is particularly convenient and effective for creating procedural terrains.

Recently, I created a Landscape Master Material, and I think it’s worth documenting some of the techniques I used during the process.

Layers

TODO

Snow

TODO

Water

TODO