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Hi there, I am pretty new to Unreal so forgive me if the answer to this question is pretty simple - but I have tried to solve this issue myself for the past week and have trawled the forums looking for someone else that has had a similar issue, but haven’t been able to find a solution.

I am creating and environment that is based off a real-world location. As such, I want to make sure that it is as authentic as possible. I am using a texture sample that is a real-world survey map. This has served as a guide when placing objects such as trees, houses, etc.

Now I want to texture my environment with megascan materials such as grass, dirt, etc. However - I want to continue to use my map texture as a guideline, and simply paint over it with the megascan materials.

What is the best way to go about this? When people have asked similar questions, the response has been to Lerp the textures together, but when I try to do this - my texture simply turns grey, so perhaps I am doing something wrong (most likely).

Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction as to how I should go about doing this?

This is my current Material setup:

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image699×587 70.6 KB

And this is how it looks in-engine:

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image1352×817 26.5 KB

Essentially, I want to keep my map texture present, but I want to use the lines in it as guidelines for my material painting - if that is even possible. Eventually the map will no longer be visible as it will be painted over, but while I am painting it will serve as a reference.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer me.

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You could use vertex painting.

So you make your whole landscape material, and then put in a couple of nodes so you can vertex paint between the template and the real material. But this has a couple of drawbacks.

  1. Vertex painting is often not very accurate on landscapes, and depends on the resolution. You might need more definition just to get the painting working, but that might be wasted in terms of the efficiency of the final landscape material

  2. Once you have it done, you’ll need to change the material, just to make things more efficient

It might be easier and much more efficient to color in the template, like a mask, which you can use to automatically blend between landscape layers. You can then use the landscape grass node to also automatically place all foliage ( rocks, trees, etc ). That would mean everything is done, apart from placing the final assets :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the response! Just so I understand correctly - I should colour in my map in an external program such as photoshop? So for example I should colour in areas with grass in green, areas with dirt in brown etc.

Once that is done, I can import this coloured map back into Unreal and then use it as a mask to auto-apply megascan textures and grass/rock assets?

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Nearly. You need to make a multi channel mask in PS. It’s basically a different mask in RGBA.

The problem is, you can only have 4 landscape layers. Unless you’re using World Partition, then maybe you can change per tile, but I’m not sure about that.

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Thanks for the suggestions, but these solutions were a bit too complex for the scope of what I wanted to do.

I ended up just having the map as a layer that I input into a layer blend with my other textures. This allowed me to use it as a guideline to paint on top of.

Thanks for the advice though!

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