Pete Mc Nally's Blog

Yes, OK, I bandwagonned. Dazzled by reflective bells and whistles I subscribed to Unreal 4. This is my first foray into working with the Unreal Engine and I’m liking it so far, FBX export from 3DSMax just seems to work, materials make sense and look really good and the editor seems to be fairly well laid out so far. I was looking at some terrain stuff in my day job and was inspired to continue at home. Starting with some random terrain in GeoControl I added some erosion presets and baked out a heightmap and an overall base colour. The heightmap, saved as a 16bit PNG, was easy to import and with a little fiddling with UV co-ordinates the base colour map soon fit the 2160×2160 terrain. I recreated the scene in max to baker out some additional info (slope, height, cavity) for my splat map in UE4 and then took some time to create a layer based shader to blend in tiling textures based on the RGB channels of the splat map. I wanted to try some tricky stuff, dry and wet sand, mixed – here are the results below which still need work. When I refine the pipeline a little, I’ll do a video tutorial.

~ by petemcnally on July 17, 2014.

Posted in Personal Work
Tags: 3dsmax, canyon, control, desert, displaced, displacement, engine, field, geo, geocontrol, geometry, height, landscape, map, material, sand, sediment, shader, terrain, UDK, UE4, unreal, vista, wet