Introduction to Landscapes in Unreal Engine 5

1. Introduction to Landscapes in Unreal Engine 5: Welcome to introduction to landscapes in Unreal Engine five. If you are a beginner in unreal and you are new and you want to learn about landscapes, this course is for you. We're going to go through all the basics of landscapes, how to create your first landscape, how to use landscape tools, how to use the sculpting mode, how to use procedural tools so that you can leverage the power of new versions of unreal. We will learn how to add water, how to change the color. How to add different layers, and we will create an automatic master material that will work with the angle of the landscape, the slope, and a lot of other things that are really, really useful. So we're going to go through a lot of new features of Unreal Engine 5.5, such as a PCG graph to add automatic measures to our real engine landscape. And last, we're going to do some final touches for you to make your environment look prettier, such as HDRI images for skyboxes and how to make your sink look good. So by the end of this course, you will feel very confident about yourself on creating landscapes. And if you want to create a landscape for your game or environment, this will give you a really good starting point. So with that set, let's get started. 2. Creating our Level: Welcome to your first lesson. Now, before we start creating a landscape, I need to make sure that you know how to navigate in RL so you can know your way around here. So basically, in this big screen, you have the viewpard. Click the right mouse click to move around like this, right? This is how you can rotate the camera. How you move is very similar to how you play games. While holding the right mouse click, press the W A SD to move around, W to move forward, to go back, EA to go left and D to go, right. So that's all you need to know. So if you hold the middle mouse click, you can pan around, and if you hold that left mouse click and move, it's kind of like you're flying spaceship or something like that. All right. So with that being said, let's create our new level. So if you go here to the top left corner, you will see that you have a new option called new level. So you have a couple of options here for you. You have open world, which is the default world that you open inside real. Empty upper world, basic and empty level. So these two use a word partition. And word partition is basically the system that real Engine uses to work with words big open words so that they can load sections of the world in memory and unload them based on where you are in the world. Basic, it's just the same, but it just doesn't have that load and unload system. So we're going to go for the empty open world because we're going to create something from scratch. So let's hit Create and now we need to add some lights because everything is too dark here. Now, you could go here to the Green plus icon to place an object and go for lights, and there are a bunch of lights that we need. But there are easier ways to do it in a real Engine 5.5. If you go for Window, go to Environment Light Mixer. You will have a new window here. I don't know if it automatically goes to the left. Maybe you have it like this. So you can move things around here like by holding and anchor them on any place in this map. So you can just click here to click all these to get all the lights. You can create skylight. You can create a directional light, sky atmosphere, lmetric clouds and some height fog. And just like that, you have your your level. Let's close this. On the right side, you will see your actors. These are all the objects that you have in your sin. And each object when you click on it, will have some properties here. On the right side, you will see that you have the transform properties, which means you can move them around, which nothing will happen with the directional light because it's the sunlight. It doesn't affect the location, only the rotation. But you can change things like the light color and things like that. We're going to talk a little bit about that later. But for now, just to just so you know, like, the right side of the screen is where you will just change the properties of everything. And world partition is also a very important one. If you don't see this, go to Window and then go to world Partition. Let's see if I can find it. There you go. War partition and then go to War partition Editor. So this will open up this. Obviously, you can move it around if you want. I tend to like it here because I don't usually need it. Sometimes when I need to open it, I just click on this and that's fine. So with that set, now, you know, everything you need to start creating a landscape. So let's do that now. 3. Creating our Landscape: So before we actually create our landscape, I need you to activate two plugins that are going to be very useful for us. So if you go here to edit mode here in the top corner of the screen and you go to plug ins, then you can just type here the plugins that you want. There are a couple of them that are really important with landscapes. And the first one is called andMss. If you click here, you will see that you have landmass. I already have it enable. So if you don't, click on it, and you need to restart the editor after. Okay? So the second one we're going to use it's water. We can just go for here for water. This is just the name water. No water extras, not water advanced, just water. We can just put it here because it's going to be really useful for us as well. So with that, we're going to restart the editor. I don't have to do it because I already have it. So how do you create your landscape? It's going to be very easy. In the top corner, you will see that you have a selection mode, and here you can decide which selection mode you want. You will see that landscape has a selection mode. You can also toggle between all these with Chief one, Chief three, and so on. So if we go to landscape, you will see that we get a preview of what will be our landscape, what's going to be the size, and what are going to be the components. So enable edit layers, you're going to click here because we're going to have layers kind of like photoshop where you can just add and delete some changes that you may not need. And so this is going to be very useful. Word partition grid size, it's going to be the word partition, you say, every single grid for the word partition. Let's just say, if this is two, then word partition grid size is going to be this big. So it's going to have one. So we have four components actually, eight components. So for every two components that we have, we're going to have a word partition. So what happens is where the player is here, depending on the distance of the players. So for example, this area, it's going to be loaded. Anything outside is going to be unloaded to save some memory, and it's going to be in chunks of two by two. So if you want a smaller section to be unloaded, instead of a big one, you will need to change this one to one. So for now, don't worry about this. To is perfectly fine. It works very well. Material we're going to create our material later, but if you had one, you can just put it right away before you create your landscape. Then the default values of the transform, the location, rotation, and the scale, we're going to leave it at the default here. And the section size is going to be really important. So basically, the more quads you have, the bigger your landscape is. So you can go by 31 by 31, 63 by 63, you know, 55255. And also, there are some variations here where you can just put two sections for each component, which will make it bigger. And you can see the number of components here. You can actually change for any kind of any kind of number that you like that you want. So don't worry too much about this. I will share with you some landscape recommended sizes that Area recommends in the documentation, where you can just see, like, what do they recommend in terms of performance to optimize the size and the performance of your landscape. You don't necessarily need to follow this. It's not like like your project is over if you don't follow the settings. It's just a recommendation, and obviously with word partition, you will be able to unload unnecessary sections that you don't need, right? Also, you also can add and delete sections along the way. So it's not really a big deal. So with that set, let's just hit Create. And that will give us our landscape, which is basically a plane here. And by the way, I'm using the M the middle mouse scroll wheel to basically change the speed of my camera. You can see that I'm moving like, very, very slow here because I use the scroll wheel, and you can see here in this section that I'm actually changing the speed, and I can put the scroll wheel up and down. It's going to be very useful for you when you go to other sections of your landscape very fast. You can also click here and change the speed, you know. But for me, it's easier to use the middle mouse click while I'm holding the right mouse click. You need to hold the right mouse click and use the middle mouse click to change the speed. Otherwise, it won't work. But with that said, we have a lot to cover here. We have a lot of sculpt mode, the manage mode, the paint mode, and with that, go ahead and create your landscape, and I will see you in the next section. 4. The sculpting tool: Alright, so let's start sculpting something. But before that, let's save our level. So we go to File, Save current level, and you will see that you have content and engine folder. If you don't see the engine folder, you can go here and go to engine content and check. If you don't want to see it, that's totally fine. So you should only see the content. I can right click and create a new folder called Landscape Tutorial. And inside here, I'm going to create my don't know, my Level 01, it's my first level. And there you go. That's it. Go safe. And in case you close unreal or anything, you can use press Control space to open up the content drawer here, or let me close this. You can go to Window, content browser here. And you can go here to Landscape tutorial folder, and then you can open your level here. So now that we have this, let's go ahead and go to the landscape mode and take a look at some tools that we can use. So obviously, the sculpt tool is going to be the most important one. So we're going to spend some time with it. So sculpt mode has some brush types, some fall off. Okay, and some strength and obviously some size of it. So if you click here, let me just sculpt something. If you click here, you will see that you have, like, a little bit of you push in the polygons like this, kind of like sculpting. If you shift click, Okay? If you shift click, you will actually do the opposite. Do the inverse operation. Instead of sculpting upwards, you're going to sculpt downwards. So just by doing that, you can just sculpt whatever. Okay? You can change the strength. So for example, I want something really very evident, you can do something like that. Or you can just make it really subtle like this and you can just start sculpting a little bit here and there and you'll have something like this, right? So let me get this into the default values. Now, keep in mind, tool strength can also be changed. You see a maximum of one here, but if you want, you can put a maximum of ten. And if you click here, you will see that you're actually getting the Alpha value of this is very funny because we are using an Alpha here that it's a basically a soft brush. So you can see that here very evidently. So let me get back to 0.3. You also have the brush size. So a maximum of 8,000. You can just start sculpting. But also, you can go higher. You can go like 16,000. In case you're having a really big landscape, you can just go ahead and just sculpt very, very big brushes like this, right? So I want to let you know that you can change these sizes to other number that is not here within the limits of this bar, right? So fall off is going to be really simple, and I'm going to be using ten strength here to show what it is. So fol off, 0.5 is just a middle one. Zero is going to be like a super harsh one. Right? There's no fall off. Like there's no kind of, like, transition between them. And if I go with one, it's going to be like a super smooth transition. Like, you can see what exactly it does. It's just the less fall off you have, the the harsher the transition is. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you don't. I recommend putting in 0.5, right. So the brush tool also has some other modes. We will touch these modes later on when we work on our landscape, but you can also use an Alpha, like this one, for example, and you can just like sculpt with any kind of texture that you want, right. So you can do that. And you also have the pattern brush it's pretty similar. Like, it's just the same, but you just use a pattern, right. And you also have like work with landscape components. I don't really use this. So most of the time you will use the simple circular brush or the Alpha brush if you want to get into more details. Obviously, you have different types of fall off. So for example, I go for this you will see that my follow off is a little bit different from this. And if you go for this type of follow off, you will see that you also have different type of result, right? You're going to have like, you know, like a taper type of f off like this. And obviously, you have the third one is pretty much like this, like a reverse tape, kind of like the opposite of this one. So that's pretty much it. And I know our landscape is a mess, and you may be wondering, like, when are you going to use this? Because, to be honest, this looks really ugly, right? Who's going to use the sculpting tools, and why am I teaching you the sculpting tools? Well, sculpting tools is not really to create beautiful landscapes, but to adjust and modify a landscape that is already looking good and, you know, try to try to move things around, like tiny little details, like, or you want the player to walk here. But there is, like, a wall here, and you need to remove it. So you start sculpting and removing this wall. And it's more of a specific thing to do. Although it's very powerful. You can still use it and create good levels with this. It has a lot of use cases, so don't worry. You're going to use it a lot. Now, I'm going to go back and reset this. And the good thing because we're working with layers, we can right click. And we can clear the layer, and we can clear the sculpt. Later on, when we have paint, we can also clear the painting. But for now, we can just clear the sculpt. Click, and now all your data will be gone. So that's a good way of, you know, if you don't want to lose your progress, you can always clear and you go back to what you had before. Alright. So with that set, let's continue with these tools. 5. Explaining the most important sculpting tools: So let's go through other tools that you will need in the sculpting process. So we talk about the sculpt mode here. That's very easy. Ease, it's just going to be erasing the data, right? So that's just what it is. It's great if you don't want to, like, fix this, like shift click, oh, let me try to make this like it was before. Then erase bottom is probably your best choice. The next is the smooth tool, so you can go here. And also go to smooth and try to smooth things out. This is actually very useful. It's going to be very helpful to smooth transitions out, right? So you can go for smooth something like this, and now this looks a little bit better. Okay, so very simple, very straightforward. Flatten tool, it's going to be quite useful when you create levels, when you create game designs because it's going to basically give you like a path. So if you click here on flatten, what it will do is grab the height that you click on and we'll basically create a surface very flat, very flat. Actually, I never try this if you actually change the fall of Yeah, it's not really a big deal. So flattening is just going to be really useful, if you want to have things like this where you want a flat surface, right? You want a flat surface. You don't want an even distribution, like you have something like this. You can just flatten everything and everything will just be very nice and flat for your player to walk in and whatever is it that you want to do, right? So flatten, very, very useful tool. You can use it in conjunction with the sculpt tool. You can just do something like this. And let's say this is the height you want, and then you go for the flatten tool, right? So that's also a choice. Let's go for Ramp. Ramp is also another useful one. Keep in mind, these are all game design tools. I know they don't look very pretty. We're going to make our landscape look pretty after. But these are really important because when you're working on a game, you want to use these tools. To have control over the game design and everything. So let's go for ramp, and how it works is you select one point and then select another one, and you will have a ramp here. Now, nothing happened because we haven't really accept, but you can change the ramp width to make it really thin. And also, you can change the follo Like no fall off will be very harsh. A little bit of f off will have more of a smooth transition. And you can also move them. If you feel like you don't like their position, you can move them around. And when you are good with it, you can just press Enter. You press Enter, and now you will add ramp, and you will have this. Now, when you create this ramp, probably you want to have, like, a smoother transition here. That's where the smooth brush comes. Very handy. You can just smooth things out, just like that. Notice that this kind of thing is really useful when you are creating labels. You can use the ramp from here to there as well. And let's say you want a little bit wider ramp. All right. W with a little bit more fall off, you can just go for this, and then press Enter and then you have it. Then you can go for a smooth and smooth things out. You can increase the size of this just to smooth everything out, just like that. And now you have like a smooth transition between this cliff. All right. So talking about clif, let's go and go for erosion. So erosion pretty much self explanatory. We'll try to simulate some erosion. I don't find this particularly useful. In some cases, you may have some good results. Like, for example, if I let me just try to click here so you can see what it does. It tries to simulate kind of like to make it more natural, right? So you have this kind of straations like, kind of like this, right, where it looks more natural. It's like water came through and it becomes more eroded. And you find, like this type of cliff like this. So obviously, it is helpful. Like, to be honest, I like how this looks like. You can change, to be honest, from all these, you know, all these properties, I find that the threshold is the one that changes the most. So for example, if I put a number of 20, it's going to be like, really, really harsh, you know, really harsh. Like, it's it's gonna be really strong, right? If I go for something like 40 something, it's going to be more smooth. So you can play with this. Obviously, it has its uses. If you go for this, it really looks like it's being eroded. Obviously, like a treaty software or something like that will do a much better job at eroding surfaces. But, you know, it's quite cool. With Control L, this is an extra thing, it's going to be very useful to test the lining. With Control L, you can change the directional light, press Control L and change it, and you can change the directional light so you can see the shadows. Alternatively, you can just go to this directional light and if you don't see it, go to Ward partition. Right, click and load. For some reason, it's still unloaded. Oh, it's because I'm on the landscape mode. So if you go to selection, you can select this directional light and just move it just like this. If you want to uncheck the snapping tools for the rotation, you can do it so here. So you have, like, a smooth more precise directional light rotation. So you can play with that, so you can play with the shadows. And the shadows really help you to see your forms, right? If this is a really cool form, like, I like how this is forming. It's like, really, really cool. You can keep sculpting after that, like, a little bit like this. Let me go for 64. 64 actually a very good number. Obviously, this works quite well on surfaces that are very lets you say, very stream. The slope is very you know, it's not very smooth. It actually helps to make some transition. You can already tell how this works. It's really, really cool too. But honestly, like I said before, it's not very used. So just in case it's there, Hydro erosion would pretty much do the same. So feel free to play with this. To be honest, I never used this. You can use the noise tool to add some noise. Like, for example, you want to make your path a little bit uneven, so you can just use the noise tool, and you will have something like this where you have a little bumps here and there and it will make it look more natural, right? Not everything is perfectly flat. So with that, those tools here at the top, those are the ones that you will use the most. They are very, very handful. There are a couple of extra tools here that we will use in the next video where you will also be using them. They are very handy. So let's take a look at them. 6. Copying Landscape data: So let's learn how to use these extra tools that they can actually be quite handy. So for example, let's say that you like this section, what you can do is copy this. So let me show you what it will do. When you click on Copy, you can actually select an area that you want to copy. All right? And you can actually scale this. If you press W, you will go for the move Gizmo. You press E. You can rotate this, you press R, you can scale this. Okay? So you can also click here to change the Gizmo. And what you can do is actually move a little bit. Just like that. And make sure you also grab the height. So let's say this is your section that you actually want to copy. So you go for copy data to Gizmo. And what you will have, if you move it, you will see here that it turned yellow. You can actually move it and rotate it if you want. And what you can do is to actually use just like any other tool in your Windows Control V to paste, and you will paste the data, just like that. Now, you will see that it's not exactly the same. You have the tool strength to 0.3, so it will be a little bit weaker. If you go for one, you will have the extra value, the exact value. So I can just go here and press Control V. And you will notice that it looks the same because I'm using the two strength one. So very handy tool. You can go and change this and copy the data for this kill, for example. Let's say you like it, copy data to Gizmo, and now you can move it around, paste it. And another thing you can do is to actually scale this non uniformly. You can scale it up if you want. Scale it like this and press Control. And what you will see now is that I actually have the same hell I created here, I can just copy it and paste it. And the same happens here. The same happened here. So when you have a pretty area on your landscape and you actually want to feel some sections of it, it's very handy tool. Now, lec, I don't I don't really use it. Sometimes it's like you want to mask. For example, you want to mask this, and then you want to sculpt. So when you sculpt, like, you don't affect the mask like this. So somewhat useful, but let's just go unclear and just leave it like that. All right. So if you don't want to affect some areas of your landscape, then definitely select, it's going to help you to not change those areas, right? So last but not least is going to be the mirror. Honestly, I never use this one, but it's basically going to do what you see here, it's going to mirror. So if I click Apply, it's going to mirror the entire landscape, like a perfect mirror. And, you know, it's kind of those weird tools that is very situational. But, you know, it is there. All right. So blueprint, we're going to talk about it later. This is Blueprint tool that if you remember, we activate our plugins where we can go for landmass. Blueprints what we're going to use to create our landscape. But before that, we're going to go to manage because there's still a couple of important things that you need to know from here. 7. Add and Remove components: So before we go into the blueprint tool, actually I actually want to show you the Manage section here that is very, very important because like I said before, you can actually modify the components, and you can already see here when I go to Manage, you can select here. You can just chief click to Diselect and what you can do is actually go here and press, just select too, say you don't want this. You can go for Delete. Okay. And what you can do is click here. Anywhere, and the selection will be deleted. You can also go here and just delete the areas that you don't want. You can also add them just like this, add all those new sections. So if you want to make your if you are in a situation where your landscape is like, Oh, my landscape is too small. I wish I had more space, and now I need to create another one, create everything from scratch, don't worry, go ahead and add more components very easily. Alright. Ideally, you will want to use the dimensions that were recommended by Unreal, but, you know, you never know what you need to know. You never know what you're going to need in the future sometimes. Or maybe you actually you make your landscape too big and you want to delete it. So you actually delete some sections here, and it's like, actually, I only need this part, right? I don't need this. Otherwise, it's going to be too big. You never know. You really never know. So those are the most important tools here. It's good that you know them so that you can just start working and if you feel like your landscape is too small and you don't want to change it, do it all over again. You can always add components. It's not ideal, but the tool is there if you really need it, and it can come quite handful sometimes, especially when you realize your landscape, it's either too small or too big. So with that set, let's go and go for blueprints now. 8. Landmass Brushes: Alright, so let's get into blueprints now. And in order to have this, remember that you need to go to plugins, go here and type and Mass. Otherwise, you won't be able to access this. Alright. So let's go to landscape, and let's clear this up. We don't really need this. So let's just right click Clear all Okay. And now, you will have a layer here, right? You can add new layers if you want it. But for now, we're going to use the base one. And we're going to go blueprint. And what you will see here is that you have a blueprint brush property, and you can just choose anything you want. So, for us, the custom brush landmass is what we're looking for. So if we go here, Sorry, this one. Nothing will happen, but if I click here, you will see that I have three dots. Also notice that in the right side of the screen, I have a landscape custom brush land mass. As soon as these shaders compile, you will see what's going on here. It's in the top left corner of the screen. It's only ten left, and there you go. At any moment, guys. It's just. Actually, let's move this. There you go. Looks like you need to move it a little bit. So let's go to Detail Spanel. If you cannot find it, press F four to go to Detail Spanel and you'll see that I have some properties here. Now, before we go into the properties, I need you to take a look at this plant here. These points you can actually move. Notice that I'm using the landscape custom brush landmass. And here on the left, I have my layer blueprint brushes, so I can toggle those on and off if I want it, or I could remove them. So I don't need to find them here in the outliner. So I can just go here and just move them like this, right? I can just move it around. Something like that. All right. So we have a little pyramid. If we want it, we could go here, right click and add Spline point. And what it will do is just add another point for us so we can add even more details. Another thing you can do is to click here to leave the spline edit mode. And click on this one, and you can actually move it around. So it's very cool because it's very non destructive. You can rotate it. You can play with it and you can scale it if you want. There are a bunch of things you can do with this. So let's go ahead and take a look at the properties now. So in order to see the properties, notice that I chose my spline and you see these properties that are not the same. Make sure you choose this one landscape custom brush, right? So the first one is out spline tangent. It basically will move if I click on the tangent here, I can move it around to play a little bit with a tangent. And then I can go out spline to everything will be a little bit more like smooth, all right. So you have the blend mode, the Alpha blend. You also have the minimum, which will basically do like a subtraction. You have the maximum, which very much we'll do a different kind of math operation and then the additive, which will add, you know, when you have some sculpt here, this will add on top of it. So Alpha length seems to be the best choice for you, right? You can also invert the shape. So basically, do an inverse operation here. Whatever was positive before now, it's negative. So you get something like this, right. Next thing is cap shape. Cap shape will basically you know, cap the shape. You don't see anything because I don't have any C upset. But if I do the C offset, you will see that it's actually cap here. And this is very useful sometimes. You can remove cap the shape if you want and leave this in zero. All right. Material, we don't really need to change it because we're not going to change the materials of the landmass brush, static mesh, and spl mesh, also, we don't need to change that. Let's go to the facts because that's where the magic happens. So for the effects, you have the blur. So you could, you can see that the edges are blur here. If I go zero, you will see that it's very harsh, and that's not that doesn't look very well. So I can go one. If I go like five, everything will look like super smooth, which is very nice, to be honest. You'll be able to control this kind of behavior. And then you have the croal noise. So you have the cal noise strength one and two. They will have different tilings. So if you go here and add a little bit of curl noise for this, you will notice that what's happening is we're having some natural formations for this. And also, if we go for cold strength two, we will have even more, right. So we can also, like, you know, move things up and down. We can scale things if we want it, right, something like that, for example, and we have some Interesting. Design here for our Montane, right? So the next thing, we don't need to use a curve, it's something that maybe I will show you later, but for now, it basically will just make a profile for you to create those slopes. So displacement kind of important. We need to go for displacement height. So if I go to ten, nothing will happen. You'll see something happen here. I can go for 1024, and you will see what's happening here is that I'm actually adding some noise into this, which is really nice. I can also change the tiling to make it smaller or bigger. So, for example, if I go for something like this, it will be smaller, so you don't see much noise. And if I go for the tiling like 50, you will see that I can see the noise. So very, very cool. I tend to not play with this too much. I can also, like, make it a little bit add more strength. And the next one is the smooth blending. So inner smooth threshold, it's going to work if we have something on top. Like if we scope something here, this one will blend. So you won't see anything here. But if we go for the other smooth, this is where things start getting really interesting because we can start increasing this and look what happens. We're starting to blend between this monta here that we had and the ground that we had before. So we can just go here and just go for something like this, for example. And obviously, we can move this. We can play with the shapes and everything. For example, I can alt and click. If I like these settings, I can alt and click and move it here and maybe make them a little bit smaller or bigger, depending on what you're looking for. And you can have something like this. You can play with the lining a little bit. And that's the beauty of having this landmass. So let me go for this one. And another thing that you can do is add the terracing. So if you go for the terrace Alpha, let me show you what I mean. You can increase the size of this. The strength. And I also can change the spacing. For example, I can put 512. So what will happen if we have this kind of like, you know, it's just the name that it's used tera sin. It's like just adding those steps, like a staircase here. Some formations are like that. You may want to play with those. It's definitely a something you can play with. You can also add the smoothness of it, so you don't have a super harsh transition like this. You can go for something more like that if you want. It's up to you to play with those settings, but that's it for the land mass. Now, from this point on, we will create our landscape, and part of your task is to create some brushes, find some settings that you like, and play with this. You can just alt and click to duplicate. You can increase the size if you want. You can rotate. You can also change the position of this, you know, you can play with this. You can add a spine point, right click at spine point and make it like that. A add another spine point here, you know, something like that, and maybe you can move it to make it closer. Let's just go here. And just move it around, you know, to have something like this, and you can rotate it if you want. And, you know, you can also play with the outer blend. So if we go here for outer smooth blend, we can go for something like this. And it's great. It's great that we now have these settings. So your task is to just play with the sauce and create a small montane for you to use, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Using Landmass to block the environment: Alright. Now that you play with the tools, I want you to look at some reference and try to create a little project from it. For example, I go on Google, and I can go for this nature mountain with lake. And what I can just do is just to find something that I like. I really like this one. So I like the layers that you see here, like this shape here as a triangle, another shape here before, and another shape. So I will try to create that. Feel free to to create any kind of environment that you feel like we can add water. So if you want, you can go for something with a lake or something without it. It's up to you. So you have many different options, look at this layer in here. It's just, like, really cool. So what I will do is just put this on my other screen, so I can take a look at this, and I will play with the landmass that I had. So I will just go here and just go ahead and rotate it a little bit. Something like that. And I can also go here, rotate it, make it bigger. Just like that. You have, kind of like a layering effect. I can also go here and not the swansory. It is the swan. I believe it's this one, yeah. So I will just go here. And also, I'm going to put it a little bit down just a tiny bit. And also, my C offset, I can change it. I can just go for something lower. But I will have something like this, which I don't really want. So I'm going to leave it like that. And this one, I'm going to increase the C offset. Sorry, not this one. Just click on those splines, and actually, we can just move it up and play a little bit with the curl string. Not too much. You don't want to do extreme values, otherwise you will lose your shapes. So just not too much. Just so that you can find something that you like. Something like that. I'm looking for I'm looking for an interesting shape here. Let's take a look at the Yeah, something like that. And then we're going to go for this one. And we're actually going to delete some points that we don't need. And just move it around. Just click here and just move it just like this. You can also find a place where you can just, you know, just play with this. And you can just go ahead and put it here. There you go. And also, I want to make this one bigger because, you know, Maybe something like that. My work for us. Yeah, something like that. And this one, obviously, the coral noise is too much too much for me. So what I will do is to select this one and change the displacement. I'm going to change it like this. And also I'm going to change the coral noise. You have something like, very, you know, very strem All right. And also, I can just move it around, play with this. And obviously, I can just move this one here. And if I want, I can also move this one to a position where I will like to have it, something like that. And the outer, you know, the the outer smooth, I can just go ahead and. Actually, I'm going to make it very smooth. Also, I can just go here to blur and I can blur the shape a little bit. Yeah, I can blur the shape, like I can have a small slope here, and then I can also remove the not this one, but the displacement height can remove it a little bit. Maybe that's too much. Let's go for five. And I really don't like too much this one, so I'm going to move this one again. And obviously, I can just add a spline point here just to make it a little bit like that and also make it a little bit smaller. So what I can do is to decrease the size. Not from this. Let's try to select the spine. Actually, I can I can go for cap shape here. I can go for cap shape. And see offset. Yeah, that's much better. And then I can go for an inner blur. So I can just go here. Let me try to layer this a little bit better. Yeah, something like that. And I think I can leave it like that. I kind of like it. I kind of like the layer that I'm having. And I also want to have something here, and I think I'm just going to use this one. So I'm going to alt and click, and I'm going to make it super small, just like that. And I'm going to put it down. Well, not put it down. I'm going to change the height, the C offset. Okay. And also the curl string and everything, we're going to change it. The blur size, we can leave it at five, but the displacement is not really there. Like, I can just move it just like this. So we have, like, a little bit of an elevation. Just a tiny bit. There you go. It's looking very cool here. I could even add another one. Another one here, but I think we're fine for now. So this is going to be my shot. I'm going to go back to selection, and I'm going to show you what you can do. You can actually go here and go to Bookmarks, set boot Mark, and you can go for Control one or whatever. So for example, I click here. I tend to use the Hot kiss Control one, two, two, whatever. So when I press one, my camera will go here. So this will be like, kind of like our main shot, you know, so for example, I want a shot like this. Where I can see the whole thing, I can just go for Control two. Now, if I press one, my camera goes here, so I press two, my camera goes here. And with that, go ahead, choose your reference and create your island or your landscape, I would say, and we'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Adding a Lake: Alright, so now that we have our landscape, let's add some lake into it and maybe some rivers. So what I want to do is to actually go ahead and remember what I told you before you go need to go to plug ins and go to the water plugin. Okay? So if you don't have it enable, enable it now, restart the editor, and you will be good to go. So when you go PAS here, you can add new objects into your sink. I want you to type water, and you will see that you have water body ocean. And you have island, lake, Ocean River. We're going to use the lake. We're going to drag and drop this, and we're going to put it here. And you will notice what will happen soon as soon as the shaders are compiling. And as you can see, we already have a splint here, and it will work very similar to what our mountains. Like, we work pretty much the same way as the mountains. So it's going to work really soon, and there you go. That's the water. All right. So what can we do here? As you can see, everything is, like, kind of blending here. And I can actually go down a little bit. Okay, something like that, for example, if I want it, I'm going to leave it to zero just because I want to play with the settings a little bit. So if you go to landscape, you will realize that actually, you have a water layer now. If you click here, you will see that you don't have the water. Okay. So what you can do now, let's first things first, let's try to try to change this spline. So let's click on this one. Let me see if I can click on it. Water body lake, there you go. And let's try to add spline. Like here. Let me take a look at my references. So I have a couple of those here, and honestly, this is a very big lake. I'm going to put it on the left so I can see it and I can just move it around like this. And also do something like that. And I think I will I will add another spline point here. Okay, and then move it a little bit, just like this. And I'm going to actually have a little bit more space to work with. All right. So we have our lag, but our transition is not really what I really wanted to be honest. Like, you can try to move this up a little bit, but you will see that your water. Like what's happening is that you're blending, right? You're creating it's kind of like creating a plane here. Like, you're putting a plane with water. And if you move it up, you will need to sculpt by hand. The terrain, right? So this is what this plugging is doing. It's actually doing that for you. So let's go to the water body lake and actually change some settings here. So wave we don't really need to change or whatever. Let's see if there is a blending option here. Yeah, blend mode. So smooth blending, we're going to go for the outer smooth distance, and we're going to pump this number up. Okay. Okay. That was a little bit too much. So let's go for 100. 1,000 10,000. Okay, that's too much. 5,000. 2,500. 2000 Okay, maybe 1,000. We can even go for the inner smooth. But it's just going to make it like, very, very small. So, to be honest, I don't I don't dislike it at all. So we can just play with this like having 10,000. That's too much. Let's put it on 1001 thousand. Yeah, something like that. Okay. And we can move it down or up. And you will have your blending here. Okay. Blend radius. Also, if you check here, what's happening. If you put 500, you will actually, you know, blend your terrain a little bit better. So let's go for the effxse see if there is a ex landscape. If we check this, obviously, we're not going to affect the landscape that we were creating. So if we do that and then we go for our blending And then we don't have the smooth blending anymore. So what we can try is to move this up. But you will see that the landscape is not really changing. So you will need to be really careful with the setting. Like it has a very smooth blending, you know, but you're going to be having some issues here. So let's go ahead and not do that. So let's go for blend. Affect landscape, sorry. Affects landscape? Yes. It does affect the landscape. So we go here. And obviously, this looks a little bit weird. But what you can do actually is to put this up. And what it will do is basically it will affect the landscape that is below, but there's nothing below. You can do that. Or you can add another layer. So you can add another layer. So let's go ahead and create a new layer, landscape edit layer, select, and this will be my finer details. And what you can do here is basically sculpt a little bit, decrease the size a bit and just sculpt it a little bit, so you can have some kind of like a more natural transition here. And you can smooth things out. Let me try to sculpt again here. There you go. You see how useful this is. All right. Let me smooth things out here. Just like that. And everything starts looking a little bit better. I can go for my erosion. If you remember that tool, very handy. I can go for erosion here. To make it, you know, a little bit more a little bit more natural. All right. So now that I have our lake, I think we can make it bigger, to be honest. Or we can just move this one around. So let's go ahead and move this one. We could potentially move that one as well. But actually, yeah, we need to make it a little bit bigger. So set this point point here and move it. I like that. Are you go. Alright. So now that we have our lake, it's time to add a river. 11. Importing Textures: Alright. So before we start creating our materials for our landscape, we need some textures. So for that, we're going to go to Fab. And what I have here is if you go to fab.com, you will see a collection of different assets. Most of them are paid, some of them are free. What we're looking for is for QuickSell. So if we go for QuickSell, go for materials and textures, you will see that you can buy them for $1. And to be honest, if you redeem this before, then it's free for you. Like me. I have all the assets for free. But if you don't, go for the price tag and then go for free. And then you will be able to pick from these materials to use in your environment. Now, don't get me wrong. These materials are great. I can go here, for example, and I can just download this one. Actually, I think I'm going to use this in the future, so I will save it. So what I have here, I have selected a bunch of materials that I think I will need. You can choose whatever you like. So I have my rock cliff material, my mossy ground material, my rock soil material, my forest floor, my rocky ground, and my rocky step. I'm not sure if I'm going to use all of them. But I will import some of them first, see how it goes and then add little by little as I add more materials to my landscape. So for my rock cliff is going to be really simple. Go to download, and here you will check which size of the texture you want. Like, for us, two k is more than enough. If you want to have high resolution, four K or eight k is fine. I'm just going to go for two K and click here. And what you will see is that it will start downloading Oops. It's a problem here. Let's strike again. So download. Click here. Okay, maybe, maybe not this one. All right. So we will start downloading the mossy ground. And when it's finished, we will open the folder. So let's try it out. And you have the ZIP file. So right click Extract, and you will just put it right here. And double click on this and you will see that you have all your textures that we need. So in order to import this, it's going to be very simple. We're just going to go here to our content browser. And in our landscape tutorial, let's save everything before. On our landscape tutorial, we're going to create a new folder called, you know, textures. And here we are going to import all of them. So we're going to hit Import bottom. And we're going to hit the AO, the base color, the displacement, the normal, and the roughness. That's all we need. Go ahead and click Open. And I'm going to create a folder called mossy rock. And I'm going to just move it here. So now this is my first texture. So I'm going to go ahead and import another one so you can see. I don't know if I can import this one. It's so vaggy, but let's import this one. The rock all download. And let's see if it downloads. Looks like it's taking some time. There you go. So apparently, I have some Internet issues with the download of this, so it's going to take a while. Yours should be faster, but never mind. It's already there. Okay, so this is a rocky soil. Let's right click and extract this, go for import, go for rocky soil, and as always the mbnocclusion, the base color, the normal, the roughness. Actually, we don't have the height map for this. This is a very good example. If you don't have the height map, I don't recommend you to export this. I don't recommend you. There are ways to get the height map from the normal map in other softwares like substance. But in case you don't see this, maybe it's a good idea. You don't use this map. Because we will need the height map for a lot of things. So go ahead and choose your textures, import any texture that you want. Follow your reference. Maybe you can go for, like, this rocky sound. Maybe you're using something like a desert or something, anything is fine. So go ahead and do that. And I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Enabling Virtual Textures: So before we continue, there's something really important that we need to do, and that is enable virtual textures. Same as Nana that can handle lots of geometry using virtual memory, the same can be applied for textures. And since we're going to use a lot of them, virtual texturing is just really useful. So we're going to go here and go to project settings. And here you will type Virtual. And there you go. Go for Virtual textures and enable Virtual texture support. Click Okay. All right. You're going to leave the default values, and you're going to restart the editor, and now we will continue. 13. Creating the Landscape Material: So now that we have our virtual textures, we can just create the landscape material. So let's open up the content drawer with control space, create a new folder called materials. And here we will create our new material. A material is basically the painting that will go on top of everything, like we will add the rug, the grass and everything. Textures by themselves, they cannot be rendered. They need a shader for that in real time render. So we need a material for that. So right click, go to Material and go for Landscape Master. Go ahead and click on this one. And what you will see here is a material editor. Now, I have a full course of materials where you create a master material in a real engine. If you want to take data look, feel free. I'm not going to go too deep into materials, but I'm going to cover all the necessary things that you need to do to create your landscape. So right click to pan around here. This is the graph editor. This here is the output, where we will put the color, the roughness, the normal maps, the AO, and everything. And we will just add notes here. So in order to add some textures, we first need to go ahead and drag something here. So which one we're going to drag first Probably? Let me think. This one can be a good one as a first layer. So we're going to add all of this. But before that, let's go ahead and right click and convert to virtual texture. Click Okay. And now everything is a virtual texture, which is what we want. So let's go ahead and grab everything. And now we have our textures here. So where do you connect those? Well, it's very easy. We're just going to go here to roughness. We're going to go here to the base color. This one is the roughness. So we can even go for the red channel. It doesn't matter. We put it here. This is the amino occlusion. We put it here, the normal map, we put it here, and the displacement. We're not really going to use it. For now, let's just connect this one here, but we're not really going to use displacement for now. So now that you have this heat apply. And what I want to do is to create a material instance. But first, let's apply this into our landscape. So right click Create a material instance. I will call it I Landscape 01. Okay. So these material instance will be very handy in the future, where we want to change some parameters. So what we can do is just go here to landscape and go for landscape material and click the Rokey to select that. Obviously, you can also drag and drop this one there, but you can already see what's going on is that we have our texture here. However, it is tiiling very finally. So what we need to do is to actually change this into change the change the UVs. So I'm going to go for texture coordinates. Sorry, right click. So you can see the options. You can also go to the palette here to choose which node you want or press tab. Those are the three ways so you can add nodes here. So let's go for texture coordinates. And what you will see is that you have the UV tilling here. And what we can do is multiply this. So let's go for multiply. Connect this one here, and then right click and add a constant. The constant value I'm going to have is a value of one. So I'm going to connect everything here. All right. So now that I have this, click Apply. And now, nothing looks like has happened. But now that these are connected to the UVs, I can change this. Now, I won't be able to change it because if I double click on this one, I won't have the parameters here. So what you need to do is to right click Convert parameter and call it let's call it one tie for now. Hit Apply. And now let's track this window so we can see the changes. And you will see that you have a global parameter value L one tiling. If we put these 22, it will be even smaller, one, 0.50 0.1. You will see that as you get further and further, obviously, it becomes very evident what's going on. Later on, we will add a mask where we can change the tiling based on the distance. It's going to be very handful for now. We can go for something like 0.05. That's a little bit too much, maybe 0.25. Maybe that's better. 0.2. I think 0.2 is a good number. Let's take a look. Yeah, I think it's not so bad. For now, we're going to keep it like that. And for now, we're going to work with this material. We're not going to blend everything anything yet, like painting all the materials and whatnot. We're just going to make sure that this material looks good. And when it's finished, what we will do is to add the other materials into our landscape. So let's keep adding more functionality to the single layer. 14. Making small adjustments to the lake: Now before I go any further, I actually want to change a little bit the landscape. And in order to do that, I don't if you remove the water, you will see that my layers were actually very, very nice before. So what I want to do is to actually move this layer up. And this water layer, I can just go here to my lake. Okay. And just move it. So let me leave this and just move it like this. Just like that. Alright. So you can move it like that to 140 is the height of this. And in order to blend with this river, you can also go for 140 here. And you can just move it around like this. And obviously, this part needs to be changed. So we're going to go for a landscape mode, and for the finer details, we're actually going to smooth things out or maybe even sculpt things. So we can sculpt something like this. Just because we're using procedural stuff doesn't mean that we really need to keep it as it is. So we can do something like that and then go for smooth. And then we will have a smoother version. So, personally, I like this one more. It's a change that I want to make before continuing. So I can take a look at my landscape, and to be honest, I feel like it looks better. Even though the landscape is not really deforming. I don't really need that. I have this already. So with that set, let's go ahead and you can always sculpt here. Like, if you don't want to see this you can just sculpt here, just like that. It's all you need to do. And here you can always sculpt as well, sculpt a little bit to have a little bit like something going on behind. So it's always very, very nice. You're able to do that, especially in these areas. So with that set, let's go ahead and continue working on our landscape material. Now that we have this done, it was driving me crazy. So let's continue with our material. 15. Using the Texture Graph to merge channels: Alright, nice little break with the lake. And now let's continue to create our material. Like I said before, we're going to work with only one texture. We're not going to paint the landscape yet. We're going to take a look at that later. But for now, we need a way to create a material inside a material because what will happen is that we will have a material here, and then we will have another material here, and then we will combine them to create the final output. So let's say this is like rock, this is sand, and then you combine them. And when you paint in your material, you will see it here. So if you just connect all of those to this outpost, it's just going to be really hard. Let me give you an example. I'm going to press L and hold click to create the arp node. If I had to make a blend for each texture, I will have to go here and let's press Control D to duplicate just so I can show you and this is my second material, and then I just go here. You don't have to do this right away. And I just copy this and add this one and go here. And if I want to use a third material, I have to get another one and put it here. You know, you can already tell, like, what's going to happen. So what we're going to do is to make a note that is called make material attributes. And here we will connect this one, the base color here. The roughness, we're going to actually, the roughness, we're not going to connect. We're going to connect the normal map. We're going to leave this for now. Okay? Because we are using three textures here, and it's better if you just combine them. So if you go to plugins and go to texture graph, you will see that I already have it. Go ahead, click on it and restart the editor. I wait for you. And now that you have it, go to your content browser. Okay. So which one is the one we're using? Let's take a look at this. So mostly rocky. So let's go ahead here, go to texture and go to texture graph. And we're going to call it texture graph RGV Mesh. So let me open up a texture just so you know what I mean. This texture is composed of four channels. Three that you can use, an extra one is an Alpha. So each channel has information in black and white. So the blue channel is like this, the green channel looks like this, and the red channel looks like this. And if you combine all of those, you get the final color. Now, why is this important is because we want to use one texture for everything instead of three. We have the displacement, the roughness, and the bin occlusion, and we want to save memory by creating one texture that has all of those as a gray scale texture inside of them. So let's click on this texture graph. And here, what you will see is that you can actually create some textures here. So what I will do is to go here to combine channels. And here you can put, you know, a texture. So let's go ahead and put this one here, the ambien occlusion. We will call it AO for amen occlusion. Let's go for roughness. Okay, let's strike the other one. Is the displacement. Let's strike it here. Beautiful. So now that you have this, just connect the AO to the red channel, the roughness to the green channel, and the displacement to the blue channel. Go ahead and click there. Okay. And now, what you can do is there are a couple of ways to do this. You can click Export. Okay. And you can just export this texture, and what it will create it's a texture that has your materials combined. You have the red the green and the blue channel, all of those combined into something that looks like this. Now, make sure SRGB is off, and we're going to go to the compression settings to mask. Okay? So now that we have this, let's actually rename this. Let's call it. Actually, let's try to use the same name, mossy ground two k mask. And we actually going to convert this to a virtual texture. Click Okay. And now we're going to drag it to the landscape. And now we don't need this. We can just connect this node here. And what we can do is connect the red one to the ambien occlusion, which is the shadows of our material, the green one for roughness, and the blue one for displacement. So now that we have this, how do you connect these ones? Well, there are a couple of ways you can do this, but if you notice, I cannot really connect this node here because this is a material, and this is like an output that has multiple inputs that are asking for base color metallic specular roughness. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first one is you go for the break material attributes, and you go here. And you connect all of those here, base color here, metallic here, roughness, normal amine occlusion, and it will work if you hit Apply. Now, we see our landscape, nothing has changed, everything works as expected. The other way is to use if you click here on the empty part of the graph, you will see that you have used material attributes. You can use click here, and you will see that now I have a compact output node that I can connect here. Okay. So both methods are fine. There's no right or wrong. They do the same. So let's leave it like that for now. In the future, we may change this because we want to add some things on top of the landscape. But for now, it's going to work for us. This is going to be our first material. And with that, let's add some functionality now. 16. Using Distance based tiling: So now that we have our material setup, there's something I want to change with our material, and that is the tiling. That tiling is one of the things I like to work on first when I work with landscapes. And usually, like, the most obvious issue is that here in this area, the tiling, it's okay. But as you get further and further, like here in this area, it becomes very repetitive. And to be honest, it looks like kind of like a Playstation one or Playstation two game where we didn't have the computing power to fix this. And what I'm going to work on is to change the tiiling based on the distance. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce you to a new nodes called camera depth fate. And camera depth fate comes with a bunch of properties, but I only want you to focus on one, which is the fate length. So let's hold one and click to create a constant, right click and convert to parameter is going to be my camera fate length. Let's go ahead. And as you can see, you go to really connect this one. So we will click on an empty space in our graph, and we're going to go for check use material attributes, and we're going to connect these to the base color. Okay. So let's open up our material instance so you can take a look at what's happening here. Let's close this. We don't need this anymore. And in order to see this better, it's better if you go from lead mode here. You can change different modes like unlead or wireframe or lead wireframe. I'm going to go for the buffer visualization and go to base color to have a accurate representation of how this mask is going to go. So if you check this camera fad length, what's happening is that everything is white. But if I change this value, let's say for 10,000, you will see that I have a mask where the black values here, are closer to the camera. And this is not a static value because if I move here to this area, now the black values are here. If I move to this mountain, you can see that as I move closer and closer, the values change. So let's go back to our original position, which was this one. I changes to 20,000 maybe. 50,000. Maybe 30,000. Maybe 30,000 is a good number. So she clip from 25,000 for now, and with the texture, we will see what's going on. So we have this, and that's great, but how do we actually use this? Because it's actually in and of itself is really not helping us to fix the tily. So, what we're going to do is to actually move this here. Let's disconnect this node by pressing out. And I'm going to select this tree and this sampler source, do you see here that I'm using like texture samplers, one out of 16? You have a limited number of textures that you can use. And usually in landscapes, it's very common for you to have a lot of textures, a lot of materials. And in order to have more than 16 textures in our material, we need to change this texture sampler. From texture acid to shared wrap. You can also change this in the original texture if you want, but we can leave it like that for now. So if we change this, now we will be able to use more samplers. All right. So now that we have this, we need a way to blend between these two. This is my camera, my Alpha. So I'm going to introduce you to a new note. You have seen it before. It's called the LRP. If you hold ELT, linear Interpolate. All right. You can also hold L and click to get it. So the Alpha is going to be this one. And the black area, it's going to have the closed tiling. So the black one is going to be A. Which means we're going to have L one closed tiling by layer one closed tiling. Okay, now, if we duplicate this, actually, we don't need to duplicate all of them, only this one, Control D to duplicate. Let's change this node to L one far tiling. And let's put the closed tiling to I don't know, 0.2 and the far tiling to 0.01. And we're going to multiply this. We're going to actually duplicate this Control C, Control V, and put it here. As you can see, I'm having the two textures. So let's go ahead and see what happens. If I connect this to the base color, let me go ahead and use the break material attributes once again because I have a feeling we will use it quite a lot. Let's just connect it right away. Roughness, metallic, specular, normal, and ambient occlusion. There you go. Click Apply. And look what's happening. Let's open up the material instance. Our camera depth fate is actually allowing us to have a bigger texture on the distance. So obviously, you can change the tiling. So for example, you can put the far tiling to you can multiply by two, if you want to make it smaller. I feel that's a little bit better. The other one was a little bit too much. Also, this area maybe a little bit too close. We can play with this, so 35,000 maybe or 15,000. You can also play with a camera length that we have here. Okay. So actually, it's kind of working. The reason we think it's actually not working is because we haven't connect the other nodes. So let's do that very quickly. It's going to be super easy. We're just going to move this and Control C, Control B. And this one is going to be my closed tiling and far tiling. So closed tiling is going to be on A, far tiling is going to be on B, and Alpha is going to be the far tiling here. Okay, we're going to connect the mask soon. The normal map, we're going to duplicate it again. And we're going to control C control B. The A one is going to go here, the B one is going to go here, and the far tiling is just going to connect for this one, and the Alpha is going to be this one. So the normal map is very easy. We can just connect the normal map here. It's a little bit of spaghetti, now, but we will fix that later. And the roughness and amine occlusion and displacement, we're going to actually go for break, float, three components. And now we're going to put the red one here, the green one here, and the blue one here. So now it's going to be much more evident. What's happening? Look at this. And now we can change the tiling if we want, for example, we can change this to start moving it. You can see when you want your tiling to start maybe around here. Is this a good number? Probably it is. Probably it is. We're going to leave it like that. It's actually working quite well. So that is distance tiling. Now go ahead, apply to your landscape because we still have a lot of work to do. 17. Creating the Layer Function: So before adding more layers into our landscape, I want to create a function because we're going to create another layer for the rocks and all the other materials. And I don't really want to copy and paste. We can just create a function, and then we can add functionality on top of it, and in the future, we will update all our materials. So let's do that now. Let's go to content Browser, right click material, Advance and go to material function. So this one is going to be my material function, landscape layer. Okay, so will click on this. And what you will see it's a graph that pretty much looks the same as the material, except that it says material function here. It has an output, but that's it. So what we will do actually is just to copy this all this Control C, Control V, and we're going to connect this here. Okay? So let's apply this. Let's save it. And the first thing I want to do is to change the output name to material. All right. And now I need the inputs for our function. So the inputs, the way material functions work is, for example, this is a material function. If you double click on this, you will see that you have functionality underneath. So we can just drag and job these functions here. So we need those inputs, just like we have here. We have some three inputs for this. We also need one for our material. So we're going to go ahead and type input, and we're going to select function input. This function input, we're going to select this color parameter. And we're going to call it close tiling. All right. It's going to have a default value of 0.2. Let's go ahead and put it there. Delete this one. We don't need it anymore. The same thing we're going to do here, go go for far tiling. So far tiling here. Let's go for 0.02. Delete this one. And the camera fate length, we're going to copy this, paste it. And we're gonna we're just going to delete this one. We're gonna put it here. And we're going to call it camera fate length, just like that, right? So this one is going to have a value of 25,000. I believe we had that value before. So that's for the color parameters. Now we need a way to deal with this because we are using textures. So for that, we're going to go for input, and we're going to create a texture two D. Texture two D, it's going to be a it's going to be our input. So we're going to connect it here. Okay? Now, obviously, we need a preview here, otherwise, we're going to get an error. So what we're going to do is to go here and create texture object. Texture object is going to be this one. Okay? And the name of this is going to be Alvido texture. Just Alvedo. I think that's more than enough. Okay? So we have this, apply, and we're going to do the same here. We're going to put it like this. Al veto. All right. So for these ones that are the mask, we're going to change it as well. So we're going to copy this, paste it. We're going to call it mask. And it's going to be a texture object as well, and we're going to put it on the texture here. And also, remember the UVs for the closed tiling and the far tiling need to be connected. So put it here, looks like we forgot to connect it on our previous material. So that's our mask. And the next one is going to be the normal. Let's make sure this one is fine. Okay? So the normal map is going to copy and paste, and we're going to call it normal map, and we're just going to put it here. Alright, so let's apply. And in order to see this function, we can actually put a description here. We can expose it to library, creates material with the tens blend. That could be. We can also expose to library, and we have categories. So for example, it's like tutorial. So I can show you a couple of ways you can drag this function here. So the first one is you can use drug this here. And you will see that you actually have your all your you know, all your inputs here. You can also go for tutorial, and you will find all the functions that you created that you can use in the future. So now that we have this, we need to actually lets you know, let's organize this a little bit. The order of this is a little bit confusing. So closed tiling is going to be zero, far tiling, sort priority is going to be one 0-1, it's going to be the order of it. Camera fate is going to be two. Alvedo is going to be three, mask is going to be four, and normal map is going to be five. You don't have to do this. It will work just fine. It's just like for me, it's easier if I have some order here. So let's connect this and see what happens. If I go to the closed tiling, I can actually go and connect this one here. Et's connect this one here to the closed tiling, the far tiling here, and the camera length here. For the Alvedo map, we're going to use this one. But however, if you connect this one here, you're not going to be able to use it. So what you need to do is to create a texture object. And we can create a parameter for this. We can call it L one Alvedo and now we can put our texture so we can I think it's mossy rock, that one we were using. Yeah. So we will go here, go for albito. It's our visual color texture. Plug this here. We're going to do the same for the mask. Grab the mask. You can also right click and convert to texture object and then convert to parameter. It's going to be L one mask. Connect it here. And the next one is going to be my normal map. I'm going to right click Convert to parameter one. Sorry, not convert to parameter. Let's drag it again. Let's convert to texture object. And we're going to go for let's just call it convert parameter, one normal connect the normal here and just like that, now, we don't need anything from here. So if we take a look at our material, hit apply, everything works as expected. So let's just delete this because we don't need it anymore. We can use our function. Put this here. This is our layer one. We're going to put it right here and see if this works and works exactly the same, exactly the same as we had before, which is very, very nice. So now that we have this layer, we can continue to work on our material to add different layers like rock or any other type of material you want into our landscape. So let's do that next. 18. Adding a second Landscape Layer: So now what we're going to do is to add another layer here to this landscape material. So we're going to choose another texture. Let's take a look at which textures we have available. So I believe I want something like a grass. So let me see if I can find probably this forest floor. So we're going to first create the mask as always. So let's go for the mossy one. And instead of opening the graph again that you create before, the texture graph, you can right click and export textured graph. And here you can see that you have your parameters. So we can just change them here. So let's go to the forest floor. Et's put the roughness here. Let's put the ambient occlusion here, and the displacement, we will also put it here as well. And now that we have this, you can also change the path, but I'm just going to export it just as it is because it's going to give me my texture here, so I'm just going to move it and I can call it. I can copy this and paste the name and call it I don't know, mask. Double click on this. Make sure this one is set to not here, compression settings, go to mask, so all the data is accurate, and that's it. We just need to right click and convert to virtual texture, except save this just in case. And now we're just going to add another layer. So we're going to copy this this material function landscape layer. And this closed tiling and camera fade laying and everything is going to get a little bit messy. So I'm going to show you a new node. So if you drag here, you cop name and click on at name rewrote Declaration node. So what this will do, I will click to close global close tiling. Alright. And what we can do with all of those, let me just do this for name global for tailing and do the same for this one, type name and go at name rewrote Declaration Node, camera, fate length. All right. So now that you have this, we can just move this here. And instead of drag and dropping these wires from here because we're going to instead of dragging this here, it's going to get really messy. We can use these notes to pretty much have a Wi Fi connection here. So if we go for global closed tiling, you will see that I have a node with the same name I put, so I can just connect this here. I can do the same with far tiling. And connect it here and the camera fade length and connect it here. All right. So now that you have this, you can just move this here. You don't need to connect this. I'll then click to delete. Oh, sorry, I disconnect this one by mistake. There you go. So this is our first layer. We can just copy and paste this Control C, Control V, and go ahead and connect these ones here because they don't need to change. And now we're going to add texture. So we're going to control space to open this and let's add all the textures that we need. We need this one. Oh, and by the way, before we do that, let's make sure this and these are converted to virtual textures. So just keep that in mind. So go ahead and drag these two also drag this one, and then convert to texture object. Convert parameter, called L to Albdo, convert it to texture object, convert to parameter, L to mask. And here, convert to texture object, convert to parameter, L to normal. No, if you're asking, why am I calling it layer one, layer two, layer three instead of grass, rock, snow, whatever. And the reason for that is basically experience working in big projects, you tend to change the textures from time to time and you get to a point where you're painting your landscape and it says, Oh, painting rocks. Okay, I will paint the rock here and you're painting grass because you change the texture. And it's easier to to change the texture than change the name. So just put it like layer two layer one. This is my recommendation. So what we're about to do now, now that we have our second layer. Let's add a blend for this. We're going to create, kind of like automateial. It's not really going to be like a one click solution for everything. Nothing is. But we're going to have a really good start with that auto material. So with that, we're going to start blending these two materials. 19. Creating a Texture based Blending: All right, so now that we have our second note, it's a good idea to think about how to blend them. There are multiple ways of blending things in real. One is like, Well, all of them are mask, but by, you know, tiling textures. The second one is like slope slope angle. The third one maybe by height. You know, there are multiple ways to do this. Auto materials are usually for, you know, just to have a starting base and then you can paint the details on top of it. So we're going to start with the tiling notes. So normally you will need to import the texture. There are several ways to do that. Like you could use substance for doing that and everything. But I want to show you how you can do it inside and real. There's actually a node called noise. And if you go for noise, I'm going to connect this here so you can see what's happening, right. So I'm going to connect it to the base color. And also, if you want to preview a node, how it looks like, right click and start previewing note. So you can see how it looks like here. So you can see how the noise looks like. And for me, the scale is very, very small. So I want to go for something really small like 0.0 001, something like that. And probably you won't even see here. So let's take a look at it how it looks like in the landscape. Not really so much on the preview. All right. So it looks noise looks. Also, you can play with a level. So if you go for level one, you will have less amount of detail. So you will see here, just like that. I want to go for seven. Now, you have different types of noise like grading, value, if you go for grading, it will look like in different too. So this note can be quite heavy. So I recommend you to go for Simplex just like that and keep it like that for now. Alright. So the other thing that we may need to do is to claim this because there may be points where the value is not one or zero. We're going to do that later. But for now, if you take a look at this, our noise is kind of working. So let's just blend this with our material. The way you do that is go with blend material attributes, and then you can just go for A, for the black areas will be my first material, the white areas will be the new one, and the Alpha will be this one. So let's go ahead and plug this in and connect the base color here again, just to see how it looks like. Alright. So now that you see, we do have our texture here. Now, there's something really strange about our texture. If you look at it, it's kind of like very black and it has a lot of contrast. And the original texture is not like this. If we go for the base color, you will see that it's actually breaking the colors. And the reason for that is this mask is having a value, even though it looks like from black and white 01, it's having values over, you know, more than one. So we need to make sure everything is 0-1, otherwise, our blending will look very strange. So the way to do this is go to the clamp node, and the clamp will exactly do that. The minimum value will be zero, and the maximum value will be one. So as soon as you do that, hit apply. And you will see that our texture now has the normal color. We don't have any extreme values already, which is very nice. So you can see that my texture is like it is blending, it is there, but I actually want to have some contrast here. And there is a node that is used very often. I use it a lot on vertex painting and this kind of stuff. And it's called the height larp node. So height larp, you don't need these two textures. You only need that transition phase, the texture, high texture, and the contracts. So the high texture is going to be very simple. We're going to drag this one. So we're gonna we're going to go here. Let's look for this texture. We're going to go for this mossy ground and drag it and right click. And actually, we don't need to change anything. We just need to make sure this is shared wrap and grab the blue channel, which is the high texture. All right. So the transition phase is going to be our noise. So we're going to go here to clamp. Okay. And we're going to plug this Alpha here. We're going to organize this a little bit better. So let's move this here. And this is our noise based masking. So let's take a look at how it looks like. And before we do that, actually, I want to go and clamp this once again, but I want to put it on the base color. So when you test this stuff, it's easier to see it on the base color rather than blending with materials. And once your mask looks really good, then you can change it. So what it looks like it's like Look at this. It's blending now between our, our height mask. Go to the base color. You have a really nice blending here. However, this is tiiling too much. So what I can do is to go for a texture coordinate here. And then multiply it, hitting the bottom, drag this here. And now I need a value here. So I'm going to go for like 0.08 to make it really small and connect it here to the UVs. And now that I have this, hit apply. You can test with the values, any value you want. Now you can see that my high texture is actually working quite well. So the next thing I want to add is the contrast. So hold one, right click, convert to parameter, and it will be called Auto material, Layer one, contrast blend. Hit a value of one by default, put it here, hit apply. Now we have more contrast. So you can see that now my textures are just blending a little bit better, and we can go to the material incense, go to materials, material incense, and start playing with this. So you can play with a contrast with zero. We have something like this. Two, five, will be very contrasty. So let me leave it at four for now. Now that we have this mask, it's a good idea for us to actually go ahead and see how it looks like with our material. So we can connect this to the Alpha, connect the base color back here, stop previewing this one. We don't really need it and it apply. Now our material now is working here. We have a nice blending between these two materials, and we have this grass material that we're using. And it also shows in many areas of the landscape. You can see my tiling texture is covering the whole landscape. So it's really, really nice. So that we cover one of those masking methods, let's go ahead and go for adding another material to this landscape as another blending method. So let's go ahead and do that now. 20. Creating a Slope based blend: Okay, so let's move on to another type of blending. So before I do that, I actually want to organize this a little bit. So let's move this global tilling here. And what I can do is actually select all the notes that I want, press C to come in, and I can call this like global parameters. All right. And I can just go ahead and put this one. Call layer one. All right. I can go here as well and call it layer two. And I can move this one over here. And I can actually call it like let's just call it noise based blend noise based blending. You can even change the colors here just to have like, you know, like, something like it's more differentiation between your layers. So you can add a name rewrote declaration note, name rewrote, call it noise. Base blend and we can go here to noise base blend and connect this one as well. Alright. So now that we have this, can even move this here. We can add a third layer. So let's go ahead and add a third one. Let's actually copy this because we won't change anything here. And let's choose our third texture. So between this rocky cliff and this rocky ground, I want to go for the rocky cliff to see how it looks like. So I'm going to go ahead and create my mask, just like we did before, right click Export texture graph. And now we're going to go for my rocky cliff displacement we're going to put here, roughness we're going to put here, and admin occlusion we're going to put here. Just like that, we're going to hit Export. And now we have our texture. Just drag it here, move it, and change the name for something that we can read. So let's go ahead and put mask. Double click on this as well. We don't need this anymore. Change the compression settings to mask, save it. All right, so now we have our new material, wrap all of these and right click convert to virtual texture. Excellent. So now we just need to track this. So this is going to be my Al VDO, convert to texture object, convert to parameter, layer three l VDO. Going to do the same for this convert to parameter, layer three mask. You can see how useful our function is becoming by not having to redo everything again. So convert to texture object, convert to parameter, T normal. And now that we have this, you can just go ahead and change the mask. Go ahead. And that's normal our new texture. So let's go ahead and create a new mask. I'm going to go to show you a different type of blending. We talk about the texture based blending Lanis we talk about the slope, talk about the height. So noise, we already saw it. Let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the slope. So for the slope, what we want to do is to actually create a new node called slope mask, as always, I'm going to clamp this and I'm going to connect it to the base color. By the way, you can just right click and connect to base color if you want. You don't need to drag the way all the way around there. So it apply, and I will show you how this looks like. So what's happening here is that we're having a slope mask, and based on the angle of this, we are changing the values. So let's change a little bit, the tangent normal, the slope angle, the fall power and the chip contrast. So the slope angle, it's going to be a vector tree. So hold a V and click to create a vector tree and call it slope angle. By default, it's going to be a value of one. This slope angle, what it's going to do is going to give us the direction where the mask is going to be. So for example, if let me just drag object here, go to the green plus icon, go to let's go to the celind there. And we can apply this material here as well to the cylinder. Okay? You can see that as I rotate this, the slope always stay on top. Okay? And if I change the material instance of this, I can go ahead. And change the slope angle. So for example, let's put one here and let's just change it to the right value. What you're seeing here is actually the slope is changing into this direction, right? So actually we're changing we need to go for the instance. There you go. You see the X value here is going into this direction. You can also notice by going into the world the world here, the X value is here. If I go for green, a value of one and zero, you will see that the green comes from this direction. So you can see where I'm going with this. So I can go I can even go both directions like this. I can even go negative like if I want it like minus one and minus one to have the opposite effect. So it's like coming from this direction. So I'm going to leave it like that. So the next thing I need to do is to change the fall of power and the chip contrast. So let's take a look at that. Fall of power, click one. Slope fall off. And let's copy and paste and call it slope contrast. So for contrast, we're going to go for one. For fall off, we're going to go for one as well. Nothing will change that much. But what you will notice is that it's actually having more contrast, which is what we want. So if we go here to our let's go ahead and open up our material incense. And let's go for contrast like fall off. If we increase the fall off, you will see that you're actually having less coverage. If we decrease the f off, you have more coverage. Also, the contrast, you can increase the contrast, and you will see that you have a much sharper transition or a much smoother transition. So I can just go for something like this. You can go for one and the f of like I could leave it like that. For now, I can play with that in the future. But for now, I think this is working quite well. So what I want to do is to actually add more details to this. We're going to do it in the next video. 21. Adding a secondary slope: Alright, so let's keep working on our slope angle based blending. I actually want to add another slope angle. So what I will do is to actually copy this and paste. I'm going to have the same values for the fall off. And the contrast, maybe we can have different values later, but let's see, slope angle, copy and paste. I'm going to have my slope secondary angle, and I'm going to put it right here. Okay, I'm going to clamp it as well just in case. And our good way to combine two different masks is by using the at node. Click A and click to get the at node very useful for combining mask. And I'm going to combine these two. I'm going to right click and connect it to the base color. Hit apply and now what you will see is that I mean, my buffer visualization base color to check everything nice and accurate. So I can go here. And what I can do is to change the slow bungle, put this to zero. And instead of minus one, I can go for one and one. And obviously, it's overlapping, so what we can do is to reduce these ones just like that. Or even we can just play a little bit with those just like that. Maybe something like this. Maybe something like this could be good. Having a nice slope angle here. We can also change the contrast. All right. So now that we have this, we have a very cool mask, to be honest. But what I want to do is to actually remove the areas of my first noise based blending. Actually gonna change the name to mask to make it more clear. I'm going to save this. And what I want to do is to actually now that I have this, I'm going to subtract. I'm going to subtract from this one, and also I'm also going to clamp it. I'm going to clamp it. And I'm going to subtract the values of this. I'm going to go for noise base blend mask. I'm going to put it here. And I also going to clamp it again and right click. Sorry, right click and connect to base color. Apply. Alright, so now we have our mask here, and I think it's looking quite good. You can even play a little bit with the angles and increase the angles or decrease it. It's up to you what you want to do with this. To me, it's working quite well, to be honest. And now that we have this, what we can actually do is to plug our material here. So in order to do that, we just need to add this material. So before we do that, let's actually go ahead and comment this slope base blending mask. And I'm going to create a name, rewrote declaration nope, slope blending mask, right? So we're going to go here, we're going to disconnect this one. We don't really need it anymore. And we're going to put it here. And maybe we can change the color of this, like having something like a similar color to what we had before. All right. So this is the color of my mask, and now I'm going to go ahead and go for blend material attributes. I'm going to copy this. A is going to be the previous material, and B is going to be the new one. So I'm going to connect this into my blend material attributes. I move this here. And my Alpha is going to my slope blending mask. So I'm going to go for slope blending mask. I'm going to put it right here and I'm going to connect this into the break material attributes, connected to the base color. It apply, and let's see how it looks like with our new material. All right. So I'm not a big fan of this texture. Probably we can change it. But I think we can do that in the future. We have quite interesting interesting blending going on here with everything, which is quite nice. Let's actually change the lining. Do something like that. I'm not a big fan of this, but we can either change the texture. If you find a texture you don't like, you can always change it. And maybe we're going to do the next. And also the blending probably we can add some other stuff on it, but I think it looks quite well. So let's go ahead and continue. 22. Finishing the Slope Mask: So before working on our slope angle, I actually want to download this texture because I want to change the one I made. And it also serves as a good example of what is a good texture for landscapes. Why I don't like this type of texture is because usually there is a pattern in every image. Like, they go like, you can have a brick image where the pattern is very recognizable. You can have a grass image where it's like grass is everywhere and it's very chaotic. You can combine both into one texture as well. There's also some direction into the texture. Sometimes the cliff, in this case, is looking into that direction. So when you duplicate this and put it here, you can already predict what the next texture is going to look like. However, when the texture it's going into very different directions and you duplicate this, your texture will be very hard to predict. So it's easier for the eye to not detect the tiling, even though I'm not really concerned about this because the tiling is usually covered by meshes and there's a lot of things that you add on top, so you won't really notice this. This is just keep in mind, guys, having tiling in your landscape, it's perfectly normal, perfectly normal, so just be aware of that. Now, I'm going to change this texture by this one that I show you. So first things first, let's create our mask. So we're going to go here and our rough rock, we're going to put the displacement here. We're going to go for roughness and put it here as well, and amine oclusion here. Go to export. And now we're going to go for output. I believe it's rough rock. Did I just did that? Yeah. So rough rock, call it mask. Okay, so double click on this. Close this one and compression settings is going to be on mask. Save. And now I'm also going to convert all these into a virtual texture. This is great. And now I'm going to change this. I'm going to change this virtual texture. I'm going to put this one here. This one, I'm going to put this one here, and this one, I'm going to put this one here. Now, the reason I'm not changing the material instance, even though I could is because, you know, this is always like a good. We can always go for the material instance later. But I think this is working much better, even though there is still a lot of tiling here, the tiling is not as evident as the other one. So I like it much more. I like the colors more. It blends very nicely. So what we need to do now is to actually change the slope mask to use a texture. So if you notice here, we do have a parameter for the tangent normal. So let's go ahead and grab one of these. For example, this one may be a good one to use. So let's go ahead and actually have a little bit of room here for this texture. And this texture sample, we're going to put it first. I go to go to shared wrap, and we're going to put it here on the Tangent normal. Like, okay. And what you'll notice is that actually our blending, it's going to be like tiling a lot, which is not really what we want, right? Like, so let's go ahead and you can see what's going on. Let's go for base color. And what I want to do is to change the tiling of this slope. So let's go ahead and press U M and one as a classic. Actually, I'm going to create this slope normal tiling, and I'm going to go for 0.08 like I had before. But this time, I want to change it because it actually affects quite a lot or visuals. So let's go ahead and apply this. Okay. And now, what we're going to do is to go for our material instance. So let's go for materials, material instance, and let's go for the sloop. Later on, when we finish our Auto material, we will actually go organize this a little bit better. But for now, just bear with this. So if you go for one, which what we had before is like, let me see if I can find a Let's go for One. You can see the tiling a little bit from distance there you go. 0.001, you start having some other kind of like a decent tiling, to be honest, a little bit more attractive. If you go for one, it's like this, very, very, very noisy. If you go for 0.001, you can see the tiling, it's very it's very obvious here. So I'm going to keep it like this. I actually like it, and you actually have the contrast, as well. So you can play with that if you want, play a little bit with the fall off. Everything will just work very, very well for us. So that's very nice. That's very nice. So with that, we are already finish our slope mask. Let's go ahead and see what we can add to this landscape material. 23. Adding the World Height Mask: So now that we have our two type of blending modes, it's time to go for the third one. Remember, the first one was the texture or noise base. The second one was the slope, and the third one will be the height. So we saw how the textures and the slope work together. Now we will see the height, how it can serve us to create a better landscape. So first things first, let's comment this and type it three layer three. That's it. So we need another layer, which is going to be the layer four. We're going to do that layer, but first let's create the mask. So the mask is going to be we're going to use something called absolute let's call War position. All right. So War position will basically give us the value where our object is located in the world. And we need the C value. So actually, just going to go ahead and connect this to the base color so you can see what's going on. Save everything. Okay, apply. And now what you will see is that everything is turning white. Let's go here to base color. Okay? And what we can do is to actually change this. So there are a couple of ways to do this. We either add or subtract. I'm going to go for subtract because it makes more sense. So subtract the value of this, and I'm going to create a constant. Press one, click, right click, then world height position. All right. So now that we have this, go ahead and connect it to the base color. Heat apply now everything turns white. So what I can do with this is to actually go here to the world height position and change this to increase the number. And you can see what's going on that I'm having a height value that I can control. If I scope something that is higher, it's going to grab those white values, but it's going to be like, it's kind of like your ocean level kind of filter similar to that. So with that, let's just put it like that for now. Okay. And now, what we need to do is to actually make a blending here because this is very harsh. So let's go ahead and just like we did before, I don't know if we actually use the multiply note somewhere. It looks like we didn't. Yeah, we did it here. Multiply basically is for intensity. And divides for softness. So anytime you want to make anything more intense, you go for multiply. Any every time you want to make everything softer, you go for divide. So let's press that dekey and click for divide. You can also go here and write if you want, as always, and go here. And let's just call this one, convert to parameter, call this world height softness. And let's put a valley of one for now. Connect it to the base color and apply. You will see that nothing will happen yet because anything divided by one is the same value. I can go ahead and increase this value, and you will see what's going on here. Actually, we're having a smooth transition, which is very nice. Now, the next thing I need to do is to actually break this into something like having a texture or something. So for that work, actually going to use the texture that we have here. We can also use a slope angle for this. So let's go for slope slope mask. We can grab the same one. Okay. And the angle, we're gonna leave it like that. I don't think we need to change it. Just in case we could have it. So let's put V and put world height slope angle. Let's put it on one by default. And then we're going to go for fall off and cheap contra. So press one. World height slope fall off. Let's go for one and copy and paste and go for world height, slope contrast. Just like that. We're going to go for this. And what we are going to actually do is to multiply these two, holding M, multiply, and then we're going to clamp this. We're going to clamp this node, connect it to the base color. And you can already see what's going on here. In this preview, we're actually having some kind of noise with texture. And look at that. Now we have a mask here, and we can change the angle of this. For example, we can decrease the intensity of this any increase one of these values here if you want to have a different kind of value. And also, you can go for world height slope contrast to increase a contrast between this and the slope fall off to make it even more interesting. And look at that now, our mask is working very well. And with that, the next thing we need to do is to connect our next material with our mask. So let's do that now. 24. Adding our four layered material: So now that we have our mask, we can even change the height of this like the position, make it slower, bigger, up to you. Now we need to connect this to our new material. So we're going to actually, I'm going to comment on this. I'm going to call it world hate mask. Okay. I'm going to change the color to something really similar so that we know this color is meant for mask. And also, I'm going to create a name root declaration note. It's called world height mask. There you go. And now we need to add another layer. So we have another texture here. Probably it's going to be another rocky ground. Probably we can add this one, the leicht rock. I think it's very nice. We can add that one. So let's go ahead and do what we always do to create our mask. Right click sport texture to graph. And now we're going to go for our roughness. We're going to put it here. Or amino occlusion, we're going to put it here and our displacement is going to be here. So let's go hit Export and go for our mossy rock, check the output, and move it here to the set Rock. Change the name of this. Hopefully, you're already very familiar with this process. And the beautiful thing of this is that you don't need to go for another app like substance or photoshop to change the textures. Let's move this one here. And compression settings set to mask to have all the accurate values. And now we need to edit here. So we're going to copy this and paste. Actually, I'm going to copy all of this, copy paste. And now I'm going to start tracking all these as a virtual texture. Click Okay. And now wrap this one, convert to texture object, convert to parameter. I'm going to call it L four Alvedo wrap this one, right click. Convert to texture object. Convert parameter, L for mask. And the last one is going to be my normal. So convert to texture object, convert to parameter, L four normal. With that, we're just going to put this one here. So let's put this one on the Alvedo map, put this on the mask and put this on the normal. And now that we have this, we just need to connect this. So blend material attributes, copy and paste this. A is going to be the previous one, and B is going to be the next one, and our Alpha is going to be our world height mask. Let's save this. And let's put it here on the brake material attributes and connect it to the base color. We can move it a little bit here. Can already see what's kind of going on in our preview. But now that we have this, let's take a look at our new material. So now we're having this texture on top of everything. So we have our texture here, but it looks like we need to play a little bit with the material incense. So let's move this here. And now we're going to go for our softness and actually the slope, I'm going to change the slope to put it a little bit like one here to make it more obvious. You can already see the values here and increase the value as well. Use the green channel. There you go. A little bit better. Now it's blending pretty well with our material. So it's because we have pretty much like the same color. And probably it will be a good idea to change the tiling in the future. Let's take a look at this. It probably would be a good idea to change the tiling in the future. But for now, I think it's going to work quite okay. 25. Organizing the Graph: Okay, now that we have our fourth layer, I want to before starting to blend using the painting tools in the landscape, I actually want to add another layer before that. So let me comment this and call it layer four. And I will come here. Copy this and paste, and I will create a new one. So the new one, it's going to be let's just go to Landscape tutorial. I play with some filters here. If you want to filters or some specific assets, you can just go here to the filter tool and then reset filters. And here you can choose what type of filter you want. For example, you want to texture. You will see all the textures that are available for you. So it's a very handy tool just to keep that in mind. So the next one, I think it should be one of these. I believe it's this rocky ground. So we're going to do the same. We're going to go to the mossy rock, right click Export texture graph. And we're going to go to this rocky ground and let's start changing the displacement, the roughness, and the ambient occlusion. We're going to put it right here and we're going to export it. And we're going to grab it and move it here to the rocky ground, copy the name, and paste it. Oh. Sorry. I was changing the normal. Let's go back to where we are. There you go. Let's just call it mask. Double click on this. Let's close this. We don't need this anymore. Compression settings go back to mask. We have the accurate values, save it. And now we just need to track it here. Before we do that, let's convert everything into virtual texture. Let's go ahead and drag it here. Convert to texture object, convert the parameter, call it, Layer five Albedo. Let's go for mask. Convert to texture object, convert parameter, layer five mask, and then convert to texture object, convert parameter, layer five normal. Are you just going to connect this here? Actually, I want to create a re wrote note for this one. So this one is going to be Live material. I'm just going to comment this on layer five. So we don't really need to do anything at this point. One thing I would like to start doing is to group everything. So for example, layer five, all this is going to be on a group. So if I go here, I can go for layer five, I can go up, go here. Call it layer four. And as soon as I apply, you will see that when I go to my material instance, you will see that I have a layer four. And also, my layer five is here. So you don't really see it in the material instance because this is not connected. So there's no reason to show properties that are not affecting the material. But if you change these, for example, layer three, and let's start changing the other ones. Layer two, and the last one. Layer one. Hit apply, you will see that you actually have the layers so you can change the textures easier. One thing you can do is to actually go here for each category. So for example, global parameters. We can go here and put it into a group, global parameters. Noise based blending. We can go ahead and change this one. Noise constant blend. We can group everything into out material here. This will be out material. This one will also be in the auto material group. Let's go for this slope angle and put it on the auto material group. Perfect. Now this one will be in the auto materrial group. So let's grab everything. And go to auto material. Great. Now that we have this, take a look at our material instance, and it's much more organized. You have your auto material in one category, so you can change all the values that you want. You have the global parameters, and you have your specific layers, properties that you can change. Like in the future, if you want to change the color or something, we can do it through this method. So now that we have this, let's go ahead and start blending our materials using the landscape tools. 26. Creating our Landscape Painting Layers: So we have all our materials, and now what we need to do is to go to the landscape here, and you will see that I actually have a paint section, and it says that there are currently no target layers assigned to these landscapes. And the reason why we can paint on the landscape, and it's one of the most important tools here is because we haven't really create those layers in our material. Now, you may be asking, why are you creating this out material that you don't need to paint when I need to paint over? Well, a lot of people like to have something to start with. It doesn't mean that the auto material will solve everything. So, for example, I want to paint some rocks here, and the auto material is not having them, so I can just go paint them by hand. But it's already giving me a very like a very nice result I can work with. So it's actually quite helpful, but it's not mandatory. You can always paint it by hand, and you still get good results, to be honest. I like to paint it by hand, to be honest. So let's do that. And in order to make everything work, let's organize ourselves a little bit. So let's put a name rewrote declaration note, call layer for material. Okay. So let's go for that. Later on, we can change this actually Layer four material. We can put it here. Okay. And let's go to layer three. Make a little bit of room here. Go to name rewrote declaration note, Layer three material. And put it here. All right. Safe. And layer two is going to be the same. So let's go ahead and put here name declaration node, layer to material. Rozon putting material and not just layer two because in the future, we will need a height map as well. So let's go for layer to material. Okay. And the first one, it's going to be layer one material. So we'll go for layer one. Sorry. Name wrote, Layer one material, and we're just going to put it. Layer one material here. All right. Great. So now that we have this, what we need to do is to actually create those landscape layer blends. And in order to do that, it's very simple. Just going to right click. Go to Landscape. And go to Landscape layer blend. And here you will see in the left side of the screen that you can actually add elements to your array. So if you click the plus icon, you will see that you have a layer name. So our layer the first layer is going to be my auto material. Okay. I'll leave it there. Okay. So the second layer is going to be my layer one. Let's put it one. You don't need to he put it too complicated, layer two, as well, and we're going to do the same until we get to layer five, which we have five layers, so we're going to only use layer five. Layer four, and the last one is going to be layer five. So how is it going to work? Well, automaterial layer, it's going to be this one. All right. And then we're going to connect this one here. And now we need to go through all the layers that we create. Layer one material, it's going to be here. Layer two material as well. Layer three. Et's move it up. Layer four. And layer five. We didn't create a layer five material, apparently. Oh, we call it five. Let's call it layer. Let's go up. It's a little bit of a big grab, right? Layer five material, put it here. Alright, so now that you apply, you will see that this turned black. And we still have this, of course. But if we go to our landscape, everything turned black. And what we need to do is to go to landscape, paint, and you will see that you have nothing here. All right. It usually happens when you update the material, but you haven't really you have the map open. So let's go to new level, empty level, and then just go back here. And now we'll go to landscape. And it's just for some reason, it's not showing here. Is plain material attributes. Oh, I have it is fine. It is fine. Oh, I'm painting on water. Sorry. So this is a layer material. So you can actually create a layer here. Usually, when this happens, just restart the editor and it will work, okay? So I'm going to do that, and I will see you in the next lesson. 27. Painting your Landscape: So, apparently, in a real 5.5, there is a new method. It won't do it automatically, but there is a new button called create layers from assigned material. So if you click here, you will see that you have all your layers here, and you just need to add the layer info. So how do you do that? Well, the layer info is an asset that real will read to save the information of your painting. So click Plus here and go to weighted blended Layer. Okay. So by default, it will create a a folder here where you have your layers. So you can click here, you'll see that you have your auto material layer info. Okay. And look what will happen. Your outta material, it's already there. So now we just need to do the same for this. So let's go for layer one. Layer one, layer info, and let's do the same here. Layer two, layer info, layer three layer info and layer four layer info and finally layer layer five, Ar. Alright, so now we have this, save it. And you have different layers here. Where you can paint. You can think about it like Photoshop, where you can use another layer to paint something on top of it. My recommendation is always use the base layer, which is this. I'm going to rename it to base layer so that you know, like, this is the base because it gets really complicated when you have multiple materials and sometimes you are erasing some material and you don't remember where was the material paint on. I talk from Spins. You can always use other layers if you want to paint. But for me, using the base layer to paint everything and just erase it when I don't want, that's the best way. So why this at material has been filled is because by default, it will just fill layer. So if I go to layer one and fill layer, you will see that it will load, and it will start adding the textures for the layer one material. If I can do the same as soon as the shader compiles, I can right click and fill layer for layer five, and you will see that you actually have the information for the layer five material. So what I want to do is to obviously fill my out material first so I can have something to work with. And then I can start going for something like this. For example, I can start painting. Maybe I want my layer two here. The first time you paint, it's going to be loading the cells where you're painting. So just keep that in mind. It will just take some time, and I can just erase some parts that I don't like. I can just go and paint something like this. Right? Or maybe I want some rocks, so I will just paint here. It will always be the first material that you paint that is going to load. And depending on the cell that you're working with, it will give you, like, a different treatment, right? So that's on that. And for example, here in this shoreline, I want to paint a little bit. So what I can do it to just go ahead and paint here. All right, so I'm painting my shoreline. Actually, I want to paint it here as well. I want to paint all the way all the way here. So I have my shorelline on next to the lake, which is great. And now, when you go here, you will see that you have your shoreline material. Now, if it's something you don't like for whatever reason, you feel like, Hey, my shoreline material is not really cool, I can just go ahead here and go to MI landscape. And we haven't put the parameters to change individual layers, but we do have the tiling, and I think the tiling gets a little bit too much. So maybe I will go for 0.3. Maybe go for 0.15. And at the distan I will go for 0.01 to make it even smaller. Let me see. 0.02. Actually, I need to make it bigger. It's the other way around. So I'm going to go for 0.05. 0.02 is fine, actually. It's just a closed tiling. I want to make it like 0.1. As here 0.1 doesn't look like a really bad, especially here. Now, later on, we will add displacement for this so we can see the rocks and it will look really great. But now you can paint. Now you can paint everywhere. You can just go ahead and paint wherever you want, for example, in the slope, like maybe you want some rocks here. So you paint some rock material. And if for whatever reason this is tiling too much, let's go ahead and change this. Something like that might be a good idea. Alright. That's not so bad. Not so bad at all. And I think we should be should be changing this a little bit. Maybe 0.01, something like that. We can just start painting here. We can even increase the brush size and start painting areas where we want a rock, and then maybe we want this other rock here. So let's decrease the painting and start painting here, like smaller details. You can have the rock here. As you can see, the ta material is just helping us having a good base. It's like painting when the canvas is empty, it's a little bit harder. But when you already have something, it looks way better. One thing we need to take care of is this blending. This blending is a natural blending from those assets that goes from 100 or 1-0 where it starts fading out. That's okay for sometimes it's the cheapest form of blending. What I can actually do is to change this type of blending to use the height blending, and it will actually make our material much more interesting. So let's do that now. 28. Adding Height output to our Function: Okay. So in order to fix this blending, first, we need to update our function to get the high value. So if we go to our material function for our landscape, you will see here that I have one output. I can actually have multiple outputs for this, so I can go for output. Go function output and call it height map. And the height map, actually I can just grab the displacement here and put it. But I actually want to control the contrast of this. So what I want to do is go here and go for power. And power is just going to make my texture like more contrasty. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to create a function input. So I'm going to go for input, and I'm going to create a scolor parameter. And this one is going to be called height contrast. I'm going to leave a value of one for now. And I could use it as a pre view value as default, so that's not mandatory to use this. I can put a value of ten here, so it's like ordering as the last thing I want. So I can just go back here, and then I can go for Clamp. Go ahead and do that. Heat apply. Now what I have here is if I go for my material, you will see that I have my height contrast. So what I can actually do is to go for my global parameters. And create a new one so I can Control C, Control B and call it height blend contrast. I can just leave a value of one and go name, rewrote declaration node and go heightlend contrast. There you go. I'm going to put it here. I'm going to put it in all of them. Control C, Control B, Control C, Control B, Control B here, and the last one would be Control B. You will also notice that I have a new output here. I'm going to create a new output for each one of them. I'm going to go to name and call it layer five height. I'm going to do the same here. Go to name layer four height, and then the same one here. Layer three height. It's just a good way to make everything more organized and then here. Layer to height. And then this one layer one height. And now that I have this, the next thing I need to do is to actually just connect this into my layer blend. So let's do that in the next video. 29. Painting Layers with Height Blend: Alright, so now that we have our height, we just need to add it into our landscape. So you will see here that each layer blend has an input. And obviously, for our auto material, we don't really need it, so we're not going to change this one. Layer one material, we don't need it, but layer two, we are going to need it. So what we're going to do is go for landscape layer blend. And on layer two, instead of weight blending, we're going to go for height blend. And you will see that you have your height here. I'm going to do the same here for height blend here. And for layer four, I'm going to do the same. And layer five, I'm going to do the same. And let me just move this a little bit. For layer two, I'm going to go for layer two height. And I'm just going to put this one here. I'm going to go layer three height, and I'm just going to move it a little bit here. Move everything. Layer four going to be layer four, height. And finally, layer five, it's going to be layer five height. Now, by default, nothing will change yet. However, let's see what happens now when we paint our landscape. So applying materials, let's just wait a little bit. We'll be finishing soon. There you go. Close this one. We don't need it. You can already see what's going on here. Our blending is actually not having, like, a smooth transition like we had before. So if we go to paint, and let's just say we want to go for this one. You can go ahead and start painting here. You can already see like my landscapes like having a really nice transition. You can also go here for painting layer four. You can see that it's actually using the height of this to paint your landscape, which is fantastic. Okay? We can go for a layer Sorry, I'm painting on water layer. So let's clear all. This is one of the reasons why I'm telling you you should use your base layer to paint everything. So now we have it. So we paint here. See that it's actually blending quite nicely. And we change if we change the texture, let's see how it looks like soon as it loads, Alright. And let's go for this one, for example. Always spend on the base layer as a recommendation. Otherwise, it's just going to be quite you know, it's quite hard to keep track of everything. Now, the good thing is we actually created a material instance that we can change the value of this hight blade contrast. So if we put zero, you will see that some things are changing. But if I go for, like, a very intense contrast, like a maybe something like five. You can already start seeing what's going on here. I can just start painting here. And you won't have that smooth transition that we see. Like, it's going to be much better. And if we increase this, even if we put like let's just put five here. You go and then start painting here to see how it looks like. Et's just wait a little bit. The first time is always like this, and then it will save the data, and then you can just paint freely without having to wait. Can just keep painting here, and eventually we will see some results. Okay? So let's go here. You can see what's going on. You are actually having like a harsh transition, and it's using the height values of this texture to actually do something like this. So the height value works like this. You have the base and the white values go like this, and the black values go like this. This is like a valley of 0.5, like a gray value. So what we're doing with a height blending is when you paint, start with the black values first so you can start painting here. And as you add more intensity, you will go over until you reach the top, which is here. And instead of just blending everything naturally, naturally, sorry, you will start going from the bottom of it. Like, you can actually start adding materials on the peaks of the on the balls of your texture. And that's going to make your scene look much more realistic. Like, for example, I can start painting here, and you will see that if I go here for the height length contrast, if I go zero, everything will be very smooth. If I go for something like very high. You don't want to overdo it something like five. You can just go for something like this. And then you can use it to blend your landscape much better. So you can just start painting here. And at this point, you want to paint everything like in a it's just a matter of testing your game, and, you know, it's like, Oh, I want to paint here, so you start painting, and, you know, it starts looking much more unique. So I highly recommend you to start painting your landscape manually so you can get results like this. And it's actually very, very nice. One thing that I want to do looks like the normals of these textures may be flipped. I'm not entirely sure yet. But if it happens to you, not all textures are compatible with unreal. And I believe it's this one. It could be this one. I'm not so sure. But let's see what happens. If you see this, you will see that you're going to find the property for flip green channel. You can do that, and you will have a different normal value. So it looks like this is better. I think this flip normal is working better. I think this looks more natural. Looks like this texture didn't have the correct flipping position. But now it looks like it's working okay, especially in these areas. I think it's working fine. So we're going to keep it like that. Not every texture needs this, but if you feel like there's something weird with the shadows or everything, and it may be that the normal needs to be flipped. So now that we have paint our layer, let's see what else we can do with this landscape. 30. Creating a Procedural Graph to Spawn Grass: So one of the important things about landscapes is that you can do a lot of things procedurally, and it can save you a lot of time on placing objects manually. So what we're going to do is to spawn some grass here on areas where we have our layer two landscape. So what we're going to do is to enable a plugin. It's called procedural content graph. If you go here, type procedural in plugins, you can enable this and restart the editor. I already did it, so I don't need to do it myself. But as soon as you restart, you will right click and then go for type here. Procedural procedural PCG, and you can just go for a PCG graph. So what I would call it is PCG landscape grass, something like that. Okay? So I'm going to save this, okay? And what I want to do is to actually open it up first. So I can show you what you can see here. And here in this area, basically you have your input and your outputs. There are new things in real Engine 5.5. So first, we are not going to use this input, but we're going to get the landscape first. But before we do that, let's try to drag this graph here. You will see there is a volume. So I have a small volume here that we can test everything. So what I can do in this PCG graph is to actually get landscape data. And this will give me the data of my landscape, like the position of the vertex, the materials that I'm using and everything. So after that, I'm going to go for a surface sampler. And here, I'm going to set the density for it. So if you want to see how it looks like, press D to DvaC. You can also devoc here. Check here. And what you will see here is basically bounding boxes. So bounding boxes are basically the limits of each mesh. So for example, if I have a grass texture like this, the bounding box will be something like the top height of this plus the top width and the top bottom, and it will give me the boundaries of these mesh limits. It's not giving me an exact measurement of every mesh, but it's giving me an approximation of these mesh bonds, which can be also changed later. So what I can also do is go for transfer points. Transform, sorry, Transform. Let's just go transform points. There you go. So transfer points, let me dvt this dvct this. What I can do actually is, for example, change the rotation in C axis by -800 and 180. -100 8,180, and you will see that now all my points that I'm spawning here, they have different rotations. Now remember, each one of those is a point. In procedural graphs, we work with points, and every point will be the position where you will spawn something, you will do something. You will manipulate anything that you want, you will work with points. So by changing the points properties, you're changing the complete output of so what else we can change? Well, for example, we can change the scale like 0.5 as minimum and the maximum of 1.7. So when you see here, you see that you have measures here. There are a little bit overlapping now because you can change the size of it. It's not really important because of the grass. Most grass will be overlapping. You can also change the rotation a little bit, like minus ten and ten, and you can do the same here, just a tiny bit, just a little bit like this. Okay? You can also have the offset minimum, like you can have absolute offset if you want, but you can go for, like, minus five and minus five to make sure everything is nice and on the ground, which is very nice. Okay? So what else do what else can you do here? Well, you can spawn meshes. So what you can do, let me dvc this, and you can vote for static mesh spawner. And this will actually give you an actual output. So what you can do here is go for mesh entries, type plus, and then go here and select a mesh. I'm going to just choose any mesh, for example, this hanfer cube. And what you will see is that I'm spawning this cube, and it will just be very, you know, very easy for me to extend this. Like, I want to make this bigger so I can have a bigger room to work with. You can just go for something like this, and you can see that it's actually working quite well, to be honest. Another thing that you can do in these PCG graphs is you can actually change the density of this. So let me just move this a little bit so you can see what's going on. And here I can just go for one, for example, or increase the sampler type, and let me just go for PCG, landscape grass, go to generate. You can change the points per square meter. You can increase or decrease it. Let me just leave it at the value of 0.1. Okay. You can also change the size of this. So let me just go for, for example, ten by ten by ten. We'll just make everything a little bit different size, every bonding box. So it's a matter of playing with this and you can also change the points per square meter, like 100, 0.001. The less the value, the less points you will have until you have a number a value that pretty much compensates everything. Obviously, you can change the size of the, the bonding bots. If you make it smaller, you have smaller, you know, more points to work with if you want to. The smaller the points here, the point extends, you can increase the number of bounding boxes that you can have. So I'm going to leave it at value of 100 everything for now, leave it as a default because what I want to do is to actually filter this by the type of material that I have. So I don't need to place it like everywhere. I only want it to be a specific type of material. So I'm going to do that in the next lesson. 31. Filtering the Spawn for the type of Layer: So the next thing I want to do is to actually filter this by the type of material that I'm using. And in order to do that here, I can add another node that is called attribute filter. And what I can do is out and click to delete this and I can just connect this one. By default, I'm not going to see anything because I haven't I'm not filtering by anything. So I'm going to put the target attribute four. I'm going to call it. The name of this should be the layer that you want to use. So there are multiple ways of doing this. Option one, you choose one of these materials, for example, layer two, which is going to be my grass material, and you will spun grass on every type of layer two that you have. The downside of this is that you won't have control over where you don't want to spun the grass. So to fix that, you can just move around different areas of your map where you want your procedural components to work. You can put another volume here and you will have your grass there. The second option is to add another layer blend. So what I'm going to do is to actually I could actually add another one, but I'm going to show you with a layer two first. So I can go here and put L two. Remember, it has to be the same name if you put L, you should be using L and the number exactly how and how it's working here. So as soon as you have this L two, also, you're going to use a constant threshold, and instead of double, we're going to use float because going to be a float value. Okay? So just like that, now you will see that I have my meshes spawning only where I paint my grass two layer. So if I go for my grass two, you can go ahead and paint here. And it will take a while, and then it will spa the meshes. So I can just go back here and spa more meshes. And I can just decrease the value of this. I can start, you know, painting something different. So I can start, you know, painting a little bit a little bit nicer. It's always a a good idea to just leave it as it is to just have something nicer to work with, and that's it. So every time you paint a layer two, you will spa the mesh. Now, you will notice that obviously, what if I paint here? So if I paint here my layer two, for example, I have my layer two here, and I can just paint here. I will just add it all over the place. What you can do is actually just move it here, A and click. And you will see that it will actually give you the option to choose where you want your procedural stuff happening. Alternatively, you can also scale everything for the whole landscape, and it will spawn the meshes everywhere. So, for example, if I were to spawn here and just make it really, really, really big, just like this, you will see that I will only be spawning on areas where it's, you know, my landscape is working. Which works. Like, I have it here, for example, I'm having some grass to here, grass through there. It's always a good There are multiple choices that you can have. But with that, we have already filtered where we want our landscape, grass to spa. Obviously, you can do this with many different things such as rocks. Maybe you want the rocks to spa here as well. That can also be a possibility. The first thing I want to do is to actually put some meshes here because I want some grass, and it's a good idea to start importing some static measures so we can see how the grass views here, and after that, we can make some decisions. 32. Importing Foliage: Oh, as always, I'm going to go for Quicksel type grass here in fab, and filtering by the free versions. If you have acquired Quickll assets before 2025, then these assets, you can grab the paid ones if you wish, I'm just going to grab the free ones because that's what most people will have, and we will work with the tutorial with them. So you can grab as many as you want. I'm going to start with two, and as I need more variation, I'm going to add more. So I'm going to import this. Let's go ahead and go for new folder here called grass. Actually, let's tap it foliage. Go ahead and let's tap it cross 01 for the first one. And what I'm going to do is to go ahead for downloads, and you will see that you have your you have a lot of acid here. So first things first, you have the variations and you have the colors. So what I'm going to do is to import everything, and we will see how we can work with. So first off, import the variations of the LOD zero, just like this. LOD zero, LOD zero. I only want the LOD zero. And just import those here. So let's go ahead and open. Let's go for ODs. You can import the ODs. So we will leave them like that. Maybe it will grab the, you know, material. And also, we can go for import materials, import textures, so it will know which textures to use. Materials, I don't really want to import material. I want to create my own material, so I'm going to leave it like that, but I do want to import some textures, so go here and import. And there you go. So apparently, these textures are not related to the material. So what I will do is to import the base color. And I'm not going to work with the billboards for now. I'm going to go for my bump cavity I'm not really need. Let's go for base color, normal translucency, roughness, and opacity and specular just like that. Okay. So with that, I'm going to create my new material. So I'm going to right click, go to material and call it grass. Okay. So if you want to create a material for this, first off, let's open up the static mesh Editor. So if we go here for foliage, grass, open up this one, and we're going to put the grass here. So we're going to put this material here. There you go. So now that we have this, let's go ahead and grab some textures. So we can go for virtual texture also, but to be honest, let's just leave it like that because we don't really need it. Base color goes here. Opacity, we're going to have to change this shady model, click here on an empty part of the graph and go for two sided foliage. So with this, you will go here to the opacity. There you go. And also, make sure this is two sided. Okay. The next thing is going to be the translucency. So this one is going to go for the subsurface color. And then we have the normal map. We're going to grab the normal map here. And then what we're going to do is to grab the roughness and put it just right here. Right. I don't know if we really need to change the specular. I don't think so. Let's take a look at what the specular values are. They're really low. Maybe we could try to go for them, but let's just apply and see how this looks like. So this is our material. It's great. Now, we do have Nant, so we don't really need to worry too much about the ODs anymore, which is fantastic. So with that, I'm going to actually apply this to all my meshes here. But I actually going to create a material instance just in case I call it I grass because maybe I want to change the color. So let's click on this. Let's go for Migras. This one also Migras Okay, double click on this and my grass. There you go. Double click on this. Do the same. And go for this one. There you go. And then go for this one as well. Great. So now that we have this, let's save everything. And let's actually, before we change it, we actually want to put this one here to the foliage. Let's move here 'cause I actually want to import the other one. So let's go to import. Let's go for this base color. Normal opacity, translucency and normal. Oh, this is the billboard. Sorry. Base color, billboard we're not using. Let's go for normal opacity roughness and translucency. And then we're going to go for all the LOD zeros. And just click the import bottom. Just click Import. Okay. Now we will add the same material. Instead, we're just actually going to change our grass material to actually be parameters. So right click. This will be Alveto, right click. This will be roughness, right click, will be opacity. And actually, the opacity, there's a couple of things I need to change here. So if you go here, actually, what you need to do is to go here and set to mask. Otherwise, it's not going to work quite well. So let's go to mask. Okay. And then we need to go here and set it as the parameter Opacity. Make sure to always use the mass texture, and this one is going to be my subsurface color. Let's just call it surface subsurface color. And then we're going to go for normal. And that's it. So the next thing is I just need to create a material incense for this. And it's going to be very easy. I just need to go here to my foliage and duplicate this one because I don't want to This will be my grass 02, and this will be my grass 01. So my grass 01, I don't need to change it. But my grass 02, I just need to change these textures. So I'm going to go ahead and go for my grass two, and my base color is going to be here. My normal is going to be here. My opacity, I'm actually going to change this into mask. Save it. Opacity is going to be here. Roughness here and translucency, it's going to be this one. So now that I have this, I will just go one by one. I won't show you, like, how I do it on all of them, but just go for grass two. And apparently, we're importing a texture that we're not actually using here. So make sure we have the the opacity is here. Yes, it is okay. It is fine. It is fine. Oh. Okay. So yeah, this one is fine. Looks like this one is just not going to work, so we're not going to use this mesh. This one works just fine. So let's go ahead and repeat that for here. Press two working just fine. Apparently, this one is just not going to work well, let's just delete it. Grass too. And I'm going to finish this off on my side. I getting a little bit long. But with that, we already have enough grass to start replacing the placeholder static mesh that we have for our procedure 33. Adding our grass meshes to our Procedural Graph: Alright, so now that we have our mesh here, we just need to update our PCG graph. So we're going to go to our PCG. If you don't remember where you put it, you can just click here, and Control B will take you there. So it's apparently materials. I don't really want it to be there, so I'm going to move it to Landscape tutorial. And double click on this. And what we need to do first before changing anything is to change the current mesh that we're using, which is blue box. So it's going to be very easy. We just going to need to go for our static mesh spanner, and we're just going to go for grass. And we're going to start adding all of those here. So first things first, we're going to add this one. So the first one is going to be this. There you go. Like here. And you don't really need to change anything from this except if you want collision or not, for example, if you want to add rocks or something, then it may be a good idea to put collision. But now you will see that we have our grass here. Alright, so let's continue to do that by adding another element. Go to the scriptor and then go for this one. At another element, and we're going to do that for all our potential measures. For this kind of thing, the more variety you have, the better it is, especially for nature, nature tends to be a little bit chaotic, a little bit unpredictable. So if you have a lot of measures you can choose with, your procedural tool will actually look more natural. A lot of the look of your procedural stuff will depend on the measures that you're actually putting and the variation. So go ahead and put this one here, and now we're going to go for grass to go for this one as well. And as you can see, we're adding quite a lot of variation. We keep adding those have quite a lot of measures to work with. I'm going to add a couple more. Actually, I'm just going to finish with everything. I think may be a good idea. So it's just three more. That's all we need. So let's go ahead and descriptor, wild grass. And then I believe this is the last one. Open it up and go ahead and click here. So now that you have this, let's go and see what's going on here we are actually having different measures randomly scattered here, which is great. This is what we want. Some of them are below the ground. So make sure you put the transform points. I believe we offset this a little bit. Yeah, but minus five. Let's go for zero and minus one maybe so that some things can be a little bit upper. There you go. You don't want things to be floating. So now we need to play a little bit with the density. And how do you test this is you will go to your surface sampler and press D, and this is how you can check your boxes, right? So let me have a little bit more room to work with. These points per square meter actually will depend on how many objects you have. Let's go. Actually, let's put everything by ten by ten by ten, and let's increase this by maybe by 100. Maybe 100 will be too much. Let's make them bigger. You can tell it's a lot of points. It's a lot of points, for sure. So let's go for this. Okay. So we don't really need to sample everything, and you can see that I have my grass here. Now you can understand why I told you before, like the importance of, you know, having limited areas where you can actually paint your foliage. Otherwise, it's going to be quite heavy. So if you go for ten, I think ten is a nice number to work with. Probably will be good. So what we're going to do is to actually go for transform points, and we're going to change the scale to make it a little bit more wild. So we can go for 2.5. So some of them are a little bit bigger. And there you go. So now you have your grass here, and wherever you paint, you will get it. So let's go ahead and try to paint something here. So if we go for our landscape and go for the base layer and start painting, we can go for our layer two, which is our grass. Change this and start painting here and increase the tool strength just in case you can see that it's actually loading because it's computing at the same time. So you can just go ahead and paint this like this, and then it will load, and then you will have your grass, which is fantastic. Another thing I want to do actually, it's to make it a little bit like you know, I think I want to try my game first. So if I click from here, you see that my grass is kind of big, to be honest. It's kind of big. So I actually want to change the size, it's good that we have our character there to check everything. So we can go for transfer points, and the scale minimum the scale maximum is going to be two, maybe 2.1. And that should be it. And with that, we are having some nice variation here. We're actually rotating everything. And also, we can even go for something non uniformly and scale on the C axis a little bit more. I can go for a tree, for example. And what will happen is like some of them will be a little bit taller. Which will add a lot of variation. So I kind of like it, to be honest. It tends to work quite well. So with that set, I think we can move on and see if we can add some more details to, like, these rocks or these pebbles or whatever. So let's do that next. 34. Enabling Nanite Tesselation feature: Alright, so now that we have our grass. I actually want to enable a very important feature in a real engine five, and that is nani teslaation. Nani tessellation it's a new feature that came not so long ago, and it allows you to displace your geometry in your landscape using the textures that we have. So in order to do that, I need to close this and what you need to do is to actually open your landscape I mean, your project, you can go here, right click Show in folder, and you will go to the Convict tab and then go to let me find it here. It's the default engine dot INI right click Edit. And you will find here the render settings. So let's see if we can find it. So Visual texture. True, render settings. There you go. And what you will do is to actually go here and copy this. I already have it here. It's the R Nani tessellation, or low tessellation equal one and R Nant tessellation equal one. So copy this and just space it here. You can even put it down. It doesn't matter the order. As long as it's under render settings, just go ahead and copy this, save it. And now that you have this, you just need to open up real engine. And I will take you to the material settings where you can actually activate this feature in a real Engine five. 35. Enabling Displacement on our Material: Okay, so now we are in a real and we need to open our material to try this. And in order to allow this, we need to go here and type tessellation. Click here. All right. And what you will find is that you have a displacement output here. If we go here to the properties and go for displacement, you will see that you have a magnitude of four and a center of 0.5. So what this means is, like I told you before you have your height map, and here is the value of 0.5, and everything it is your plane, and your height maps, the white values are going to be here, and the black values are going to be here, and they're going to do some kind of bumping. They're going to be bumping into the surface. So this value, let's say, it's four. So if you put a value of one here, your bumps are going to be smaller. So there is no right or wrong value here. You just need to test it out. The good thing is, we already have that displacement in our material, so we just need to connect this. And apply. Now, by default, nothing will happen yet because our landscape is not using nanite. So let's take a look at this. You can save this. And you can see our landscape seems to be the same as always. So what we can do is to go to the landscape here and look for the Nani tab, and here go to Enable Nanite, click here, and then build data. And what this will do it will build the data of your landscape. And it will allow you to have tessellation here. So you have this. Let's take a look at the let's take a look at this. Go for this revealed data. We have already done it. Revealed data. There you go. And now we're going to see our landscape being revealed with a nanite feature. Alright, so now our landscape is using nanite and take a look at what's going on now. Now, nothing seems to be working now because it's loading, but as soon as it finished loading, we can we will see how it actually looks like. You can already see what's going on here. Looks like a magnitude of four was a little bit too much for us, a little bit too much. So what we're going to do is to actually go to our landscape master. And go for not here, go to this place and put a magnitude of maybe 0.5. It's a little bit. So we're going to do that. And now our landscape will have a different value here. You see that it's actually having a little bit of shadows everywhere. Still a little bit too much. So we're going to go for 0.2. Let's go for 0.2, just a tiny bit. Okay, so now what you're seeing here is actually a really cool feature that you already having displacement in your geometry. So let's take a look how this looks like with our character here. So let's play. You can already see like there is a lot of value, a lot of things happening. I feel like the still a little bit too much, a little bit too much. So let's go ahead and go for 0.1 and actually divide this by two, which is 0.05, click Apply. I only want it to be like a small little detail. There you go. That's much better. That is much better. So now that you have this, look at how it looks like with the lining. You can see that we're actually getting some really nice shadows whenever we Oops, that's a little bit too much. So if you take a closer look at this, you will see that your mesh is actually being displaced. And you're getting some really nice shadows. If we go to the detail lines, you will see that you're getting some really, really nice shadows. So that's the nani Tesilation. It's quite a heavy feature. It's still experimental, so you shouldn't be using it in a project that is like, you need to ship it or something. It can be quite heavy, but it works quite well. So in case you want to add it, so that's your nani testilation. And with that, we're going to move to other things. 36. Painting your Landscape: Okay, so now we reach a point where our landscape is actually, our material is very good, but we just need to paint a little bit. So this is the fun part of it. And as soon as you have your material, you can start painting your landscape. So let me just control L to move the light so I can have, like, a composition. I kind of like this one. Maybe we can go for this because what I'm seeing here is it's basically a shadow here that we're creating in this area and elite area that's happening here, and then another shadow and elite area and another lead area after the shadow. So I think it's very interesting. We're going to leave it like that for now. And let's go ahead and actually actually paint something here. So we're going to go for our landscape. And what you will notice is that if we go to our base layer, let me just move it a little bit, we go. Okay. So we can go for our base layer and start painting. So, for example, this part, we can just go for paint and start painting the layer five. Probably maybe a good idea. So let's go for layer five here, and then we can paint a little bit of layer one. Just like that. Okay. So the idea is to play a little bit with those tools to see, you know, what works best for you and everything. I'm going to actually stop the PCG graph from actually doing something. So let's go for these PCG landscape graphs, and I think we can stop the Let me see if there is how to activate. No, let's just go for activate it off so we don't really need to worry about this for now. And we can just start painting here just like that. Okay. There's some weird shadowing going on with this. And if you see this, probably you can go for your project settings and go for virtual shadow virtual shadow maps, sometimes it happens, but you can try the shadow maps if that's the case for you, it's really it's really annoying, to be honest. But, you know, it is what we have for now. So we can paint a little bit of layer two here and a little bit of layer four. And let's decrease the tool strength so that we can you can actually have some kind of transition. You can already see, as soon as I go here, it's very nice. And you can go here and start painting the layer two. Is a little bit. I can have like grass here and there. Next area I want to work with is probably this one. So let me go for layer five, start painting this just like that. Increase the two strength a little bit, so I can just go ahead and paint something like this. Can paint all the shore line with some rocks. And then I can go for this one, for example, and I can paint the layer four. I can do the same here. And then I can go to maybe layer one and start painting here. You don't necessarily to use an auto material, but as you can see, it's actually helping us to just have something to work with at the beginning. You know, it's quite nice to have that at the beginning. If you like I said before, it's better than having an empty canvas. It's like, it's quite easier to work with. So just go ahead and do that start painting here. It's a little bit of a transition By the way, if you want to go to this mode, just go to the unlit mode. Just go ahead and keep painting here. At this point, you can just decide what you want to do with that. Like, for example, I want to paint a little bit of layer two here, which I have my grass, and then a little bit of layer one. You know, it's sometimes you have really nice textures, really nice materials, but you're not really, like, painting it well. It happened a lot. I remember when I was working at Ubisof I will be testing a new tool for painting. A tool was working well, but because I wasn't presenting it in a way that I should have done, like, you know, just painting it like to prove that the tool is actually working. It may look like, Hey, actually, your material is not very nice, maybe we can change it. And it's not really that. Sometimes it's just that you're not painting your landscape or your mesh with the right tools, and that happens quite often. So you can just start painting here. What I'm trying to do here is just breaking it down a little bit. Obviously, we have quite a lot going on, and our a material is actually helping us quite a bit in this case. I'm only going to worry about this area, which is my main shot. I can go ahead and take a look how it looks like from here, and it's quite okay. It's quite okay, to be honest. So now that we have this, let's go ahead and change some stuff. Like, I want to change the water to have a better color. So let's do that now. 37. Changing the Lake color: So I painted my landscape a little bit. You can compare it with yours to see what's the difference. I also going to go for my PCG and activate. So I can see the grass and have, you know, a better view of what's going on. So you can see that I painted my grass here. Probably I will need to add more density. Like, for example, in this area, I can just paint a little bit here, so I can just go for a layer two and increase like painting density so I can have, like, more grass, so you can see, like, it's loading, and later on, it will change. So it's up to you what you want to do with this, or maybe you want to feel like, No, you know what? Just just remove this for now, and your PCG graph will be updating as well. So it's up to you what you want to do with that. For me, I want to have this shot from here, so I'm going to actually this shot is not bad at all. Like, let me you just go back here and yeah, something like that, and I can control tree to save it. And I have my bookmark. And what I can do is actually first change the water. So in order to change the water material, you need to go here to the water lake and go for material, type it here, and you will see that you have a water material lake and yeah, that's it. So HLD water, we don't really need to change it because this is the water that we'll be seen from distance and our water is very close. So water material lake, double click on this, and you will have a bunch of properties that you can play with. So for me, I want to play a little bit with the absorption. So let's go ahead and take a look how this looks like. So if we actually change the color here for something like something like this, like a little bit greenish. I think it looks better, in my opinion. So I can also change this, but let's go ahead and leave it like that. Like 250 looks like a decent number. I don't know how it would look like if I just leave it like that. Let's just go ahead and a little bit greenish, just so I can blend with my I can actually go for a little bit red to blend with my greens, but let's go for actually go for this. Actually, not bad. So what we will do is to actually copy this, okay? You can also change, like, the scattering, like how it looks like. You can just play with it quite a lot if you want. For me, I don't really want to Okay, that's really cool. I don't really want to change it that much. I feel like this is okay, so I'm going to just going to copy this. And what I will do now is go for my river. I click on my River, and in material, I can go for I have a bunch of materials here. So I have my water material river to lake transition and my water material river. So let me open the river first. And the absorption, I'm going to click here and I'm going to paste it. And you will see that I already have my material and it's working quite well. So I don't really need to work on the transition. I think this is working just fine. So let me save this. I think this is a really good proof that I actually need to update my computer. It's already been five years already. So let's go ahead and close this. So I like the water now a little bit better. I think it's working quite nice. So the next thing I want to change is actually the sky. The sky can be a little bit better. So let's do that now. 38. Adding an HDR Image to the sky: So now that I want to do as making some final touches for this is to play with the lining. It would be a shame to finish your landscape at not having a good lining here. So I want to turn on a plugin that is called HDRI. So HDRI backup, turn it on and restart the editor. I already have it, so I don't need to do that. And in order to use this, I actually need to use some HDRI images. And there is a really cool site called polyhven where you can download these textures for free. So you have like this one, for example, or like the sunset, this pure sky, and by default, it will be 16 K. You can download eight K. Eight Ks what I recommend, but actually four K actually works okay. So you can play with this, choose whatever you want. You can take a look at how it looks like, how the lining works here. So this will be a replacement for our sky. We're going to use the HDRI drop for that. So in order to use this, we're going to actually delete all light. So if you go to Window and I believe you can go for light mixer, so you can see I have my lights here, but actually, I want to delete everything here. I want to delete my directional light. It's deleted. I want to delete my skylight and my sky atmosphere. I want to delete my cloud, and pretty much everything will be dark, right? So what I actually want to do is go here to the green plus icon. And by the way, I need to import this texture. So just go ahead, go to Import, double click on this one, and it may take a while to process the texture, but you don't need to do anything as soon as you import them. What you need to make sure is that these MIP gen settings is set to no MIP maps. Okay? So no me maps here, save it. And with that, you're going to have your texture ready. By default, this is going to be HDR compressed. You can go for HDR or H DR compressed, both are fine. No me maps are very important because you don't want this texture to be blurred based on the distance. And SRGB will be off by default. If you use the HDR compressed, that's okay. So you don't need to worry about that. So as soon as this one finishes, we will be able to use our HDR image. So let's go ahead to the green plus icon and type HDRI, and you will see that you have your HDRI backdrop. So let me put this here. And you will see that I actually have like a like a kind of like a sphere with inverted normals where I can see the texture. So first things first, I want to increase the size. So I'm going to go for maybe 15,000. And now you can see that my texture is actually there. Now, obviously, I don't want my texture here, so let me just move it down. There you go. Now, you will see that, you know, this HDR comes with a skylight, so I don't need the skylight to add a skylight I already comes with skylight. What I need to add it's actually directional light. So we're going to add it later, but for now, we're going to use one of the textures that we use. So we can go for this one, for example. If you like it, you can go for that. And what you can also do is to rotate it on the C axis. You can rotate it like this until you find an angle you like. Like, for example, you may find like you want this one, but I actually want this lining coming from here. I think it's really cool. You can also try this one to see if you like this sky. So choose whatever you like. I think I'm going to go for this one. So the next thing I need is to go for the intensity and probably go for something like 0.5. Notice that it's actually increasing my shadows here is not only the intensity of this, but actually increasing the shadows. So I have this texture here. So the light's coming from here. This is great. So now I need to add my directional light ahead and put it here. And I'm going to actually move it to zero, just like that. And actually, what I will do is to try to simulate where the light is coming from here. So actually, I can use press Control L, try to simulate and maybe something like that. Alright. So we can go for that. We can also go for our sky atmosphere. So go ahead and put that. And also, we can go for our fog. So we can go for I believe we have our fog here from the beginning. Yeah, we do have our fog. So if we put it zero, we will have zero fog density. We're not gonna touch it yet. Just make sure it's volumetric. Volumetric fog is actually really, really cool and you can change the scattering distribution of this, like how much **** you want and the Alvedo as well, what color. For now, we're not going to touch the ****. We're actually going to be going into the directional light, which is already working for us very well. I actually want to go for the HDRI backdrop and the skylight. I'm going to go for SLS captures. I have real time capture, so I'm going to have something like this, or I can go for specific cube map, and I can just choose this one. So basically, I will use the shadows that I get from this. So my shadows are going to be tinted by the colors of the sky, which is great. You also have the light color that you can change. So keep that in mind. Let's play a little bit with the skylight. There you go. And now that you have this, you can go for the directional light and start changing some things. So for example, I want to increase the intensity of this. Something like that. Or maybe I want to have some kind of light shaft occlusion or light shaft bloom, and the bloom is actually really cool. I'm going to show you what it does. It's actually giving us some kind of glot right here, which is really cool. I don't know if you can feel it, but it's really, really cool. I'm going to turn it off for now. I'm going to turn it on later. So for now, I just want to play a little bit with the lining of something like that. Something like that is fine. Alright, so let's go ahead. Actually play a little bit with this. Maybe we can have some kind of like a different lining setup. It's fine. So let's go for this lining. And the next thing I want to add is some post process volume, which is also related to the lining. So let's go and do that now. 39. Using Post Process to control the lightning: Okay, so the reason we haven't touched the lining that much is because we need to set our post process volume first. And the reason for that is that we can control the light intensity coming from there. So let's go here to the green plus icon and type post process, so you can get the post process volume. So you can just go here and drag a volume anywhere in the map is fine. Now, in order for this volume to affect everything, you need to go for a search and type and bound. Click here. And now everything that we do here is going to change our landscape. So for example, I want to add some bloom. I can go for increase the bloom of this. That can be really cool, to be honest. Convolution bloom also as well, can be quite cool depending on what you want to do. So I'm going to go for standard bloom, leave it like that. And the exposure is what I actually want to want to change. So out exposure histogram, you will see that if I play my game, the lining will change depending on where I'm looking at. So if I look like there, it's going to adapt to your eye, and I don't really want that. What I actually want is to have a consistent lining. So instead of out exposure, I'm going to go for manual, and you will see that everything turned dark. So I'm going to play with this exposure compensation to see what results I can. So I can get something like this, for example, and what I can do also is go to the saturation and for now, put everything on black and white. Black and white is actually going to be very useful for us to see if our image is, you know, interesting or not. So if we put it like this, it's going to be wash out with white. If we're going like this, going to be too dark. So something like this, I feel like it can be really interesting. That's very really cool. So let's go for 8.5 maybe, or eight, maybe 8.5. All right, so let's leave it like that. The next thing I want to add is my let's see local exposure. We don't really want that chromatic aberration. Not really. Let's keep going. Lens flare can actually be a really interesting one if we increase it. That depends where we look at if we're looking at our where you see the lens flare coming from there. But not really what I'm looking for for now. So the next thing, it's the deep field can be an interesting one, but we don't really need it for now. Temperature, actually, let me change the saturation back to one. Okay? You can see how it's really affecting everything. So it's really, really cool. So let's go for the shadows. We can tin the shadows a little bit, like, make it like super saturated. Really want to change anything here. Mi tons, I don't really want to change anything. What I'm looking for is the film, the slope, the toe, and the shoulder, especially the slope and the toe. So if I go for something like this, you will see that I have more contrast. If I go for something like this, I will have less contrast, depending on what you want to go. My advice for you is if you're doing something more stylized, more contrasting colors, and more saturated colors will work for you. So if we go for toe, for example, this is too dark. So we can just play a little bit with this. I don't recommend you to change the values that much. Just actually, the default value for this one is really cool. So we're going to change the shoulder, global illumination and all that stuff, we're going to leave it like that. And now that we have this, we can also go for our saturation and actually play a little bit with this, maybe we can increase saturation of everything. You don't want it to be super saturated. If you desaturate things, it's going to look a little bit more cinematic feeling. That depends on what you want to do, of course. So light coming from here, this is really cool. I like it. And bloom. We can increase the bloom a little bit. Even convolution bloom, I think it may work for us. I'm not super sold on the idea yet, so let's just go for the normal bloom and default value seems to be okay. A little bit, like, put it on one or something. That's totally fine. And with that, like, we don't really need to change this. Chromatic aberration, maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit. Obviously, if you go for depth of field. So let's try to find the depth of field here. So depth of field. There you go. So you can change these values here for something that you want. So for example, I want to let me just increase the values a lot so that I can see what's going on. So if I go for 0.01, it's too much. You can play with this value. Anyone is fine. So for now, you can go for this and start increasing let's just change this to the default value and change the focal distance. You can see how cool it is, right? So, and now you can go for the sensor width can decrease it. It's a little bit. You can have some kind of blur at the beginning. So that works quite well. The next thing I want to do now that I have my post process is to actually change the light color. So let's do that next. 40. Changing the Lightning: So in order to work with lights, I have a bunch of tips I can give you. So the first one is the intensity. The intensity of the light obviously is going to be one of the most important things. And if you put zero, it's basically like it's during night. I want to have something like this. What we had before was really okay. We can also go for something a little bit yellowish. Sunlight usually people say that it's like white color is the color of the sunlight. In general, it's going to have a yellow tint, just a tiny bit. So you don't want to go for something like this, but just a tiny bit of yellow. It's good for you. So you can also play with the temperature and go for something cold or something really warm. Like, that's up to you to decide what you want to do with that. Okay? So effects were obviously cast shadows. We talked about this before the light heft. So if we go for this, we have, kind of like a shadow here and then go for the heft bloom. It's going to be quite a big bloom, so we can increase the threshold. And actually, if you move here, you will find that your lights, you're having some kind of gut ray, something like that. I don't particularly like this feature in this particular case, but if you like it, you can put it. Depending on how your landscape is looking, you may put your lining in a position where you have a gut ray or something. So that's for the directional light, Let's go for the HDRI backdrop and go for the skylight. So the skylight, obviously, we're not using real time capture. We're using specific cube map. And we also have the intensity. So light color obviously is going to be the color of the HDRI, but you can also tint this. So if you put this one, you will have a reddish shadow or, like, a bluish shadow. Sometimes, if you're working on a desert or something like that, you can tint the shadows to be a little bit blue to balance the colors a little bit. So I mostly want to play with the intensity. So if you put too much intensity, obviously, we will lose the shadows. If we put zero, we will have super hard shadows. So I think like one or I don't know if two's too much. Probably one is okay. The light color, obviously, like, a little bit blue, just a tiny bit can be okay. Just a tiny bit, don't overdo it. Okay. So you also have indirect lining intensity. So if you put these to ten, you will have a lot of bouncing lining. Don't try to overdo it. Okay. So that's it for the HDRI backdrop. Then you have the sky atmosphere. So you have this light here, this property here that you can play with that, but to be honest, you have like kind of a lot of values to play with. So I tend to leave them at the default values. I don't really change it that much because most of our post process is doing quite a lot of work for us. So now that we have this, I think I think it's a good time to wrap it up. 41. Using the Procedural Tools to change the result: So one last thing I want to do before wrapping it up. I don't really like this shape. And the cool thing is that we're actually using procedural components here. So if we actually go here to our landscape, and before doing that, let's go to PCG, go here to the PCG graph, landscape graphs and deactivate it for now. So I don't really want to use this one. And what I can do is actually go for my landscape. And find the base layer. And you will see that you have your custom mass. So let's try to find which one we're using. So it is this one. So what I can do is to play a little bit with the C offset, so I can just go ahead and change this a little bit. I can also play with the fall of angle, just like that. I can also play a little bit with the cold strength or the displacement. Displacement can also be a nice feature to have from time to time, and I can change the coral a little bit. So I can go here and change the landscape material. Have a different coral. Maybe something like this. Let's take a look. I actually like it much better, and I think it's working quite well. And let's go ahead and change the tiling for the displacement. We can even go and change the displacement tiling for something that we want to use here. For example, let's go for our rock, maybe. We can go for this one. You will see that it actually is having quite a different result. So you can play with that if you want. And let's just increase the size of this. It's just going to be really, really, really handy. So let's increase the the height of this. So you can't really tell how powerful this is. Let's go for this one. Let's go for where is our landscape. It is this one. So we can even go for something like more displacement, maybe, or maybe we can go for change the angle of the fall off, can be very big or very small. We can leave it at 45 looks like a decent number to have. And obviously, we can change the coral if you want. If you're not satisfied with that. That's the beautiful thing about this is that we're actually having such a cool landscape to work with and, you know, change the cool strength and everything to, you know, just create something more impactful. And I actually like this shape more. I don't know why. Let me change Let me save this value and change the angle a little bit. Maybe something like that. So I actually like it. I actually like it a lot. So let's go ahead and actually go for our PCG and activate it. And one last thing that you need to do if you change things, you will lose your nanite, right? So it may be you're may be having an issue where your nanites really not working. So in that case, you go for landscape and go for revealed data. What this will do is to rebuild your landscape with the new geometry to create the nanite messes. So with that, I hope you have enjoyed the course. It's a course made for beginners. Hopefully, if you didn't know about landscapes, now you know a little bit of everything. There's so many things you can do here. Really, the sky is the limit for this, and there are many, many other things that you can add such as meshes and, you know, to make things more prettier. I will leave it up to you to see since you can be a little bit more creative and add, like, a rock or something to make everything look nice. So that's it for me. I hope you have enjoyed this course. I hope you have learned something. And if you want to learn more from me, make sure to check out my other courses. I have a lot of courses related to environment art, modeling materials, and many more coming. So make sure to follow, and I will see you in the next course.