Quixel Bridge Materials
We are now going to start adding multiple materials to our world. We will also be blending them together so we will have a nice flow between surfaces. To do this we will want to look into some of the mega-scans.
To find the mega scans we will have to open up the quixel bridge. We are going to select the add object >quixel bridge which will open up the library.
We are then going to select Surfaces. Surfaces are basically materials we can use. We are going to pick 3 different materials here that we are going to blend together. We are going to pick a stone layer, mud/dirt layer, and grass/moss. layer. We are going to pick a rocky steppe material and download it. We are going to use the highest quality for our build, use whatever suits your needs best. When done downloading let’s add it to our project by clicking + symbol. When done the contents of the material will end up in our content browser.
We also downloaded the Rocky_Forest_Floor and the Mossy Forest Floor for our scene. We can close our bridge out for now.
We are now going to add a new folder called materials at the content level. We are then going right-click to create a new material. This is going to be called M_Landscape. Open up our new material.
Go back into the megascans folder and move our texture’s from one of our materials downloaded into our new material. We are going to do this for all of our textures.
We are then going to add a LandscapeLayerCords node. This allows us to map our textures onto our landscape.
Now we are going to create a landscape Layer Blend. Now we are going to need 4 of them, but we are going to setup them ahead of time before we duplicate them.
If you go over to the details panel on the left hand side and click the Layers + an idex will appear that we can expand. This will give a bunch of information options we can enter for our layer.
We are going to change the layer name, based upon what we are going to put into it.
Let’s comment each node so we know what we are plugging into each blend node (base color, normal, Ambient Occlusion, Roughness).
Now for A/O and roughness we are going to use the red channel for A/O and the green for roughness as these textures are packaged together into one.
We sometimes want to be able to paint out some of our landscape using the Opcaity Mask. So we are going to select our m_landscape output node and go over to the details panel. We are going to go down to blend mode under Material category and change it from Opaque to Masked and we then have the option to select Opcacity mask. Then add a Landscape Visibily Mask node and plug it in.
Now we are going to hook up the rest of our outputs.
Save your material when complete.
Now go back into the editor and select our landscape. In the landscape’s details panel there is a landscape material option where we are going to select the material we just created.
When we apply it our landscape will change to the color of the material, but you will notice something is wrong when you apply it.
Not what you had envisioned I’m sure. It is very reflective and the colors look nothing like what we had selected for surfaces.
The problem is we have no layer information. We are going to select our landscape mode. We are going to select Paint and select +on our material and select Weight-Blender Layer. We will then be asked to save this in a location and we’re just going to choose materials and click save. Repeat for all 3 layers. Our landscape will now look like this.
Now if we zoom in to ground level we will see a ton of repeating patterns in our scene.
We are going to go back into our landscape material and change our landscape coordinates of our branches to 3 in the details panel of the landscape coords mapping scale.
It’s not perfect, but it does look a little bit better, but we can now paint in our other layers. For blending purposes it is better to have a smaller brush and a higher fall-off. We painted in some of the other materials
We are now going to start bringing in other assets and tools to help building our level out.
