Dowwnload a couple of Megascans ground textures
Make a landscape in your level
Make a new material -call it M_LandscapeBlend
Open it and tick Use Material Attributes – makes the node into a single node
Add two Make Material Attributes – these will take input from our two ground textures. I’m doing it with 2 but of course you might want 3 or 4 layers to blend -it’s the same principle.
add a Landscape Layer Blend –
under its details add two layers and name each layer to correspond to your textures & change Blend Type to LB HeightBlend -this will blend the layers based on the heightmap data in the texture. Megascans textures have this info.
Adding the layers add inputs to the Landscape Layer Blend Node
Add a 3 Point Levels node too, this will let us alter the contrast on the Pebbles layer to help make the blend look more natural – instead of a fade, the high points on the rocks stick out of the sand.
Wire it up like this – the pale lemon coloured Megascans texture is a packed texture– it has black & white textures in each channel & it will be called SomeName_ORD
The packing order is R= Ambient Occlusion, G = Roughness, B = Displacement.
The pebble textures displacement also goes into the 3 point levels and 3 scalar parameters attach to the Black, Middle and White values which should be set at defaults 0,0.5, 1
Save this texture & make a Material Instance of it and apply it to your landscape. This will turn black. Look in the Landscape panel, under Paint tab and at the bottom…
Click Create Layers From Assigned Materials -this will populate it with your layers from your landscape material instsance.
Then click Auto Fill Target Layer Assets button
this brings up a dialogue, tick the Create new assets in the default folder if none are found and then All Layers – this will make 2 layer infos that allow you to paint on the landscape.
you could instead also use the small + button.
Now you can paint the landscape – inside your landscape material instance you can edit the Global scalar parameter values for Black, Middle and White to get a better look -start with the Middle value. In the pic below you can see that instead of a photshop like gradient blend between rocks and sand, the shape of the pebble is showing above the sand. BUT!!! its still a bit flat. so now…
Select your landscape and under its Details panel Enable Nanite and Click Build Data
Go back to your M_LandscapeBlend – the master material not the instance, select the material attributes M_LandscapeBlend node and under its details click Enable Tesselation and then try tweaking the Displacement Magnitude, this will increase the resolution of the mesh near the player & use the displacement texture to push the mesh up so that the pebbles are 3D and can actually cast shadows.
This is culled from this vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-BMbadinPI&t=107s
and this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4q2UNTXlc
