Setting up a Landscape Layer

This is for legacy versions of the Landscape Material Tool before the 2.0 update.

To begin, select the "New" button under the "Layers" tab.

This will bring up an asset dialog to save a new landscape layer asset.

It is recommended to keep the prefix "LL_" before each layer asset, you may experience issues without this prefix.

Once the new asset has been created the "Layers" tab will now be populated with that asset. and should look similar to this. The main thing to input at this point is the texture samples which have been highlighted.

It is common place to have your texture samples set to the correct compression settings/sampler type: Compression Settings

The plugin will automatically set your sample types to what the compression settings of the source texture is, but this might have undesired results if your source textures have the incorrect compression settings.

Each layer can take in a Diffuse, Normal, Height, Specular, Roughness, Ambient Occlusion or a Channel Packed Texture. A good approach to save on texture lookups is to use the Channel Packed Texture for your Height/Roughness/AO, you can use my other plugin Texture Tools to easily pack separated textures into one texture.

You can find example textures under the plugins content folder, remember to enable "Show Plugin Content" under your view options of your content browser.

Once textures have been put into the correct texture inputs, the layer is now setup as a basic landscape layer. However, if you used a channel packed texture as show in the picture above there are some extra steps.

To enable the channel packed texture support on the landscape layer scroll down to your individual texture parameter categories. In this example its using an A/R/M texture which is Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Metallic texture combined.

Metallic texture inputs are not used in this plugin as we support RVT/Runtime Virtual Texturing which does not use metallic inputs.

This is the correct setup for the A/R/M texture, you will want to make sure you have enabled "Use Channel Packing" and then select the correct channel packing mask. In this case Ambient Occlusion uses the Red channel and Roughness uses the Green channel. These options are also available under the Height and Specular parameter categories.

At this point this landscape layer is considered ready to use, you should Save the layer. There are much more advanced settings and parameters to go over which are covered in the Advanced Landscape Layers.

By default each layer has "Global Distance Swap" enabled, which will at a distance fade the textures to a less tiled version of the layer, which is useful for distant details and makes the landscape look less repetitive.

Layers are automatically saved when you swap out to a different "Landscape Layer Reference", But they are not automatically saved when you switch between tabs or close the editor.