Scribd
Upload
42 views

Guide - How to Paint Landscape with Megascans Materials in Unreal Engine 5

This document provides a step-by-step guide on how to paint landscapes using Megascans materials in Unreal Engine 5. It covers material preparation, landscape creation, and the use of material instances for efficient texturing. The guide also includes useful shortcuts and links to additional resources for further learning.

Uploaded by

David Aragón
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
42 views

Guide - How to Paint Landscape with Megascans Materials in Unreal Engine 5

This document provides a step-by-step guide on how to paint landscapes using Megascans materials in Unreal Engine 5. It covers material preparation, landscape creation, and the use of material instances for efficient texturing. The guide also includes useful shortcuts and links to additional resources for further learning.

Uploaded by

David Aragón
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 30

How to Paint Landscape with Megascans

Materials in Unreal Engine 5


Quick Guide

I’m SUPER excited to share with you how to paint landscape with

Megascans materials in Unreal Engine 5.

If you are coming from my website www.ezunreal.com you can check

out Youtube guide here: https://youtu.be/eW0iLoO6QrM


Learn more about Unreal

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ezunreal

Website: www.ezunreal.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ezunreal

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FilipDelac

Preparing Materials

It’s always a good idea to prepare our materials, so we don’t lose

time later.

Click the plus icon and select Quixel Bridge.


We will use three materials for painting.

Navigate to Surfaces → Ground.

Over here choose three materials you wish to use to paint your

landscape.

If you want, you can change the quality of the material.


Add them to the project.

If you hit ctrl plus space you’ll open the content drawer or Content

browser.

And if you go to content, megascans, surfaces, you will see your

downloaded materials.
This megascans folder will show up when you download content

from Quixel bridge and it will store all your megascans assets so you

can easily find them.

Creating Landscape

Let’s now create landscape so we can paint on it.

Go file and click new level.

Select basic.

Click create.

When you create levels like this make sure to save it right away.

Click File, and save the current level.

And name it as you wish.


Now select landscape from the drop-down menu or press SHIFT 2.
Over here make sure to have this enable edit layers selected.

This will allow us to work with landscape layers so we can easily

delete or change parts without affecting the whole landscape.

As for other settings you can leave them as it is.

Click create.

The next step is to create a landscape material.


Creating Landscape Material

It’s worth noting that any random Material can be used with a

Landscape, but landscape-specific material provides some nodes

that can help improve the textures or in this case allows us to paint

with layers.

To create landscape material go to your content browser,

select desired folder and right-click and select Material.

Name it.
Double-click to open it.

Now open the content drawer and navigate to the megascans folder.

Over here select one of your materials and drag textures from it to

the graph.

Use CTRL+LMB to select them all.

Sort textures as you see fit.

I’ll sort them like this.

Base color, normal map, and masks.

This is the important part.

Select all textures and on the left side.


Under the sampler source make sure that you select Shared,

wrap.

This is important because it will allow us to use more textures in

our material.

The next step is to make material attributes.


Texture Size, Tiling and Material Attributes

Right-click and type in makematerialattributes.

Connect base color to base color


Normal map to normal.
For the mask, drag the red channel to ambient occlusion and the
green channel to roughness.
Now we need to add texture coordinates.
This will control the tiling of the texture which is super nice to have.
To add it type texcoord or press U+LMB.
Press M+LMB to create multiply and press 1+LMB to create vector
one node.
Now right-click and convert vector one into the parameter.
Name it tiling.

If you are not familiar with parameters please check my other videos,
but for now, parameters will allow us to change things without going
back into this material blueprint.

Don’t worry, you’ll see the power of parameters later in the video.
Connect the nodes.
Don’t forget to hit apply and save everything.

Replicating the Nodes


Now we want to do this for all other textures we have.
It’s simple, just select the textures and hit ctrl plus c to copy and ctrl v
to paste.
Open the content drawer.
Now select the first texture and make sure it’s selected.

Go to the second material that we downloaded.


Select the first texture.
Now click use selected asset from the content browser.
This will replace the selected texture.
Now select the normal map.
Replace with the second one.
And the same thing with masks.

Don’t forget to save your project, just in case.


Now try and do this with the third material.

Ok, now we need to connect the multiply node with texture UVs.
You can comment on sections to make them more readable.

Layer Blend

To be able to paint on our landscape we need to add layer blend


node.
This will allow the blending of multiple Textures or Material networks
so that they can be used as Landscape layers.
Just right-click and type in landscape layer blend.
Select it, and on the left side you will see some properties.
Since we have 3 layers we will add 3 elements by clicking the plus
button.

And now rename it as you wish.


I’ll go with simple 123.
Just connect the base color to the layers you created.
To connect layer blend to our material select anywhere on the empty
space and make sure to click this use material attributes.
And now you can connect it easily.

Don’t forget to apply and save your work.


Creating Material Instance and Painting Landscape

To use this, first, let’s create a material instance.


For those who are unfamiliar with instancing, unreal engine says:
Material instancing is used to change the appearance of a Material
without incurring an expensive recompilation of the Material.
In normal language, it means that we can change our material as we
want and save time and computer resources.
To create an instance go to your content folder where you created
material.
Right-click on it and select create a material instance.
We now have our master material and its instance.

We need to apply this instance to our landscape.


Select landscape in the outliner.
As you can see everything is dark.
This is because the Unreal engine doesn't get the layer info.
To fix this, go to the landscape tool.
Under paint, you can see the layers that we created in the material
editor.
Click this plus button on every layer and save it.

If you select your layer, you can paint with it.


We can see that we have textures but they are so tiny and don’t look
realistic, or good.

To change that go to your content and over here open the material
instance.
You can see the tiling option here.
If you remember, this is the parameter that we created earlier.
And now if we change numbers we easily change the size of the
texture.
This is called material instancing where we change things without
touching the original material.

Play with tiling option to make perfect texture size


And this is how you paint landscape with Megascans materials in
Unreal Engine 5.
I hope this guide helped you.

Thank you for reading.

Useful Shortcuts
Use CTRL+LMB to select multiple items (nodes, textures, assets…)
U+LMB to create texture coordinates node
M+LMB to create multiply node
1+LMB to create vector one node
Learn more about Unreal:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ezunreal

Website: www.ezunreal.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ezunreal

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FilipDelac

You might also like