With that said here is another tutorial:

This one covers out moss material layer and how to create it yourself. Hope these are useful to some of you 

-Lukas

Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think

Its xyz-worldaligned so that we can use it for nice blends between meshes.
The parameters drive how much of the rock it covers, how strong the normalmap should influence the result and if there should be a color overlay on the edge of the intersection (for nice brown moss around the edges)
Vertex color is used to mask the whole effect by hand.

Let me know if this is something you would be interested in seeing a breakdown for.
Ill do one… someday…

-Lukas

Our system uses vertex color to drive the world position offset of the material, very similar to what you can find in the unreal engine content examples.

The reception of the breakdown for the landscape material we did yesterday really surprised us (in a positive way). Please let us know if you are interested in more content like that.

-Lukas

This is the material we are talking about:

It has distance based tessellation, height blending between the textures and procedural puddles that you can paint on top.

Lets start with a look at the complete material:

And its settings:

Its not using a mask since we dont need holes but it should not be a problem to add that to your version.

And this is what an instance looks like with all of the settings that are exposed to the artist:

The interesting part here are ofc the puddles.

So lets break down the Material, starting with the UVs:

Nothing too crazy here, just a world position and a multiply to control the tiling. This means the texture will stretch on steep angles, not important for us since we wont be using it there but you might want to change this if you plan on using it for rocks and stuff.

Next up is one of the material layers:

We put our materials into functions to keep the graph from getting messy and just expose the relevant settings as parameters. Were also feeding it the world position uvs.

Detail shot of the function:

Pretty simple and regular setup with a few inputs for the parameters. We have the roughness, height and ao stored in one texture to save memory. Since the material attributes do funny things to the scalar value of the heightmap and were going to use that to mask stuff I created a separate output for that.

Important: If your using a lot of textures or layers you need to set the texture Sampler Source to Shared:Wrap.

We then use a regular Landscape Layer Blend node to blend the layers:

The important part here is having an unused alpha blend layer as well as having one layer that is going to cover the whole landscape as weight blended. We use this to get rid of problems with black spots on the landscape as well as it not compiling properly and showing the grey worldmaterial when more then 3 layers are used with tessellation.

We also use the separate heightmap output for the height input on the blend node.

Since we arent using the material attributes for the height information we need to blend that separately:

Here we sample the layers mask information and use that to lerp between the different heightmaps.

Once the materials are blended we add the puddles ontop:

This layer has a lot of parameters that arent really necessary, I was experimenting with my procedural setup which is why I have so many
We input the blended Material as well as the blended heightmap and the layer information for the landscape “puddles” layer that we sample here into this function.

This is  screenshot of the puddles function:

Its still really messy as I havent found the time to clean it up yet. Its basically a custom blend, using the heightmap to blend between the terrain material and constants as well as a 3-vector for the puddle values. The cool stuff is in some features like normal blending and wetness on the edges, color and opacity for depth or dirty puddles and a option that allows us to shift the height of the puddle from nothing to covering the whole area. All of this is then masked by the puddle landscape layer information.

You can take a look at some other puddle tutorials to get similar results, most of them use vertex color to blend in the puddles, just use the layer information instead.
Edit: Added detail shots of this graph for anyone interested in what exactly it does.

Final step is the tessellation:

Here we use the heightmap information to get our worlddisplacement for the landscape material (upper right).
Our tessellation  setup is dependent on the camera location and has the vector length in there since unreal likes to tessellate the whole object otherwise (which we obviously dont want) We have some extra parameters to control the fade distance, offset and tessellation resolution.
We use a material parameter control to input our overall tessellation strength since we want to be able to control the effect via the users option menu (on all our materials at once).

And there you have it!
Keep in mind that this is a pretty expensive material and we only use it on the highest settings, its probably not something you should use on very big terrains and fewer layers is always better for performance.
Let me know if this was of any help or if you have any questions in the comments!

-Lukas

It blends between the textures with their heightmap and has distance based tessellation so that we can displace it and give it some real depth.
We can also paint in procedural puddles that conform to the underlying textures:

Here is what the same scene looks like without puddles:

The puddles have settings like depth to control their color and opacity or edge wetness which makes them very versatile.

Since they are completely procedural their material function is rather complex and we still havent really cleaned it up so it looks like a spaghetti monster:

We still need no make some tweaks but were already happy with the result!

Were also scheduling the voice recordings for the demo right now so we are going to be able to share details on our actors and their roles soon!

-Lukas

We have a couple of styles we are experimenting with for the design of our icons with these three being our favorites:

(Feel free to let us know which one is your favorite in the comments )

And this is what they look like when applied to our radial menu ingame:

We think it looks pretty cool already! (Please ignore the placeholder environment art )

We are looking forward to sharing even more of our UI Elements and other work with you!

-Lukas

All of these are just Materials on a flat plane!

To create our textures we are mainly using Substance Designer, all of the above are 100% procedural!

Feel free to let us know what you think as our Environment Artist (thats me ) continues to work on more textures and the geometry to go with it!

–Lukas

In the meantime we have a short video that we would like to share with you showing our evaluation tests of the TrueSky system by Simul which we are going to use in Sane!

Hopefully our next post is going to show you our new studio! Fingers crossed

—Lukas

As you can see we set this character up in a way that allows us to remove the cap when we need or want to.

For now we are going to shift focus from these humanoid characters to non-human ones and we are going to start working on the environment art soon. (Cant stand looking at our greybox placeholders any longer! )
But before that we will have to update the rigs for these characters so that our animation lead Christian can start preparing our motion capturing sessions! (Which should be fun, we are looking forward to sharing that with you already )

Thats all for today, but we still plan on doing the writeup on all the characters we released so far so stay tuned for that!

Cheers,
Lukas.