Texturing the ground and forming the lake!

All right, in this post I will show you the new texture (which may will be replaced or modified in the future, I don’t know that for sure, not that if it’s bad, but I have some issues with it, but the reasons will be mentioned later) and carving out the lake, so it’s not just a plane anymore.

 

Click on read more for the details.
 

So for the texture, I have this basic, very pail looking green stuff. Which is not that bad, if you want to texture a little patch of terrain with it, it’s pretty good for that, but for everything, it’s… yeah… not too great.

I have to confess, I cheated a little here, cause I didn’t get myself into material creation in Unreal Engine 4 (so far… although I want to learn it, because I can use this knowledge in 3DS Max or Nuke (compositing program) later) also, I don’t want to freeze the project because I am learning material stuff. (I can to that later, when I finished and not wasting your time and test your patience. ;)) So, I had to use pre-made materials. I searched a bit, and ran into something, that was so awesome, I dropped my yaw.

What I found was amazing. There is a natural environment pack for Unreal Engine 4, (UE4 from now on) and it has some very awesome features, like a very complex grass material, with procedural textures, tesselation and other goodness (and many more very useful stuff, what will get very handy for later progressions). The grass material is happen to be very close to the mossy, dirty ground that the cove has.

But unfortunately, it has some issues. It very badly tiles. The only thing that I liked in the default grass material was, it had a „larger” tile set, so if you viewed it in the distance, it blends another texture to the whole thing, so it doesn’t look all that pattern like.

The other issue is tesselation. If you have a mid-range video card like mine, (AMD HD 7870) this effect will seriously eat your FPS. Fortunately it’s very subtle, so if you turn off tessellation in the game, it won’t impact the graphics that much. But if you have a high-end video card, then go for it.

(Note: Which I also happen to have, (GTX 1070) but sadly I had to give it to my brother for a couple of months, and now I'm stuck with my old hardware, and suffering from the awful FPS drop. :( (From fixed 120 FPS to 25-ish… blegh).

(Oh, if somehow you manage to read this dear brother, I just wanna let you know, that I hate you! ˆ ˆ xoxo)

BTW, this is how the new grass material looks like in the editor. Wow!

There are 5 types of materials that you can play with. I used grass and dirt. The painting is very easy, you just select the material and paint. That’s it.

This is what the cove looks like with the new texture:

(Argh… the tiling is so bad, I have to do something with it. I’ll try to use that bigger procedural tile texture from the default grass material and somehow blend it to this complex material… I didn’t tried it yet, but that would be very good if it would work).

Ok, so now time to move on to the lake forming.

If look at the layout image, you can see for the lake, there are 3 depths. Okay, sounds easy, just carve out 3 different depths, and have a good day. Sigh… If life was that easy… In reality, that’s not that simple. (Well, after looking back, I should have done it less problematic, but I blame my stupidity for that).

So, I have a lake to make, but oops, there is the reference plane in the way. I can’t move it away, cause I need it for reference for the depths, so what could be done inorder to solve this problem. I tried to make it transparent, but that didn’t work. I tried to carve out blindly, making the tool much stronger on each separate depth, but that turned out to be a horrible idea. Wasted a few hours on several dumb approaches, without any progression whatsoever. After a little thinking, I figurate out the proper solution. What I did, I used the 3 terrain materials to separate and mark the locations of each depth. Dirt for the shallow, cobblestone for the mid, and puddles to the deepest parts. I “painted on” to the reference and so, I painted the ground beneath it. After I felt that I covered every bit, I moved away the plane and prayed. Well, it turn out to be very accurate (well... kinda).

Finally, I don’t have that reference in the way, so now I can go deeper.
I started with the shallow part and from there, gone deeper and deeper. I made another dumb thing here, I was focusing on the color code on the reference image, and not referencing from the movie, to see how deep it is actually. Later, it turn out I made it too deep… So, I have to fix this sooner or later (more on that when I’ll do the water). I smoothed out the ridges, with the smooth tool, (duh) and after a while, I came up with this.

Before smoothing 

After smoothing

Not so bad, though the textures are a bit silly, but that’s an easy fix. Sadly there wasn’t just mud, (I didn’t get to manage to make it work...yet) so the dirt texture will have to do it for now.

You should say, now we have more like a crater than a lake. Yeah, it does look like one, but it won’t be like that for too long. In the next part, I show you how I applied the realistic water shader on the “crater” and made it work properly (the latter was a rather challenging experience, so prepare for some mindfu… confusion).

Here is a little sneak peek:

That’s it for now, thanks for reading! Stay tuned! :)