Building Materials

All the settings in the Materials tab are explained here.

The material settings is where the maps making the Sub-Layers's Material are set.

Each option will be shown separately below, featuring the Scalability and Mobile toggles/features if present but won't be discussed in this page.

Please see Scalability Options to learn more about the Scalability toggles, and Unified Cross-Platform Development for the Mobile|VR switches.

Some of these parameters work in the same way as on the Master Surfaces Shaders. As such, some links to the MSS Documentation will be present instead of a detailed description.

For most options, a button is available next to the option's name. Clicking it will allow you to restore the default values for it.

Sub-Layer Material Settings

Exclude Sub-layer from Caching

Enabled only if the Sub-Layer is uncached.

• Excludes this layer from caching. See Landscape Caching for more information.

Use Texture Atlasses

Visible only on MULTI Instance mode.

Enables the use of Atlasses textures to reduce the number of texture samplers used if many Sub-Layers are used across multiple BIOMES.

Should be toggled only if absolutely necessary, as it has a big performance impact that is not justified unless the Instance crashes due to the number of Texture Samplers !

• Clicking on "Refresh Biome Atlasses" will fully refresh the Texture Arrays with all textures set in the Biome. It may be necessary if a texture shown using atlasses isn't the same as shown without.

[ES3.1] Use Sub-Layer on Mobile

Visible only with Unified Cross-Platform enabled.

• See Sub-Layer on Mobile in All Switches & Features for ES3.1.

Sub-Layer Texture Settings

UV Tiling

• Scales the texture map tiling on the terrain.

Distance-Based UV Scaling

• When enabled, samples the texturing at a different UV Scaling and shows it when the player is at a certain distance of the surface. Useful for keeping "crisp" materials far away like rock surfaces.

• If the second distance is toggled, an additional layer of different UV Scaling will be used at set values.

In the example below, a version of the current Material with a UV Scale of 2.5 will be shown starting from the distance of 6000 units on top of the normal Material.

Break UV Tiling

• Samples the texture differentely to break texture repetition. Settings are the same as on the Master Surfaces Shaders.

Triplanar Mapping

• Reduces texture deformation on stretched surfaces like high terrain spikes. Smoothness changes the transition's smoothness.

Parallax Occlusion Mapping

Unavailable if Break UV Tiling is enabled, or if the Layer is cached.

• Uses a heightmap to simulate depth.

Specular Settings

• Uses a channel of the Base Color as the specular output. The value is a cap as natural landscape aren't surfaces with a lot of specularity.

Texture Maps Input

Base Color

• Base Color slot of the Material

• If "Use Uniform Color" is checked, a uniform color will be used instead of a texture map. The color can be changed by clicking the Uniform Color thumbnail.

• Texture Adjustements are available below :

  • Hue Shift (from 0 to 360)

  • Saturation (Values under 0 to desaturate, over 0 to saturate)

  • Contrast

  • Luminosity (0 for black, 1 by default, more than 1 to increase lightness)

  • Tint (Color)

Normal Map

• Normal Map slot of the Material

• Texture Adjustements are available below :

  • Regular Flatness (1 for full flat, values under 0 to increase normal strength)

  • Distance 1 & 2 Flatness available when Distance-Based UV Scaling is enabled

  • Reverse Normal can be checked for inverting the Map

ORM Values

• Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic slot of the Material

• Packed "ORM" Texture can be enabled/disabled, but should always be used for optimization purposes if more than 1 map is used for any of the ORM channels.

• If Uniform Roughness/Metalness is checked, the texture won't be used and an uniform value will be used.

• If "Use Occlusion Map" is checked, the Occlusion map will be multiplied with the Color and Specular values following the Occlusion map adjustement options.

• Texture Map & Settings are available if a Texture Map is used for any of the channels instead of uniform values :

• Each map can be selected (if "Use Packed "ORM" Texture" is disabled.)

• Contrast & Luminosity adjustement are available for each, except Metalness as a Texture map should be avoided as much as possible for performance reasons.

• Metalness is present if need be but affects the shader complexity and is not cacheable !

  Using a metalness map will need the processing of the affected sub-layer to be done even if it's cached, so it should be always set to Uniform Value except for special cases !

Use Displacement

Visible only with a Studio license.

• Displacement slot of the Material

• If enabled, displaces a Virtual Heightfield Mesh or the Landscape if Nanite Tessellation (5.4+) is enabled. If it is, a Nanite Strength option will be visible ranging from 1 to 0. See Adding Displacement for more informations.

• The Texture is contrasted before the Force setting.

• The texture used for the Displacement can be a Texture, the last channel of the ORM Map ("Use ORD Texture Format" as featured on some Megascans maps) or the Alpha channel of the Base color.