I thought about appending this to the previous post but realized that I’ll probably need to refer to this workflow in the future (near future) so it might be better off as its own post.

Here’s another view of the “good” render. There’s a good amount of detail in the cliffs and you can see the dry and cracking mud on the ground. It’s certainly not the “refried beans” look I got from the sync version, so things are already looking up!

Shaders – General

I needed three things: the splat map, and two textures. The splat map exported from World Creator only had two color channels because I only had two colored layers, so this was easy to manage.

The first node down was a Mix Shader node. The two textures are plugged into the two Shader inputs, and the splat map is plugged into the Factor input. I loaded this image in via a standard Image Texture node.

Shaders – Megascans

The two texture nodes are actually groups of other nodes, collapsed to keep things tidy; in the event there’s a terrain which has several layers, each of which needs a Megascan or other texture setup, grouping the texture nodes is going to save a lot of space on the canvas. Both textures were handled the same.

Here, I started with the Principled BSDF node and used Node Wrangler to add in four images that were included in the Megascan texture: AO, Base Color, Roughness, and Normal. Node Wrangler will set up the Mapping and Textures groups, wiring up the Normal Map as well. Because these were groups, I wired the output of the BDSF to the Group Output node which exposed the output socket in the main shader tree so I could connect them to the Shader Mix.

And that was all there was to it. The pattern of “two textures with splat map factor” would repeat if we had more layers in World Creator, with the Shader Mix plugging to another Shader Mix alongside another Megascan texture group and additional splat maps until we’d used every splat to texture every level laid down within World Creator. Then there’s no doubt a whole lot of other clean-up that could be done involving the normal flow of Blender’s shader development, but I’m not quite there yet.

Scopique

Husband, father, gamer, developer, and curator of 10,000 unfinished projects.