The Automaterial uses a lot of similar settings for each layer. These are things like Texture Brightness, Texture Desaturation, Texture Scale, Specular Amount, etc.
Below we’ll go over a lot of the common settings that are used on all of the different Automaterial Layers and where to find them within the Landscape’s Material Instance.
For this demonstration we’ll be using the Automaterial layer, Flatland A, these same settings can also be found and used within any of the material layers.
Open the Landscape’s Material Instance
First, lets open up the Landscape’s Material Instance by clicking on the Landscape in the outliner.
Scroll down to where it says “Landscape Material” and double click it to open it up.
Texture Coloring and Size Settings
To tweak the coloring and size of any layer we have multiple settings:
Texture Tint: Controls the coloring/tint of the layer. White will give us the default coloring of the texture without any tint.
Texture Scale: Controls the overall size and tiling of the texture that we’re using.
Texture Brightness: Makes the texturing brighter/darker for the layer we’re changing it on.
Texture Desaturation: A value of 1 makes the texture fully black and white, a value of 0 makes it the default color. We can choose any number in between, even -1 to make it more saturated and vivid.
Normal Map Settings
Normal Map Flatness: Controls the intensity of our Normal Map for the layer we’re changing it on.
A value of 1 here will give us a totally flat normal map, 0 will give us the default normal map, -1 will increase the intensity of the normal mapping.
Displacement Settings
To change the displacement of any layer we have multiple settings:
Displacement Intensity: Controls the amount displacement from the Displacement Texture.
Displacement Contrast: Controls the amount of “pointiness” of the Displacement Texture, this lessens the lowest low point while increasing the highest high points of the displacement. Higher values than 1 will increase the displacement’s pointiness.
Raise/Lower Entire Layer: Positions the entire layer further up/down, while retaining its displacement amount. Change this setting if your characters feet or objects are either floating or going through the ground because of displacement.
Note: make sure you’re using a version of the material that has displacement in order for the displacement settings to have any effect (Tessellation in UE4, or Virtual Heightfield Mesh in UE5).
Reflectivity Settings
Specular Amount: Controls the amount that light influences the shininess of the material.
Roughness Amount: Controls the shininess of the layer.