Landscape turns gray at fourth layer

I’m using 4.5.1, and I can’t properly paint a landscape with five material layers. When I add the fourth layer to some block, it turns gray, and doesn’t show up in colored material even after I wait for shaders to compile.
Also, running the game in standalone still shows it in gray (SM 5.0)

Hi jwatte,

How many textures are you using across these four layers? If you have more than 10 textures assigned to that section (including bump maps, normal maps, textures, etc) it will not correctly render. This is a limitation we are aware of and are looking into options to increase this limit.

I did some more research, and I think you’re right – the problem is two-fold:

  1. Unreal Engine wants landscape texturing to be single-pass
  2. The Landscape module forces all texturing into the SM3 limitations

If the Landscape were to do splatting (slicing either by render-target, or by source-setup) then a very large number of layers could be supported, with variable performance based on complexity and shader model.

If the engine allowed me to say “only SM5 cards and up are allowed” then I could also cram all I needed into a single shader. But I would prefer a solid splatting-based approach :slight_smile:

Set all your landscape texture samples to “Shared: Wrap”. That limits you to PC DirectX platforms only for now though, but it allows you to use 128 textures in the landscape material.