On Day 27, you’ll learn how to create complex, layered materials specifically for use on landscapes, making your sculpted terrain visually diverse and interactive. Unreal Engine supports powerful landscape material blending, allowing you to combine different surface types—such as grass, rock, sand, or mud—on a single terrain using dynamic controls and paint layers.

The session begins with constructing a landscape material using the Material Editor. You’ll learn to set up Landscape Layer Blend nodes, which enable you to blend different material layers and control their influence via painting directly on the terrain. Each layer will be assigned its own set of textures, including albedo (base color), roughness, normal maps, and more. This process allows for highly customized surface variation that feels organic and tailored to your scene.

You’ll then explore automatic material blending techniques. For example, using world-aligned textures, slope-based blending, and height-based masks, you can make rocks automatically appear on steep slopes or grass blend naturally into flatter areas. This minimizes manual painting and speeds up the process of creating believable terrain transitions.

Students will also learn optimization tips for landscape materials—such as using shared texture samplers and controlling material complexity to maintain good performance. You’ll test your materials live on the landscape, tweaking parameters for a natural and cohesive look.

By the end of Day 27, your landscape will be fully textured with advanced material blending that reacts to terrain form and painting inputs. This adds a huge layer of visual depth to your environment and prepares your scene for foliage painting, gameplay design, and atmospheric detailing. You’ll walk away with the ability to build dynamic, layered terrain materials that respond intelligently to the topography and enhance immersion in your Unreal Engine environments.