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A key feature of making the terrain shader look more natural as the sun light goes low is the Translucency options. These expand on the existing options explained here: PBR - Using Standard Shader#UsingStandardShader-Translucency.
In the Terrain shader there are now additional per Albedo scalars in the Translucency parameters section. These can be used to reduce the effect on areas with out grass for example.
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The Splatter Map Generator is included in the Substance Utility Pack
You can specify masks for Roads, Buildings, Trees and Treelines. These can all be used to force shadows or certain albedo maps to be more prevalent.
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Finally it's possible to specify a single grey scale input which demonstrates on a scale of 0 to 1, if the area should be dry or saturated. This is often generated from satellite map data. The strength of the effect can be scaled on both how much it makes channels more likely and less likely to occur.
Detail Specific Sections
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For example the Road Verge allows us to force Albedo A (Dry dirt) near road areas. These settings effect how far from the road and create a randomness to the effect.
The Tree section mostly concentrates on creating reasonable baked shadows through the use of blurs.
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We can also use this mask to make certain albedos more or less likely under the trees. In the beneath example we are making the terrain much drier and even bare soil underneath them.
Building Inputs are just used to add to the shadow mask. You can apply some blur to the mask in order to soften the edges.
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Due to using static bias and mixmap values there is likely to be some difference compared to the in game output.
Generating Inputs
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- Clone all the objects with the required faces to generate the mask
- Merge them into a single object.
- Clean up the UVW by removing all UVW channel data. (Tools - Channel Info, clear each channel). This will reduce the file size.
- Acquire the UVW from your reference object for mapping.
- Render a UVW Mask either through 3ds Max, or by applying a standard material, exporting as FBX and rendering an opacity map in Substance Designer (This is not recommended for Trees).
Tree Mask Rendering
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For individual trees, we need to clone and rotate the faces by 60 degrees twice.
Ambient Occlusion
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The resulting output is likely to be very subtle and only make a small difference to the output.
Satellite Map Inputs
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Now we have our Satellite Map rendered out, and we can start to do either edit this in Photoshop or setup some nodes to convert this into some data we wish to use.
At Le Mans as you can see the sat image was from two separate scans. To make the data work roughly the same over the two, I set up a mask for the two scans, and then exported the saturation of each side of the mask and used levels to even it out, before merging the input.
I then masked out the road sections so that they were 0.5 grey, and put this into the pattern input in the Splatter Map Generator node. This allows for the addition of realistic patterns to the blending. Resulting in the input beneath.
