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Other Library Nodes

Errant Biomes comes with library of helper nodes for common operations.

You can find them under Biomes category.

Flatness check​

Flatness check node allows you find areas of terrain with limited height variation.

This is useful to ensure suitable terrain when spawning large meshes from species

To use it

  1. Add Landscape Height to your material mask material parameters.
  2. Specify the name of the texture object parameter.
  3. Create texture object parameter in the material with name from previous step.
  4. Set FallbackMask as default texture in that texture object paramter.
  5. Add it as height to the FlatnessCheck node.

For slower but more precise calculations on the edges of generation components enable Include Neighbors in both the material parameter and in the material function parameters.

Noise​

You can find Noise node in Biomes category.

It's just a material function wrapper around Unreal built-in noise node but has better defaults for use with Biome Material Masks.

NoiseNode

Note: It's best to just play-around with the preview enabled to get an intuition for it.

Height​

You can access landscape height using Height node in the Biomes category

HeightNode

With smooth gradient​

For height based mask from height you can use HeightMask node from the Biomes category.

To get values for MinHeight and MaxHeight you can use some Actor on the level as reference.

You could for example just place boxes and copy their Location Z values.

image image

Doing that gives you 0 to 1 gradient between the altitudes of these two locations.

image

With hard cutoff​

If you want to have hard transition at some altitude you can use HeightMaskHard node from the Biomes category.

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Slope​

You can get a slope angle of the landscape using the Slope node from the the Biomes category.

Slope node outputs values in 0 to 1 range, where 1 means the slope of 90 degrees (vertical cliff).

note

The returned value may not change linearly with the slope. Beacuse of that an output value of 0.05 doesn't mean 5% of 90 deg.

image

You can set the MinSlope and MaxSlope inputs to control its 0 to 1 range.

If you'd like to have values lower then 20 degrees to output 0 you would set MinSlope to 0.222(20 / 90). Now the Slope node outputs 0 to 1 values from 20 degrees to 90 degrees.

Play around with the values using the preview to get an intuition for it.