Brushify – Multi-Biome Landscape Shader

We’ve recently shared an interview with Joe Garth about Brushify, the artist’s terrain library with 8k res meshes and terrain Alpha brushes that lets artist build high-quality landscapes directly in UE4. The artist continues to develop his toolkit with the biggest update being the Multi-Biome Landscape Shader. We’ve decided to ask him a couple of question about this cool new tool. 

What’s new with Brushify?

Brushify.io is a Modular Environment infrastructure for Unreal Engine 4. Multiple Brushify environment packs are available for purchase on the Unreal Engine Marketplace.

In the last month, Brushify has gone through some big changes, with new packs and new features across all the products.

The biggest update is the Multi-Biome Landscape Shader. This advanced material allows all the Brushify biomes to be blended together seamlessly. For example, you can blend desert, beach, grasslands, snow all in a single scene.

Here’s a 10-minute tutorial showing what’s possible with the shader:

Why is a landscape material like this important?

For open world games and MMO’s, it can be really difficult to build massive worlds. Especially when the terrain materials available are so limiting. Sometimes terrains may look good, but they aren’t modular and can’t be edited. Other times dynamic solutions like auto materials can be very performance intensive. Brushify aims to both look good and run well even on low spec systems.

It’s also usually not possible to blend multiple auto materials together. So you may have a perfect desert biome in your game, but have no way to blend it into the grasslands area that’s a few kilometers away.

What about performance?

The landscape material is optimized for Consoles and VR scenes. With close attention paid to overdraw and draw calls for the assets.

The more landscape layers in an area, the more the overdraw will increase. But thanks to the fact that each Brushify layer already handles, 3 levels of detail, automatic slope texturing and cover texture for snow or dirt, there isn’t as much need to paint down a lot of layers by hand. You can still easily combine 5-6 biomes in one location without a huge performance hit.  

What’s the future of Brushify?

My plan is to expand Brushify into as many biomes as possible and eventually into large kitbashing kits for various game genres. I’m also working hard to include modular photogrammetry assets in future packs.

Joe Garth, 3D Artist 

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev