I’m colourblind so I hope the examples in today’s make sense!
Did you know you can add slight variances in colour to assets using the Speed Tree Colour Variation Node?
If you would prefer to watch the video version, check it out here
This is super cool and can help you create subtle colour varieties in things like grass or leaves. Its really simple to use, if you go to your material editor then look for Speed Tree Colour Variation
There isn’t much you need to do here. Feed in whatever you have going on for the Base Colour pin and then create a scalar parameter and feed it into the Amount pin. By parameterising the amount value, in our material instance of this material, we can easily tweak the values, which is great for iterating.
Now if we change the Amount Value we can start to see some subtle variation appear in the colour of the assets in our level example. The way this works is basically each instance of the material is given a random slight variation. The larger the amount the greater the variation. I found the range for this needs to be very low numbers so you will see in my example I am using values around e.g 0.02, 0.04 etc
As an extended example I turned my asset with the material applied into a foliage actor and painted it down, to give a more relevant example of how it could be used.
The material setup is exactly the same in Unreal Engine 5, the only difference is that amount value feels a little different. But if you play around with the amount im sure you can easily find values that work for your project!
This is one of those nice little tips that can add a lot of value to your project, especially if your game environments are largely built on grass and other foliage. That said I’m sure there are lots of other creative ways that it can be used as well
If you want more quick tips & tricks FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @cbGameDev
Also, check out the parkour game I'm solo developing called Freerunners. Give it a wishlist if you like the way it looks!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1430330/Freerunners/