Introduction

To the point

With Shader World you don't have to learn a new interface, everything is taking place inside Unreal Engine material editor, and will be compiled into optimized low-level GPU code, which instead of creating beautiful surface material, is gonna be used to generate data, do computation.

In turns, we are going to generate the heightmap of our surface (terrain/ocean), and all the various extra layers of information we want.

Those layers of data we generate can be further edited using brushes, which are actors that locally apply modifications, using materials as well.

All the information generated is available to the high performance spawning system, which has a user friendly interface allowing to finetune from the start various settings such as slope-range, altitude-range, alignment to terrain slope, density, collisions, shadow casting, collectable, ...

Leveraging the layers created and edited alongside the heightmap, you can filter precisely where which kind of asset must spawn (where do you want tall grass, short grass, no grass at all...) .