Material Instance

Now that I have sculpted my landscape I am going to create a material instance, I have experimented with creating material before when I created one with a mountainous forest in mind and used grass, rock and snow textures.  I will be using this same material instance however I will be making some changes.  First of I changed the grass material to another grass material that was a much brighter shade of green and would suit a tropical environment much more than the previous grass material did.  I then swapped the rock material for a sand material which I will use for the base of my landscape.  I didn't do anything with the snow texture as all I see myself using is the sand and grass textures so I simply left it alone.  You can see how I have done this below, it was a fairly straight forward process of simply connecting the landscape coords node to the three textures.  My material can now make use of all three of these textures.  I repeated this process for my normal and specular textures, the reason I have done this is because it will now add some complexity to my material and should make it look more realistic.  Now I would like to adjust my material so that I will be able to paint my materials in the view port, to do this I simply added a layer weight node to all of my textures and connect them all.  Below you can see this process.

I am quite happy with how my material looks so far and think I done this process quite well however if I could go back I would consider replacing the snow texture, I only really need the grass and sand textures however if I had the time I would have wend and found another texture that I could have possibly used in a tropical environment.

I have began to paint my island with my material instance, to do this I will be using the paint tool located within the geometory mode, it allows me to drag and drop the textures that I used to create my material instance into the paint tool.  From there I can adjust the size and strength of the paint brush to my liking and then simply select whatever texture I intend to use and start painting.  I will be creating grass to put over the grass texture later and here you can see my sand complete with the Crazy Bump texture.

I am actually very pleasantly surprised with this outcome as I was worried before that I may have made my texture in Crazy Bump a little too rough however I think that this turned out great, I could have made it a little smother however I think that had I done this the texture would have gone unnoticed and it wouldn't even have been worth my while.