Hermes Terrain Material + Environment Nodes

[clever pewter]

This blend file has a handful of useful nodes that can be used by appending them:

• PG Foliage [COMES WITH PG GRASS]

Cycles friendly foliage shader that allows leaves to let light through, along with subsurface and transmission. All around more PBR Accurate. Works in EEVEE too but is less accurate. Comes with the PG Grass node group. Do not import both.

• PG White Foliage

A node that recolors white foliage diffuse images unlike FPv3 Foliage. Allows for finer control via vectors.

• PG Grass [CYCLES ONLY]

A grass shader that uses a mix of the Principled Hair BSDF and Principled BSDF to get a convincing, homogenous grass look. Allows biome map coloring if set up.

• PG Cliff Terrain

Lets you place grass on top of cliff props that can also be affected by the island biome map if set up.

• PG Hermes Terrain [WORKS IN EEVEE WITH TWEAKS]

The modular Chapter 6 Hermes terrain material. IMPORTANT: Will show up as pink in material view. This is normal, it will work in rendered mode only. EEVEE will not work by default due to a built-in limitation with how complex a graph can get. An EEVEE friendly version can be found at the bottom.

An attempt at an accurate Hermes (Chapter 6) terrain material with particle-based grass scattering. This system can be set up to work with trees or any other props too. This material IS modular in more ways, so you should realistically be able to make it work with any map and season as long as you have the season/island's

• Weightmaps
• Normal Map
• Biome Map

^ Does Not Export From The Map Tab by Default

You are also able to swap out all the textures used for any other you want.

Please Ping Me For Questions!

But read this guide first :)

Post-Release EDITS:

Some useful information to do / keep in mind that I've learnt after release.

• Swap out the 'Normal' node in PG Foliage with 'FPv3 Normals'
• Change the Alpha channel on the Sand diffuse image inside 'PG Hermes Terrain' to 'None'

Table Of Contents:

1. How to access these node groups
2. How to set up the Hermes Terrain.
3. How to set up scattered foliage for Hermes terrain.
4. How to bake the grass mask.
5. How to use the other nodes.

How to access these node groups

Open up any blend file you want to use these nodes in. Top left go to File > Append > Locate the downloaded blend file > NodeTree folder.

At this point, import whichever ones you desire. Keep in mind 'PG Grass' comes with the 'PG Foliage' node group, so do not import both.

How to set up Hermes Terrain

Create a new material, and in the nodes view accesed via the 'Shading' tab in the top bar add 3 new nodes. (Done with Shift-A)

• UV Map
• PG Hermes Terrain

Plug all the outputs of PG Hermes Terrain except 'Bake Grass Mask' into the Principled BSDF.
For the inputs of 'Island UVs' we need to make a new UV Map for the terrain mesh.

Head to the menu in the sidebar represented by a green triangle, and under **'UV Maps' ** add one new UV map, named IslandUVs.

Getting the IslandUVs to line up

I am using the assumption you have imported the entire Chapter 6 Terrain for this. If you have, this will be simple. If not, do that, and then after this process delete what you don't need.

With the entire terrain selected, press CTRL-J To join it under one model, Add your terrain material in here if you have one, otherwise create one. With the entire map selected now, enter edit mode with TAB, press A, and in the materials list, select your terrain material and do 'Assign.' In the same menu, click the little dropdown arrow to the right of the material's list, and click 'Remove Unused Slots'

Now head to UV editing. With the entire map selected in edit mode, enter top-down view using the gizmo top right of the viewport by clicking the blue Z circle. Press U and do 'Project From View (Bounds)'

Select the terrain mesh and do CTRL A > All Transforms.

Note: it will be offset by a little, so play with the UVs.

Micro Edits to alignment

Accurately aligned Pre-Fortnitemares Hermes Minimap for use to further align the island UVs. Since even with a bounds unwrap, it's ever so slightly off. I recommend using a notable landmark for this that makes it easy to align. (FortnitePorting's exported one is not)

How to get scattered foliage set up on Hermes Terrain.

Make a collection in your scene called something, like 'Hermes Foliage.'Using FortnitePorting export a handful of grass and small plant meshes you want to use. For example:

• Grass_Helios_Standard
• Asteria_Grass_Standard

Select all the foliage meshes, rotate them -90 degrees on the X Axis. Hit CTRL-A and select 'All Transforms'

Create a particle system on the surface you want foliage spead on. Such as the terrain mesh.
Swap it to 'Hair' mode and tick the 'Advanced' right below.

Under the 'Render' menu in the particles tab. Change 'Render As' to 'Collection' then select your foliage collection as the desired one. change the scale to something higher, 0.150 for example.

In this menu you can also enable 'Use Count' which lets you add weights to the different models, so you can make grass the most likely to propagate instead of equally grass & flowers for example.

Under the 'Rotation' tab (You must enable it first) change 'Velocity / Hair' to 'Normal'

Under the 'Children' menu enable interpolated. and play with the amount, the default is 10 in viewport mode, and 100 in render mode.

At this point you should have basic, functioning grass. The last thing you need to do is bake a mask to tell the foliage where not to show up, such as dirt and gravel.

How to bake the Grass Mask.

Similar to IslandUVs you'll need to follow the process, Add a BakeUVs UV Map in the previous menu where IslandUVs is. Select the BakeUVs UV map, and then select the mesh, and while in edit mode on your mesh from top-down view hit U, but this time select 'Project From View (Bounds)' That's it.

Select your terrain material. Find the PG Hermes Terrain node. Create an emission node, and plug the 'Bake Grass Mask' output into the emission. Plug 'Emission' into the 'Material Output'

You'll have a black and white mask covering your material mesh now. This is correct. Open the 'PG Hermes Terrain' node by clicking the small icon top right of the node itself. You'll see a lot of nodes now. Look for the dark red box labeled 'Mask Baking'

You'll see an 'Image Texture' node in here. Click 'New' on it and make an image texture of your desired size. I usually do 1024x1024 or 2048x2048. Depending on much terrain I have.

Now, with your terrain mesh selected, and this image texture selected. Head to the render tab on the sidebar, represented by a camera. Scroll down to find 'Bake' Change 'Bake Type' to 'Emit' from 'Combined.' Now, at this point you can hit Bake to let it bake. If it's taking too long, lower the amount of samples, found under the 'Sampling' > 'Render' & 'Viewport' tabs.

Once the mask bakes, you should see it in the bottom left image viewer.

Now you can head back to your particle system, and under the 'Textures' tab, add a new texture and name it GrassMask.

Open up the tab in the sidebar represented by a red checkboard. In here, load your GrassMask by clicking the button left of the 'New' button and searching for it.

Scrolling down, find 'Influence' Untick 'General Time' and instead tick 'Density'

Scroll further down, under 'Mapping' change the 'Coordinates' from 'Generated' to 'UV'

At this point you should have grass only on the parts the mask has as white. Congrats!

How to use the other nodes

## PG Foliage & PG White Foliage
Used on trees and foliage models. Plugged into Material Output. Just simply add it in place of a FPv3 Foliage or any other shader node.
Plug the OSSR Texture of foliage into the SFX Mask, the '_N' texture into the Normal, and the '_D' into the Diffuse.

Sometimes the diffuse is white. (Ends with _BC usually) For these you want to add a 'PG White Foliage' node and plug the '_BC' into the Diffuse of the PG White Foliage. The output foliage can be plugged into the 'PG Foliage' diffuse

## PG Grass
[ CYCLES ONLY ]

Used with grass meshes (Not the texture used on terrain), plugged straight into Material Output. Plug the 'Mask2DTexture' of a grass mesh into the 'SFX Mask' and the normal map into the 'Normal'

For the 'Pink Grass' inputs you'll need the 'T_Apollo_Grass_D_02' texture. Once you have it, just plug the Color into the 'Pink Grass Texture' and the Alpha into the 'Pink Grass Alpha'

Darkest & Lightest grass shade can be whatever you want.

If you want the grass to blend via the biome mask, similar to terrain. Scroll down! You’ll find an image replying to this message.

# PG Cliff Texture
This is to be used with the cliff models that you can export via FortnitePorting, and plugged into a FPv3 Material. This node adds any texture you want ontop of the clifface, whether it be grass or snow, or anything.

As a prerequisite for this working, you'll need to select all the cliff models you want this to be used on, and join them into one model using CTRL J.

In the cliff material, (has to be done for each one.) plug the Cliff's diffuse, normal, and specular texture maps into the PG Cliff Terrain's inputs labelled the same. If this is for the battle royale map and not just a cliff face on it's own, you'll have to set up the 'Island UVs' input again like exactly what you did for the Hermes Terrain. By creating a new UV map for the joined cliffs model, and projecting from top-down, and aligning to the minimap.

Similar to the terrain. You can bake a GrassMask for this model. the BakeUVs is a bit trickier to set up. You need to once again go into top-down mode, but this time. Select all the tops of the cliffs by hovering the mouse over them and pressing L to select only the top. Repeat for every cliff top, and once you're done, Hit U, and do 'Unwrap Minimum Stretch'

IMPORTANT NOTES!

These Weightmaps export from FortnitePorting incorrectly offset. You will have to re-align them manually in a photo editing app using the minimap as reference.

• Weight LANDSCAPE VISIBILITY Hermes_Terrain
• Weight_Asphalt_Hermes_Terrain
• Weight_Snow_Hermes_Terrain

The ones provided with the .blend are corrected versions of the Chapter 6, Season 4 - Fortnitemares weightmaps.

Hermes Terrain Material + Environment Nodes

[clever pewter]

Much better system to color the grass via biome mask by directly referencing the terrain UVs!

Final result 👀