[TUTORIAL] Triplanar material

[StevePeters]

Project download link

I made a material that maps 3 different textures to an object based on it's xyz world orientation. It really speeds up the texturing process for rocks and other terrain features.
I apologize in advance for the audio quality, the mic is from a 1990s Gateway computer.

[StevePeters]

[StevePeters]

Added material functions:

[Mixitman]

this is great info.. thank you very much for putting it together!

[ambershee]

You could instead just use the World Aligned Blend node, which is basically planar mapping.

[StevePeters]

You could instead just use the World Aligned Blend node, which is basically planar mapping.

It took me a little time to dig up documentation on the world aligned blend node (This is all that I found), it seems to work by modulating the alpha based on a surface slope. I'll play with the node a bit and post what I come up with.

[ambershee]

It's a flexible material function with a few static switches that compile out based on what you're doing with it - you can open it right up and see what it's doing. You could quite happily use one for each planar blend through an axis though

[StevePeters]

In the end, I wasn't able to use the world aligned blend node. It has a pixelnormalWS node in it that prevents it from working with normal maps or displacement maps. I did figure out how to get the textures to project almost completely without stretching. Here's the (slightly modified) default UE4 rock that has vertex paintable displaced snow on top.

[StevePeters]

Repost bc forum outage

I uploaded 2 more triplanar tuts to youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2WKGIVr39E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yuvt3RatIE

and here is the material functions I used. Next up, projection texturing in local space.

[AdamZ]

Looks fantastic. Will this work with terrains as well; say the height is grass and the sides of the elevations are rock?

[StevePeters]

The most current version of the projection material allows for local or world space mapping (no heightmap based displacement on the local one though), wood grain type noise, and a rudimentary system for determining the projection direction. Instead of just being based on the XY or YZ planes you specify a rotation amount which is stored in the red and green channels of a vector. I'll make a vid about the usage of the material soon.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...onMaterials.7z

[Cinebeast]

Very cool. I see this is actually a pretty old post? I'm glad you bumped it back into relevance.

[StevePeters]

Very cool. I see this is actually a pretty old post? I'm glad you bumped it back into relevance.

I got distracted with another project and never quite finished this one. I got a few questions on the materials so I decided that it would be best to get off my butt and clean it up so that I could share it.

This is what's in the project for those that are interested:

For the material experts out there, I'm changing the projection angle for the projection material by creating a new transform basis based on 2 scalar values (stored in a vector). The values work between 0.0001 and .49999 with larger and smaller values repeating. At 0 and .5 it suffers from what seems like gimbal lock. I can prevent this by clamping the values, but it feels kind of hackey to me. If anyone has a better method I'd love to hear it.

One cool thing about using a vector is that I can use a texture to determine projection direction. There's a raised panel door in the project which has the stiles and rails projected at different directions.

[StevePeters]

Damaged wall prof of concept

[unit23]

Oh sweet, i had a bit of an issue getting pattern variation right and was curious about decals, thanks for posting will check it out soon!