Blending Material

Hey ue4 community

Recently I’ve been working on a blending material
where you can blend 6 materials
With texture placeholder for "difuse, roughnes, depth, normals,AO
of total 6x materials layers in a single material.

total textures used in the shader 24 textures
a result i acheived using that blending material.

Here is the showcase

and here is a walkthrough tutorial of how is it working

I am also adding another material to that package that will mostly work like
floor generator 3dsmax ( but it is still early in developing so there is nothing i can share about it yet)

I would love to hear your feedback about what iam doing. and how to make it better

Thanks!

Edit:
After reading the comments I started optimizing in the shader in my free time, and I’ve managed to hit 70 to 100 fps with 4k Textures I would also like to know if this would be valuable for others and if i should put it in the marketplace

thanks.

If this is intended to be used for landscape, it’s quite unplayable. 24 Textures is a ton (in UE4) and you need to channel pack everything. On top of that, 6-7 channel packed layers is still a ton (in UE4). I can imagine the shader complexity already.

Like Maximum, I’m kind of curious to see a benchmark on this material. 24 textures in one material does sound like a recepy for insane shader complexity. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hey guys,
Thanks a lot for the feedback
I tested it on 64 quad landscape with 2k texture size and it was running on 120 fps ( in editor)
but when i use 4k textures fps drop to 40-60 ~
i think it is expected since iam using tessellation on each layer
I also want to know what’s the standard test ? I mean how big should the landscape be and how much fps should i have to consider this material optimized ? so i can start working on it.

Thanks.

In order to call it usable and give it a high value it should give a minimum of 80-90 FPS on mid to large scale landscapes, however, I think that’s still pretty bad performance, but due to how UE4 works there at the moment there’s not much you can do. Material layering is extremely expensive and needs some improvements.

Ok thanks
i will try to hit that with 4k textures with tessellation on ( although i doubt it) but i will try.

How do you get 24 textures in material editor? I thought 16 texts was the limit.

You can change the Sampler Source on texture samples to Wrap to bypass that limit

I used Merging channels to bypass that limit
so i haven’t crossed the 16 texture limit iam just using channels
so technically it is not 24 textures .
it’s explained in the tutorial video

Hey guys, I have updated the post, I’d appreciate your feedback
thanks

Saying “it runs at X FPS” doesnt mean anything at all without knowing more. Does it run at 1080p on a 1080GTX at 120 fps? Does it run on 4k resolution on a cellphone at 120 fps? Also, dont measure in FPS, measure the impact in milliseconds, not FPS, since FPS is relative and ms is absolute.

Thanks for replying back
had it run on fullscreen (1080p) on gtx 1080 i know it’s not fast enough as it doesn’t hit 120 fps with 4k textures but the material is too complicated to run faster than this i think as mentioned above in comments
i also had shown the stats of ms ( of what i know of ) not sure if there is another measurement i should have tested with, let me know if there are any :smiley:

Well that means that your material is way more expensive than most AAA titles are in total :smiley: