Dual base materials with a coating material such as snow or moss.
Almost every aspect of this shader is a parameter. The snow/moss can be changed to any other material you want. Mud, dirt, water, ice, WHATEVER.
The same can be said for the bricks and stone materials. As long as you have a height map or something similar (Strong AO Bake) the snow (or whatever) will build up through the cracks on the upward facing polys. The height maps can also be inverted for masking to have the coating be on top of the texture instead. The axis mask can also be disabled to create an all over coating of the material. The math for Roughness, Metalness, AO, contrast of the snow, and everything else is editable as parameters for use as instances. Incorporates Tessellation to literally “build up snow levels” while improving the realism of the other materials as well. This can also be turned off inside the material editor.
Accepts Roughness, Metalness, and Ambient Occlusion as one texture compiled into the RGB channels. A color mask can be imported for the two base materials to increase the flexibility of the shader. This shader can use the maximum 16 texture sheets UE4 allows in one material and is completely scalable.
Let me know anything you think I should change or you’d like to see or know.
Materials were done in Bit2Material3, Quixel, and Photoshop.
I noticed you mentioned Bit2Material3 and I was wondering if you make use of the .SBS + .SBSAR file types or are you primarily using .bitmap? I assume you’re not using Substances based off the images you provided but having them available would be a bonus for those who are conscious of texture sizes on disk.
P.S. I skimmed through your video due to it being 20+ minutes long (ain’t got time for that), so I might have missed where or where not this was mentioned.
Sorry about the 20 min video, didn’t want to leave anything out. I did include the embeded data, but the materials I used were just the example ones. I will make a few of what I would think this would be used for, but I also made it so that people can use their own textures.
Question for Epic but open to everyone. The brick is from Megascans. Everything else is made by bit2material3. Should I swap them out and rerender the examples and ship it with the new stuff or should I just ship it without the example textures.
Functionality of this is obviously great, and i could certainly use it, but i have two questions.
1.How is this shader different than current UE4 default vertex painting ability?
2.Is this optimized to be handled in large environments, for example using it on many rocks across the landscape, or with other words what is its performance impact as opose to standard material.
