I am trying to create advanced multi-material. That would use 2-3 textures for blending. Plus on top of that there would be an option to paint tint onto them. I’ve found out that quixel bridge multimaterial shader is great for blending textures together but is missing option to paint tint onto them.
Added vertex color to top layer of quixel bridge multimaterial blend shader but unfortunately it’s not working as intended. I need to use RGB nodes to paint vertex color onto mesh for tinting but it’s already using some of these channels for texture blending giving me a crazy result:
I wonder if I can use alpha channel as tinting channel. Would that work? How it could be done?
Vertex color is ‘just 4 channels’; you can use them as alpha’s (or whatever) for anything.
Unfamiliar with the Quixel material but if they are already using RGB and leaving A alone (in vertex coloring) then you can surely use it for yourself.
It’s ‘just’ another 4vec
As for color, you can use a single vertex-channel as an alpha and lerp to a predefined color. It sounds like you are using the RBG channels of your vertex-coloring as R, G, and B for the actual tint?
No idea what I am doing here tbh… Tried that setup You’ve sent but it’s not working. Certain I am doing silly stuff here. I might start to deconstruct this shader and try out new settings on the go.
In the meantime if You have any ideas. Please share. Maybe there are other ways to paint tint on a material layer blend node?
ps. (I am still new to Unreal shaders so probably no idea what I am talking about here xD)
So you are doing it correctly with regards to the second picture. A single value (Scalar) is coming out of the vertexcolor node to LERP between two 3vecs (Color-information).
What I CANNOT tell you is what the mesh might already have insofar as colors stored in the red-vertex-channel, the green, etc, etc.
What I said before is the ideal, but you will have to control the actual colors. I have no idea if the red-channel or whatever is suitable for what you want to do, just HOW it could/would be done.
I’m quessing quixel has some predefined information on the vertex-colors, so if you wanted to co-opt them for your own purposes, you’d have to paint them yourself, either in an external program, or in Unreal.
So, for example, this quixel rock I exported a while-back is completely-full in the red-channel. NOTE: I might have done that myself, no idea how it originally exported over…
As far as the top picture, it’s too fuzzy so I cannot make out the function-names, but if you are using different colors for different alphas (as you nominally WOULD be doing) it’s likely on-point insofar as the concept. Again, if the mesh already has predefined vertex-coloring, it’s more your logic is sound, but garbage-in-garbage-out.
Thank You so much for Your time writing this answer. I really appreciate that.
I am new to Unreal Material creation so I am sure I am doing stuff wrong. I try to do 5 different things in one go while mixing different premade concepts to speed things out.
Mesh painting feature with megascans multimaterial feature works miracles and does most of what I would like it to do. It’s shown here:
But I think it’s missing a tinting feature. Once I will get a bit of free time I will try to break it down and add it on top or just create my own multimaterial. I’ve seen multimaterials that are capable of using 4 diffrent textures with tinting, wetness and lookup.
Would be nice to get some shading to my current WIP scene:
I’ve had a look at a fair amount of tutorials now. Few steps closer to creating the one I need.
I will publish it here once I am done with it. As some other people might find it useful. Althrough it might still take some time since I am working on 10 different things at one time xD