Advanced Vertex Painting with more than 3 channels?

Hey I’m doing research on Vertex Painting in UE4. I did the 3dmotive vertex painting for UDK last week. I’m making a small horror game for school and it would be extremely useful if I had vertex painting. I want to create multiple materials with vertex painting. It’s is possible to create a material say: clean concrete walls as the base material and the vertex painting would give it cracks, moss, and Ivys+geometry displacement?

Here’s my link to my website blog post on vertex painting concept art I created of what I am hoping to achieve:
http://www.hawkeyegamedesign.com/blog/endemic-material-concept-art

Also is it possible to add more than just RGBA for the vertex painting? Does anyone know any advanced vertex painting tutorials for UE4? I had a little bit of a hard time following along with 3dmotive UDK vertex painting tutorials as its made for UE3 not UE4.

RGBA by itself allows 5 different textures to be blended (RGBA+1). You can also use textures and world position to add a bit more variation on top of the vertex painting.

I thought it was only 3 different textures with RGBA. Can you give me an example of 5 different textures in one texture file? Would I just add another channel in Photoshop?

Also I was meaning to ask if it’s possible to add non-grayscale textures for vertex painting? I just am not quite sure how I would create that cracked concrete texture with moss and ivy growing on it.

With RGBA you can mask out Red, Green, Blue, Alpha, and have a base texture, so that give you 5 layers of textures. Of course you can use non-grayscale textures for vertex painting, using gray scale just saves on texture memory, which was a bigger deal on the PS3/Xbox 360 era.

Oh okay I understand, how would I create a texture in Photoshop with channels containing non-grayscale textures? Is it possible to put full RGB colored images into one of the channels of the image file in Photoshop?

I’m not sure what you are asking or trying to do. Here’s how to use RGBA for blending 5 layers of textures. You can do the same blending on the normal map and the roughness. There’s also ways to control the blending between two textures using a mask, but I’d have to do that at another time.

Yeah, that answers my question. I will be posting in the the epic forums on the creation of my materials once I have questions or help needed. Thanks!