Give me motivation with reviews and i'll add Blend Presets that works like Smart Materials :)
Substance-style control. Unreal-native power. Since 4.27
Built on top of MaterialCraft - LayerCraft is a high-performance, production-ready Material Layering System built for artists and developers who want complete control without complex setups.
Whether you're working on environments, props, or modular assets, LayerCraft gives you an intuitive, scalable workflow for blending any number of materials — cleanly and efficiently.Most systems either oversimplify or overcomplicate. LayerCraft finds the balance:
Built like a toolkit — use only what you need.
Inspired by AAA workflows (tiling + trims + global effects).
Works out of the box, but customizable down to the bone.
This is your shader Swiss army knife. With a focus on customization and performance, from procedural blending to paint overrides, from level variation to cinematic surface response — LayerCraft scales with your vision.
Master Layer Logic: Create your layers with these basic steps: Layer Logic + UV Logic + Textures + Surface Adjustments
Master Blender Methods: Blend smart, work with required attributes, keep shaders lightweigth.
I’ve added your asset pack to my current project, and I can confidently say that you’ve done an amazing job with LayerCraft. It’s really convenient that everything unnecessary can simply be disabled, saving a certain number of instructions.
The only thing that’s currently a bit missing is a texture rotation function in “UV Logic” when you using World Projection and the ability to adjust texture contrast in “use Albedo Controls.”
Oh, and by the way, in “Surface: RESPONSE”, the Specular Amount is set to 0 by default. It would be great if you changed it to 0.5 by default, otherwise everyone importing custom textures (for example, from Substance Painter) will be wondering why the appearance looks so different in UE.
Other than that — my compliments.
By the way, will you be adapting LayerCraft to work with Substrate?
Thank you so much for taking the time to write. I’m honored by your comment
You’re absolutely right about the Specular default. It came into my notice really late but it’s been fixed to 0.5 in the latest update.
As for the Texture Rotation in World Projection, its still something i struggle with. True normal map rotation - preserving correct tangent-space direction - is still a challenge I haven’t solved to a level I’m confident shipping.
I’ll try my best to add this functionality as it deserves a proper solution.
About the substrate, i haven’t get my hands into it. But your comment is a push for that new direction to explore.
Again, thank you so much for using the system and seeing its potential. Grateful for the review and i’ll make sure it will shape what comes next.
I’m proudly announce that texture rotation for World Projection is now updated. For days i’ve worked on it and now its working even with Local Projection.
Thanks for pointing out!
Great news! I’ll definitely test it out. If you don’t mind, I’ll occasionally send suggestions for improvements. For example, I just noticed that Detail Normal doesn’t use World Projection. If a model has no UVs or just poor UV mapping, Detail Normal produces visual artifacts or doesn’t work at all.
Oh please do!
Detail Normal world projection is clever, didn’t had the need since they are usually used with high tiling scale.
But now they are also added, with correct rotation of true normals.
Also Noise Variation in Surface:COLOR has world projection option also.
Beyond these, 2 new features added:
Baked Normals: For any mesh that has baked normals in 0-1 UV space can use it to blend with the layer stack
Rain Function: Something i’ve been delaying for a long time. Now it has a complex rain effect with all ripples and puddles in the material parameters. It is an override to the whole layer stack and also can be masked with RVT to disable in certain areas in the world.
I’m interested in purchasing LayerCraft 3.2 and would like to clarify a few points to ensure it fits my workflow:
Vertex Paint: Does LayerCraft support direct Vertex Color (RGB/A) blending for layers, or is “Manual Paint” only texture/parameter based?
Triplanar / World-aligned: Can I switch between UV and world-aligned per Material Instance? Does it work with Nanite meshes?
Material Control & Optimization: Can I blend only selected channels (Color, Roughness, Normals)? How many texture samplers are typically needed for 3–5 layers? Are there optimizations for large environments?
Runtime / Blueprint Integration: Can exposed parameters be controlled via Blueprints or Level parameters for variations?
Documentation & Support: Are there examples for vertex paint, triplanar workflow, and procedural/manual masks? Is LayerCraft actively supported?
Thank you for your time — I want to make sure it covers my workflow before purchasing.
Of course! VertexPaint is one the foundations of the Blend Logic. You can use VertexColors as painting or ID Masks, select channels and further adjust the mask amount&contrast.
World Projection is ready out of box! I downgraded the newst updates on single texture sampled method so its most optimized.
You got Cheap Projection as sharp plane edges and also dithered Smooth Projection where you can blend the projection planes. Also Top-Down & Side Projection if you want world projection but only particular axis without the cost of Triplanar.
Also you have Local Projection which will stick the projections to the object so location, rotation and scale behieve like UV projected.
One of the best optimization of the system is exactly that! You can choose each attribute channel to be blend, even with weighted blend to control the amount. So you can have a whole new layer and just choose the Normals, with minimal cost. I use as Color+Normal Blend most of the time with minimal cost and it works pretty fine.
Samples are wraped so you don’t have much of a limit in sample counts but sure, texture sampling is the main killer of performance so I develop BakeCraft for packing textures and use them -like baking normals+roughness+occlusion into a NOR, 2 channel normal method which the system is offering you-
If you can create Texture Arrays and benefit custom datas like from PCG, with single material you can have mutliple assets within a single draw call.
Its both for background and hero assets
BP_DynamicCraft is ready to serve that! You got a blueprint with layer & blend parameters exposed to be controlled in game, cinematics or just you can create variation with single material instance in the level, without dublicating new instances.
I’m actively creating content on youtube about different topics the system has to offer. It basicly unlimited so doing each example by time and once you get to the base principle, only limit is the imagitation.
I spend a lot of time to make whole static switch system to be user-friendly in UI and make them cut-off/enable all different parameters as logical groups.
Check out my youtube channel for more examples and usecases.
I’m sure you’ll find it convincing.
Thank you for the interest.
Vertex Paint: Does LayerCraft support direct Vertex Color (RGB/A) blending for layers, or is “Manual Paint” only texture/parameter based?
Triplanar / World-aligned: Can I switch between UV and world-aligned per Material Instance? Does it work with Nanite meshes?
Material Control & Optimization: Can I blend only selected channels (Color, Roughness, Normals)? How many texture samplers are typically needed for 3–5 layers? Are there optimizations for large environments?
Runtime / Blueprint Integration: Can exposed parameters be controlled via Blueprints or Level parameters for variations?
Documentation & Support: Are there examples for vertex paint, triplanar workflow, and procedural/manual masks? Is LayerCraft actively supported?