HermineGames - Ultimate Master Material

Documentation Link

Ultimate Master Material is a powerful and optimized master material designed for Unreal Engine 5, built to cover the majority of environment material needs while staying performant and easy to use. It comes with two optimized shader versions:

  • 3-Texture Workflow: BaseColor, AORM, Normal

  • Ultra-Optimized 2-Texture Workflow: BaseColor+Roughness, Normal+AO+Metallic

This flexibility allows artists and developers to balance visual quality and performance depending on project requirements, from high-end environments to large-scale scenes.

The material supports advanced features such as triplanar projection, automatic grunge, distance field dirt, rain effects, emissive control, and vertex color blending — all demonstrated in an included demo level. Designed with scalability in mind, Ultimate Master Material leverages Custom Primitive Data to enable runtime parameter control without material instance duplication, making it ideal for games, archviz, film, and real-time applications.

Key Features

  • Two optimized master materials

    • 3-texture packed workflow (BaseColor / AORM / Normal)

    • 2-texture ultra-optimized workflow

  • World-aligned / triplanar textures

    • No extra texture lookups

  • Advanced surface details

    • Automatic grunge overlay

    • Distance field dirt accumulation

    • Rain and wetness effects

    • Emissive control

  • Material blending

    • Up to 4 blended materials

    • Height-based blending simulation without extra height textures

  • Artist-friendly controls

    • Vertex color support

    • Random UV offset

  • Runtime customization

    • Custom Primitive Data support

    • Change material behavior at runtime without extra instances

  • Modern Unreal support

    • PBR workflow

    • Nanite compatible

    • Lumen compatible

Included Content

  • 2 Master Materials

  • 21 Preconfigured Material Instances

  • 1 Demo Level showcasing all features

Performance & Optimization

  • Designed for low shader complexity

  • Optional 2-texture version for maximum performance

  • Reduced texture lookups

  • Efficient blending and feature toggles

  • Ideal for large environments and instanced assets

Who Is This For?

  • Beginners – ready-to-use instances and clear structure

  • Environment Artists – fast iteration and powerful blending tools

  • Technical Artists – runtime control and optimized shader design

  • Game Developers / Archviz / Film – scalable and production-ready

Top 3 Benefits

  1. One material for almost everything

  2. Performance-focused design without sacrificing visual quality

  3. Runtime control via Custom Primitive Data, reducing material instance overhead

I’d buy this instantly if there were support for 5.4