noob question here,but would be possible in UE4 to just create several shader,1 for each type of material needed (let’s say wood,copper,iron,steel) and then texture an entire mesh with all of them assigning each one to a portion of the uv based on the colors in a material ID texture (red=wood,green=copper,yellow=iron,purple=steel)? I saw that method beign used in a Substance Designer tutorial,and looks great for speeding up the workflow.
Look into layered materials: Inside Unreal: Layered Materials | Feature Highlight | Unreal Engine - YouTube
@Jacky: first of all thanks,that’s exactly what I was talking about,unfortunately from that video seems that Unreal is doing this in a less Epic way compared to Substance Designer xD
Reason being that from what I see he’s using each channel to drive a single material thus you’re limited to 4 material per material ID texture,while in substance designer basically you tell him precisely what color to pick from the material ID texture as mask for each single material,thus you can have tons of colors in a single texture driving tons of material. Also the video is from 2 years ago,so what Substance Designer does would be possible now inside UE4?
On a different note, if I have let’s say 50 game assets and the choice to use the standard method (each mesh his own material) or the layered method,what are the pros & cons for each method? (especially performance wise)
1 Like
+1 Nice summary on how material ID works - turns out it’s the color channels in UE4.
Yes it sounds a bit limiting but with some tweak you can still get pretty complicated behaviors: Paragon Character Texturing Pipeline | Unreal Dev Day Montreal 2017 | Unreal Engine - YouTube
I would say it can be automated and be more intuitive but good to know it at least works😆