Materials or textures?

Development Rendering
1

Hi.
I started to create my own models in blender, but when I started to take a look to the unreal examples I saw that the models only have one material

Example: A table with wood and metal legs.

  1. One material with the texture of the table and a map to say to unreal that the legs have metallic aspect
  2. Create two materials, one for the legs and the other for the wood

I think that is easy to create some good materials and paste it on models (in some cases) instead of create a new texture that is only useful to one model
What’s the difference?

Thanks :smiley:

2

the difference is in the performance of your game. each material is a draw call, more draw calls = worse performance, less draw calls = better performance.

someone will probably give a longer explanation at some point but that’s basically it in a nutshell.

3

you can use vertex paint in some cases to define witch parts of model texture should affect so you can reuse them

4

Ok, thaks you all
I will try to make better textures instead lots of materials :wink:

5

There’s a few things to consider when making assets that have more than one material. If you interpolate between two values in the material with a mask, that masking and interpolating will make the material much heavier to render than if the values were just plugged directly, so for larger items that you don’t have too many of, it would be wiser to select those polygons in your 3D modelling software and assign it to a different material. This sharp polygon definition is also the only way to blend between translucency and opaque surfaces.

If you need some more textural blending and the object is going to be duplicated all over your scene, then you can use a multitude of blending options to keep everything in one material. I heard vertex blending being a possibility, but another is using texture masks. Texture masks can have a much higher resolution than polygons, so they can also work well as masks.

It’s a good idea to make a lot of good materials, but whether or not you need to sculpt or use generic textures all depends on the style you’re going for, what the surface is, what the object is, etc.

6

it’s a tricky balancing act.

if you can texture all the objects in your scene with just a handful of generic materials you’ll probably end up with less draw calls compared to having a unique texture and material for each asset. making that look good and varied though without adding more materials or making the materials expensive is a very difficult task…