I’ve been watching the unreal engine’s material tutorial and noticed how some models have multiple materials applyed.
Can this be done in blender too? Or do you need 3D max for it?
yes it can be done in blender, when you create the first material it gets applied to the whole mesh, create the second material, switch to edit mode, select the faces you want, then click the “assign” button in the second materials options and it will be applied to the faces you selected, that’s it.
hope that helps:)
A better way to do this would be to just used Material Layers within UE4
Layered materials are not for free in terms of performance and should be only used if necessary. So no, it’s not better per se.
It’s also stated in the docs,
“Your first impulse may be to use Layered Materials any time you wish to have multiple surface types on an object. For instance, if you have a model of a car, you may want to have one Material Layer for paint, another for steel, for rubber, for glass, etc. However, many of those Materials could be separated at the geometry level. This creates more Material Elements on your objects, which increases draw calls, but is generally much more efficient. In short, if you can apply multiple Materials instead of using a Layered Material, then do so. If you must have per-pixel control over where Materials are placed, then use a Layered Material.”
Performance
Whats the performance impact of one mesh with two materials? In unity its something to avoid but in the shooter demo for example we see meshes with multi materials everywhere.