Problem with the 16 samples maximum...

Development Rendering
1

Hi there! I’m really in a bad position!

To make it simple, I’ll start by explaining my situation and, if you want to know only the problem itself, you’ll be able to jump to the problem section! :wink:

THE SITUATION

Basically, I’m working on my master degree. I had a CGI formation in VFX but I deceided (to make my whole life a lot more complicated) that I wanted to use unreal even if I don’t know verry well this program!

I’m working on an environnement I would prefer not touching on the landscape tools (because I have too many convex stuff and it doesn’t give good results…) So, I have some meshes that I’ll use to make island in a sea. Each island (wich are one mesh) will have many material on it : Sand, Rock, Moss and Earth. Each material is made of two set of textures overlapping to avoid the repetition effect. Wich means : each textures has two RGB, two, normal maps, two ambiant occlusion, two roughness AND each mesh has an extra normal map to bake high res detail in it…

THE PROBLEM

The problem, is that as soon as I’m trying to merge my many materials in one (each mesh can only have one material at the time), I’m busting this 16 layers texture limits in my material…

MY QUESTIONS

  1. Is there a workaround that would allow me to bypass this 16 layers texture limit?
  2. If yes, how?
  3. If not, what should I do? I have over 30 islands (wicha has grottoes, peak, mountain) to import in unreal and I would like to blend at least those four materials in them… Help!
2

Roughness and AO only need 1 of the 3 color channels in an RGB texture, so they can be combined into one. ChannelPacking - polycount

If you set the textures’ “sampler source” to warp inside the material, you can use up to 128 textures.

3

Thanks for answering ZacD! Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the 16 sample problem counting more on the number of manioulation (layering?) I do with the pictures than the number of textures I used?

If not, where is the “sampler source”?

4

You don’t need two different material textures to avoid repetition. Just sample same texture multiple times with different texture coordinates and blend the results with some magic. This is well studied problem and there are good solutions.

5

Hi there! After testing, it works perfectly! Thanks guies! :smiley:

7

I encountered the same problem, Please tell me how you solved it~ thks.