Edit: I figured out the terminology I’m looking for: Texture masking.
Edit 2: Actually, that was even wrong. I feel like I had to go into hardcore detective mode over the span of days to get to the bottom of this. What I’ve actually been trying to figure out is how to make mask textures AKA mask maps. It’s incredible how hard it can be to find useful information that would make you a useful 3D artist in practice.
So I’m having the absolute worst time in tutorial hell on this issue, because I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the right lingo / search terms to google. I’ve watched videos, worked through books, still can’t figure out how to even begin learning the skill I want to learn.
Here’s the deal, I want to make materials in UE5 and apply them to my own models I’ve made in blender. What I can’t figure out, I don’t even know the terminology for this… Is how do I generate a UV map or whatever… (texture reference??) that allows me to specify what part of the model will have what parts of the material attached to it. Like in the material editor in UE5 you can use a lerp to split what channel (or whatever) a specific albedo goes to, and then the other one can be sent to a different channel, and bam, you’ve built a single material that makes your robot character part metal and part plastic.
I don’t even know the terminology for these concepts, so I’m not sure how to even properly ask how to do this stuff or even how to look up proper tutorials for it.
As you can see in the above picture, here is a layout where various lerped constant-3’s feed directly into the base color of the result node, which gives us an effect like this picture below. All that by itself is black magic to me. How lerps splitting into the base color do all this??? Beyond me.
But more importantly, how do I generate this texture sample that would allow me to do this?
Is it done from blender?
