So I stumbled upon something really cool. I’m most likely a moron for never thinking of doing it before but I exported a gun from Blender as an fbx but I accidentally did it with like 5 or 6 materials assigned to different vertex groups. When I imported it into UE4 it had material slots for these groups and I thought ‘AWESOME’! I have a UV Map and a few textures but this opens up a bunch of other options as well. My question is will this have any affect on gameplay? Is it better to use one or the other? Honestly, I’d rather use materials made in UE4 anyway rather than paint a texture as I’m terrible at texturing.
more materials means more draw calls so if you do it to a lot of models in your game it will effect your performance but doing it to just a few models is usually fine, for example most vehicles have multiple materials, guns in games like BF4 could be done with multiple mat’s or masks in one mat.
in some situations one material is better and sometimes multiple mat’s is better, only you can decide what’s right for your game and how you want to do it.
The more Materials an object has the more expensive it will be to render to the screen as each Material that an object has requires a new rendering pass. So if an object has six Materials on it , it will require six passes to render(I am greatly over simplifying things here for ease of explanation) before it can be drawn to the screen or simply put, one pass for each Material on the object. While the effect this has on performance is hard to tell when viewing a single object in a non-complexe environment, performance will eventually start to degrade as you add more and more objects with multiple Materials to the scene.
Darn! Thought I could get out of painting textures. LOL