So I’m currently working on a level for my university course, and at this moment I’m focusing on a material for the stairs leading from the first floor down to the basement area. I cannibalised a world aligned concrete texture from a modular pack I brought into the level and added to it by implementing a self-generated texture that’s meant to add painted yellow strips to the edge of the stairs. After tweaking them for ages so they have the right roughness and normals, I brought them into the level and spliced them into the material with some multiply nodes.
However, once I had a chance to look at the material in-game I noticed immediately how flat the paint strips were as well as how they seemed to be translucent against the concrete background of the material. I could just say “good enough”, but I don’t do my work by halves. Anyone with experience know where I went wrong in my nodework?
It’s because you’re using a multiply node, the line is combining with the concrete.
You need to lerp between concrete and yellow line by using one channel of the albedo ( any one that highlights the line ).
Also your roughness is shot. Again, you only need to use one channel of the albedo to how rough it’s going to be ( 0 - 1 ).
If you wanna upload the texture here, I’ll knock something together if you get stuck…
I’ve linked the dump file in my university OneDrive containing all the Photoshop and targa files, plus the Unreal asset that contains the material. Hopefully this link will allow you in
link text
Thanks a tonne for having a look at this. I’ll experiment with the dirty paint vs clean paint, because I don’t want to decide which one I want until I’ve seen both possibilities plumbed into the material I already had.
Could I also just ask for clarification on what you meant by the roughness map being shot? Did you mean the texture itself, or just how I went about connecting up the nodes in the material?
Finally got a chance to look at this. Ignoring world aligned as it’s not relevant for the moment, it seems to look fine just connecting up the nodes:
What effect are you trying to achieve?
EDIT: Dirt on the concrete and not the stripes or…?
More dirt in the rough areas:
This is better, you can choose how much dirt is on the lines and powered by roughness:
Sorry, what I meant, was you hadn’t setup the roughness correctly. It works much better if you only take one channel from the texture. In this example, red. But you often have to check out the texture to find out which channel to use.
I’d be interested to see it on the stairs 
I’ve had a dabble in Unreal and set up my material according to the above screenshots, and it’s almost perfect and in keeping with the texture I’m using the on the floor tiles. Have you had any thoughts on how I could implement the world aligned concrete texture underneath?
If you just pop in the world aligned nodes like before, is that enough?..
Unfortunately, I’ve had to scrap the combined material and rethink of ways to get the yellow lines on the stairs, including decals. I wanted this to work, but I’m running against a clock and I can’t afford to sweat the small stuff when I’ve got all of last semester’s work to complete as well as keeping up to date on this semester’s work.
Nevertheless, thank you for teaching me more about materials and the limitations of world alignment
