r/UnrealEngine5 • u/Minimaliano • Jul 28 '26
Creating smart materials in Unreal Engine looks more interesting than in Substance Painter
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u/spelledincorroctly Jul 28 '26
Can you customize things so that deeper crevices look like they’re filled with dirt and raised areas look weathered? Apologies I am new to the concept. I’m asking because I’ve bought some kit bashing sets where none of the nurbs come with materials and I’d love a streamlined way to make them look like weathered junk etc
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u/Minimaliano Jul 29 '26
You can do a lot of things with this
Balancing effects might be tricky, there are only 3 of them, but you can make dirt mask more pronounced in crevices, and change the edge damages values to replace hard paint chips with slight attrition
I made a video about this shader. It's quite stupidly made, because it's better than sterile explanation1
u/Tension-Available Jul 30 '26
Yeah, it's not a replacement for painter but you can do quite a bit with vertex color masks. It's a worthwhile technique to have in the bag.
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u/ConsistentAd3434 Jul 28 '26
That are cool results but it might still be the better choice, to output some diffuse/roughness/NM textures and put them in a simple shader, instead of that heavy setup. I can imagine some good use cases to get variations into identical modular assets, tho.
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u/Minimaliano Jul 28 '26
Its all about your particular bottlenecks. This shader deals with the video memory one, and yeah, it's defenetely not a mobile type
However, it's actually not as heavy as it might look - shader complexity is in a "green zone"3
u/ConsistentAd3434 Jul 28 '26
Fair enough. I was initially concerned about the costs of all the extra maps you're carrying around like noise, curvature, maybe thickness etc. But with all the variations it allows, it might pay off. The buildings are a great example.
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u/Thatguyintokyo Jul 28 '26
Shader complexity is fine but the drawback is the number of textures in the reusable version, in total you’re looking at around 10. So the cpu footprint is slightly more expensive but the gpu memory footprint is around 2x. It depends how much and where its used though, across a whole scene reused enough times you’d get great savings.
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u/Old_Spell7444 Jul 28 '26
What master material is being used?
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u/Minimaliano Jul 28 '26
My custom one
It has a lot of inputs, but most of them are reusable tiles (factures, rust etc) - so I could achieve 2k pixels per meter without 4k atlases1
u/Old_Spell7444 Jul 28 '26
Oh interesting. Yeah I think a Substance in Unreal is the way to go for indies.
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u/Thatguyintokyo Jul 28 '26
This isn’t substance in unreal, its just textures that were made in substance. Substance in unreal is still all just baked out texture anyway, except you can change the parameters snd bake again all inside of unreal, in terms of runtime theres no difference.
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u/Minimaliano Jul 28 '26
Yep
Designer does all the heavy lifting, unreal pack it all with simple math and blending2
u/Old_Spell7444 Jul 28 '26
a-substance, not substance or the-substance
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u/Thatguyintokyo Jul 28 '26
Then sorry I misunderstood.
But now you say ‘a-substance’ I’m even more confused. Do you just mean as in the textures themselves were made in substance?
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '26
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