[UE] Detail Mask-Based Master Material

As of the past few weeks I’ve been going through my preferred material library and have been going through my master materials for water, glass, eyes, foliage, car paint, etc. Recently at work we have been doing a lot of trailer work for clients and I love when they send over unreal projects for us to work with. Its always interesting seeing production grade master materials from other studios. One that I saw recently made extensive use of detail masks and I thought I would give a try at something similar.

Herein is a tour of a pretty packed mask-based master material for general use.

So as previously stated, the primary workflow with this material is using masks for detail textures over a primary set of Base Color, ORM, and Normal maps.

Here is the standard map controller - It handles the base trifecta maps, UVs, and the base detail mask texture.

Here is a look at the UV controller - The top section is for primary map UVs and the bottom section is basic X + Y tiling for all the detail maps along with some world aligned normal controls.

Here is where the UVs are hooked up to each detail texture. The detail maps are all ORM (occlusion, roughness, metallic) channel packed maps. In this section they are all controlled by their respective UV outputs and broken into each individual map. Below is the same for the detail normal maps.

To see how these are applied we will take a look at the AO section. The top box is the primary AO map and below is a row for each detail AO map. If you recall from the standard map controller, there is a red + blue + green texture with non-overlapping sections. Each color is masked out and then multiple or lerped by the corresponding mask channel. Additionally, there is some normal aligned controls.

By using switches we control the number of instructions loaded in the instance based on the channels used in the detail map. In a full production setting we would ideally track which channels are used so that the ingest tool can switch on the necessary channels.

This basic setup is the repeated for roughness, metallic, and normals. Sometimes the detail maps are multiplied against each other while other times they are simply added. The instruction depends on the type of greyscale data that is being used.

That is the primary workflow section accounted for. In addition to all the detail masking I’ve also added some various utilities. For example, here is the emissive controller:

Along with the normal aligned mask setup, non-normal aligned masking, and some subsurface controls:

Here are some grass wind and world-space gradient helpers:

And then finally some basic variation and basecolor controls:

And there you have it. This material has been serving me well as a starter to get basic environments up and running before more bespoke functionality is required. I’ve only used it on a handful of hero environments as most of the projects I’ve gotten to use it on up to this point have been very fast turn arounds (like a week or two).