Tips with Material Masks in UE4

David Somers

Hey guys, just getting into the more in depth features of the material editor within UE4. I'm wanting to tackle the usage of the metallic features to really get some convincing metal visuals down. I've got some really great examples to look at in current UE4 level example content, but I'm sorta baffled on the ins and outs of actually creating the mask. I've only used the basic norm/spec maps for props in the past so this is all new to me.

While I think I understand the usage pretty well, I just don't know how to manage setting that up in Photoshop. I'm sure there are some good and bad ways of doing it but I haven't had much luck as I'm almost as fresh to Ps as I am UE4 (used gimp for ages). Any good tips or articles you guys might know that can point me in the right direction?

ZacD

The quickest way would be to bake out a material mask or a diffuse map, which depends on what program you are using for baking.

LMP

I did a 400~ tri prop that had 5 different material definitions with a single mask texture. I assigned red, green, and blue (pure 100% rgb values) to materials in 3ds max, and then assigned them to a multi-sub object material, and I had another material that stood out from the RGB for the 4th option. I then baked the diffuse color from the high poly that I assigned the materials to down to the low poly UVs, and then in photoshop I extracted the 4th material that wasn't pure r, g, or b and put it into the alpha channel. The black space or not any of the other 4 materials I used for a 5th material.

David Somers

ZacD wrote: »

The quickest way would be to bake out a material mask or a diffuse map, which depends on what program you are using for baking.

Since my baking was just AO and Norm I'd only used the stock baking systems in XSI. Not a lot of documentation in the older application anymore but I'm getting to think this is a bit more straight forward than I was thinking before. For some reason I was really over complicating this in my head.

ZacD

Yup, the ultimaper in Softimage has a material ID option, and an albedo option. Both work just as well for making masks. What I've done is apply constant red, blue, green, and black materials, and bake out the albedo.