Need explainations about Layered Materials in UE4

Samuel_D

Hey, I'm Samuel, 16 years old and I'm currently working on a small SciFi environment with UE4.

I began to model the basics modular pieces such as floors and walls. But, during the early process of creation, I discovered the Layered Materials. So I deleted all the materials I created to start again with Layered Materials.

I understood the main idea : You create generic materials (such as Metal, Wood, Leather...) and you create "child" material with the specific maps of your asset (Normal Map and AO Map). Then, you don't have to redo exactly what you did 10 mins ago, and several assets can share a common parent material.

BUT, I don't understand how to apply this creative process. I have a metal material, and an asset to test it, with both baked AO and Normal Map.

Thanks for your help,
Samuel.

Samuel_D

I precise that I followed Epic's official videos, but I still have huge difficulties to apply this workflow.

Thanks,
Samuel.

kurt_hectic

" So I deleted all the materials I created to start again with Layered Materials."

It's good that you try to learn this technique and look how it works but keep in mind that in production you should keep everything as simple as possible. Use special, heavy, not optimal mechanism only when they are reaaaaalllyyy super needed.

In most productions you have one big shader with all you need inside and you just create instances of this one shader.
There are extensions like special shaders for water, glass, characters, ground, sky, fx's ect. But the rest, like probs, buildings ect. ~75% of the game could use instances of the one, pretty simple shader.


https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/MaterialInstances/index.html

Samuel_D

Hey kurt,

Thanks alot for you last message, now I understand