Bot material setup from Infiltrator demo (packed textures)

decorix

Hi All,

I am trying to understand how the M_DPW_Bot material is setup. As its a complex material with lots of packed textures. 

I would like to use this material setup for my own model. Does anybody know how the channels are setup. As I want  to export out my textures.

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Material from Infiltrator demo

M_DPW_Bot01

PackedTextures are:

T_DPW_Bot01_MatBlend.TGA is this like vertex color ID map?

R=?

G=?

B=?

A=?

T_DPW_Bot01_Shade.TGA

R=AO?

G=Curvature?

B=Spec?

A=Opacity?

T_DPW_Bot01_Detail.TGA

R=?

G=?

B=?

A=?

T_DPW_Bot01_Detail_Mask.TGA

R=?

G=?

B=?

A=?

leleuxart

I don't know about the bot specifically, but I'm pretty sure the Infiltrator demo was all(or mostly) Layered Materials. What you're seeing might be the masks for the individual materials. 

decorix

Thanks Leleuxart.  I'm just wondering what textures they are using for each RGBA channel. its hard  to tell. The material looks really cool. And there are alot paramters/instances you can adjust. 

musashidan

Could you post some screenies of the individual channels? I'd be interested to see this myself.

decorix

HI, Thanks for you reply. The material seems really robust with lots of parameters and adjustments.

I made a list of the textures and there R|G|B|A channels. If you can help out would be really cool.

musashidan

Yes, as @leleuxart says, it looks like it's a multi-layered material setup making heavy use of masking, similar to what you would see on a vfx asset (albeit not nearly as complicated ) so the final comped channel result isn't usable as a map in itself, rather the separate channels. I would have to see the shader tree. I might download the demo and pick it apart. I love the hero character design from the promo vid.

Obscura

Yes, its a layered material. All of these textures masks some areas and applies a material on that part. I don't have the demo downloaded, but probably they have some pre-made materials, as material functions. There is a make material attribute node, so now you can have complete materials as functions, and you can call multiple of them inside one material, and blend or do whatever you want. The first row of textures seems like some ao, cavity, and specular occlusion mask. Second and third row of masks seems like simple material masks that are used to blend in some other pre made materials, lets say metal, rubber, etc.... 

musashidan

Finally downloaded the demo had a look at the shader tree. @Obscura is correct. Everything is running on material functions whilst using the make attribute node.
So there are 5 separate mats: chrome, machine paint, secondary colour, rubber, base metal. Each of these just uses vector3 or 4 as the base value with various channels from the textures you are curious about acting as masks. These 5 mats are then passed through mat functions for layer blending. then through the make material attribute node, and finally split off again with the roughness/metal/normal piping straight to the final material output, and the specular(yes, spec is used here in the metal/rough workflow) and base colour going through more masking/blending using the AO/curvature/cavity channels from that 1st texture you showed.

The emissive channel is created using similar techniques, but is built separately and piped straight in to the final output.

The entire material is basically achieving a similar result to what you might get in Substance designer/painter, but all within the UE mat editor. With the power of the mat functions and parameters(in an instanced mat) essentially being the same as publishing a substance with params exposed in-engine.