[UE4] Worn Varnished Wood Master Material (Clear Coat, UV2 RGB Masks)
greentooth
Hey people
A lot of the time I encounter questions about the whole "medium-poly with weighted normals and UV2 magic" workflow, so I figured I'd experiment with a Clear Coat UE4 material and document it while I test stuff.
ArtStation
I ended up making a Master Material that contains some tiling wood textures from a previous project (start storing all your good content on a hard drive or something, it's saved me incalculable amounts of time) as well as a super generic blendmask and a tiling pattern of scratches and water rings I whipped up quickly in Designer. The UV2 mask provides AO in the red channel (which is also inverted and added to Roughness), darkens areas of the wood according to the green channel, and I painted areas that would get worn with use in the blue channel - which is the alpha input of a Lerp node that controls where the scratches/rings appear. The tiling scratches/water damage affect diffuse saturation, roughess, and also subtract from the clear coat.
These obviously aren't the world's best furniture assets ever, but they're not the worst either - and while you won't always want to build stuff this way, it shows that with this kind of material setup (plus some more standard ones for metallic details, etc), you can really quickly make good and consistent assets.
Shader Complexity view:
I did have a version of this that took further advantage of the clear coat model, and had a small soft wobble normal map as the "underneath normal" but a few things were removed to get it into a level of Shader Complexity that I preferred
A lot of the time I encounter questions about the whole "medium-poly with weighted normals and UV2 magic" workflow, so I figured I'd experiment with a Clear Coat UE4 material and document it while I test stuff.
ArtStation
I ended up making a Master Material that contains some tiling wood textures from a previous project (start storing all your good content on a hard drive or something, it's saved me incalculable amounts of time) as well as a super generic blendmask and a tiling pattern of scratches and water rings I whipped up quickly in Designer. The UV2 mask provides AO in the red channel (which is also inverted and added to Roughness), darkens areas of the wood according to the green channel, and I painted areas that would get worn with use in the blue channel - which is the alpha input of a Lerp node that controls where the scratches/rings appear. The tiling scratches/water damage affect diffuse saturation, roughess, and also subtract from the clear coat.
These obviously aren't the world's best furniture assets ever, but they're not the worst either - and while you won't always want to build stuff this way, it shows that with this kind of material setup (plus some more standard ones for metallic details, etc), you can really quickly make good and consistent assets.
Shader Complexity view:
I did have a version of this that took further advantage of the clear coat model, and had a small soft wobble normal map as the "underneath normal" but a few things were removed to get it into a level of Shader Complexity that I preferred
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