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Procedural grooving in grout material?

Zablorg
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Zablorg polycounter lvl 6
I'd like to make a pretty geometrically simple material- some grout inlaid with smooth stones.

I plan on modelling the geometry by basically intersecting a bunch of these stones with a simple plane. This should work well for the stones, but the grout would obviously going to be flat. Ideally there'd be some grooves in between the stones, with the height of the grout getting slighly lower the further away it is from a stone.

This certainly wouldn't be impossible to model or sculpt, but since it'd be so dependent on stone placement, it'd be a pain to have to redo every time I want to change up the material. So: with a mask with pure white representing grout and pure black representing stone, is there any good procedural way to create some grooving along the path the grout takes around the stones?

I'm afraid I can't think of any- you'd basically want to get the distance of every white pixel from the nearest black pixel (which is arbitrary, not formulaic), and that'd require... loops, at the very least.

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  • Zablorg
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    Zablorg polycounter lvl 6
    I've given this some thought, and I think one way to do it (outside of UE4) would be to convolve the grout mask with a circular gradient? I'm uncertain how to achieve this even in Photoshop, however.

    I suppose it's just a blur filter, really. Blurring the grout mask and then multiplying it by its original hard mask might give me what I'm after.
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