@b1skit Thank you, that's not the actual landscape I'm going to attempt, only ground portion is similar. I'm aiming for this quality of blend, where both diffuse, normal and spec elements are correctly blended using custom mask or heightmap.
almost all of my textures are composed entirely of photos and automatically generated masks it's extremely commonplace and saves tons of time. only when the project calls for a specific art style or something should you be hand painting the majority.
Definitely has your immaculate style all over it Tim. The oxygen mask does tend to suggest pilot yeah, and probably doesn't quite gel with the rest of him, so Id be inclined to go one way or the other.
I got all the texturing done for the Mirana items this weekend, sans spec maps/color masks. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so I'll get that finished up when I get back next week.
KDR_11k you dont have to do every effect with the same shader. For example if you want rust on metal you have metal shader and rust shader and mask for the rust shader (preferably vector then it will be always sharp too)
is alphatest checked in your final blend? or you might need to use masked alpha instead of alpha blending. you might check out udn, my memory is fading on unreal2 stuff http://udn.epicgames.com/Main/WebHome
Think of using world position as the basis for a mask. Like.. Think of the world grid AS uv's a d your model being placed and moved around in them. I'll give a more thorough answer later, but see if that analogy helps.
As Andrea said, you should use a unique material for the glass faces. But you can also use the Refraction shader and load a mask image. https://marmoset.co/posts/getting-to-know-toolbag-3-ep-7-refraction/
WIP17 Drafting a poster for the beauty shot. There's a couple more details I want to fix. Skinning is where I need it to be at for the pose. Want to bring this into unreal to do animated vertices displacement on masked areas of the Ultralisk and gif the animation.
I've tried to practice a bit more with material definitions, using metals, paints etc. I feel that my workflow still needs a lot of improvement, but I've definitely learned a lot about masking in Substance Painter. mode