You can nest Blend materials. Metal Material + a Rust Material into Blend Material 1 using a grunge mask, then plug Blend Material 1 + a Paint Material into Blend Material 2 with an OSL mask for paint wear, etc.
However, if your aim is to move materials between renderers, both realtime and offline, then you'll want to avoid fancy blending graphs, and stick with standard metallic-roughness pbr, and use a single material per surface type.
Wow ok, I think I'm getting my head around that... I haven't used Blend yet, can it only do 2 materials? As some objects have 3 or more materials. This might be exactly what I was after, thank you very much.
There's no hard rule here, it all depends. You can use 1 material for multiple different surface types, but it's usually more work to do this as you have to separate the surface types in every texture... Metalness, Roughness, Albedo, etc. This is often required for realtime export since we typically want less complex…
Others have gone over the details but I'd just do all my texturing in substance designer. With designer you can just output the materials setup for different renderers. There's an arnold and unity output preset. And it exports directly to sketchfab.
This is where I'm unsure where to proceed. The model is being made in 3ds Max 2019, with Arnold Renderer ideally, and I was going to try shader tree pbr kinda materials. I *think* (read: unsure) I see a youtube video where you can later bake complicated materials/shaders down into basic pbr maps, I was planning to do that…
That's always going to be the case. Materials above and beyond standard PBR metallic-roughness will not transfer reliably between renderers. Each is so different in what it supports. If compatibility is key, then it's best to adjust the asset down to the common denominator of surface attributes: * Albedo * Metalness *…
I'm really confused with the best workflow for my project. I'm using 3ds Max with Arnold Renderer. The scene has 20 or so objects, all are UV'd, some I need to be multiple materials others only one. If I need an item to be both gold metal, and coloured glass, how do I get an Arnold standard surface to control both parts,…