UE4 Material Gradient Mask Array

UE4 Material Gradient Mask Array

Mathew Wadstein tutorials are super helpful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovelaLbCNjw&t=

FYI: When using your own material in painter make sure Red channel(Array) is set to black*
Do not touch the opacity or generator offsets*
Paint in bottom layer mask.

Feel free to shoot me any questions!

The best situation for this UE4 shader is when you have a lot of buildings/rocks/trees/concrete/etc.
These are not the necessary materials. Could use different levels of brick, concrete, or whatever variation is useful for the production.

The best situation for this UE4 shader is when you have a lot of buildings/rocks/trees/concrete/etc.
These are not the necessary materials. Could use different levels of brick, concrete, or whatever variation is useful for the production.

Materials separated based on their values in the Red channel in the Array mask.
Drips grunge masking in Green channel
Dirt grunge masking in the Blue channel

Materials separated based on their values in the Red channel in the Array mask.
Drips grunge masking in Green channel
Dirt grunge masking in the Blue channel

Substance Painter portion. 
Utilizing a custom designer generator and anchors attached masks to offset painting between materials. 
In a production environment you would have an Open GL coder guy to make special painter shader. This was my work around.

Substance Painter portion.
Utilizing a custom designer generator and anchors attached masks to offset painting between materials.
In a production environment you would have an Open GL coder guy to make special painter shader. This was my work around.

Why not paint your whole environment inside UE4?
We need more brush options though. Hopefully a nice UE4 update will come soon. If we can skip the whole painter portion of this workflow, production would be even faster.

Why not paint your whole environment inside UE4?
We need more brush options though. Hopefully a nice UE4 update will come soon. If we can skip the whole painter portion of this workflow, production would be even faster.

Comparison between painting in substance painter and the result in UE4. 

I basically had to copy the math created in UE4 somehow and make it paint the exact same way inside of Substance painter. I think it worked out successfully.

Comparison between painting in substance painter and the result in UE4.

I basically had to copy the math created in UE4 somehow and make it paint the exact same way inside of Substance painter. I think it worked out successfully.

Save some texture memory

Save some texture memory

scene graph.
Attempting organization and simplicity, spiderwebs can get confusing for iterations. Materials were organized into Material Functions. Made it super easy to replace with new materials.

scene graph.
Attempting organization and simplicity, spiderwebs can get confusing for iterations. Materials were organized into Material Functions. Made it super easy to replace with new materials.

Utilizing and understanding ValueStep node.
Using customized material lerps that is more optimized for this shader

Utilizing and understanding ValueStep node.
Using customized material lerps that is more optimized for this shader

Designer material blending.
Height could have been replaced with something else depending if the project uses displacement.

Designer material blending.
Height could have been replaced with something else depending if the project uses displacement.