MATERIAL LAYERING SYSTEMS in UE5 🔥 (Baked maps in Blender)

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0:00 intro
1:28 material setup in Blender
2:48 material blending in Blender
4:17 general setup in Unreal
5:12 material setup in Unreal
6:32 channel packing in Blender
8:16 material blending in Unreal
12:18 adding a blend mask control in Unreal
13:20 bringing it all together
15:53 final thoughts
ABOUT ME
I've been using Blender for over half my life! That's since 2008. My first freelance work with the software was around that time as well. I did some animations for a waiting room in my local dental office. Since then, I've been hooked earning a living providing 3D services for businesses across the world. I've had the chance to do work for some big organizations like NASA and Microsoft. The real pride in my work though, has come from helping and being involved with small, independent productions. These indie productions and creators embody what it is to me, to be an artist.
Nowadays I spend my time making 3D models, textures, and training material to help get these solo creators and small teams off the ground and running. You can find everything I'm working on in one place, over on the site I built from scratch: www.rileyb3d.com
I'm very proud of it! I ought to be with how much time I've put into it. 😅 It's the catch all site to access everything I create. Supporting me there is as simple as contributing the cost of one coffee per month. Doing so gets you access to all training material I've ever created. For a slightly higher support tier, you get access to my ENTIRE model and texture library! Higher still, and you'll receive recognition in all of my video and site footer credits.
Some people ask why I don't have a Patreon. This site is all about creating custom and exclusive offerings for artists. Your monthly contribution is no joke. In fact, it's my complete livelihood at this point! I don't think it's responsible for me to give away a cut of your money to third party organizations like Patreon, so it stays with me, and goes directly towards producing more content and resources.

[@ShaggyMummy]

damn I really like this workflow, the only UV specific texture is the detail mask and everything else is modular

[@stedbenj]

Can you read my mind? This Blender -> Unreal workflow info is gold and what I've been looking for.

[@tamtrily]

So much more complex in Unreal 😮

[@HussinKhan]

Thank you for the tutorial. I’ll incorporate it into my workflow 😊

[@codylavery356]

Been working with Unreal since 2015.... LEARNED A TON watching this. Thx man :) BUT... Makes ya wonder if in like 5 years everyones gonna be bashing all the models we make now with RUST EVERYWHERE like rounded corners in UIs in 2010's Let the Rustenning BEGIN 🤪

[@MatthewSkurow]

Amazing workflow clearly explained. Thank you!

[@davidebigotto]

To bypass the limit of 16 textures in unreal, in every Texture Sample node you need to change the "Sampler Source" to Shared: Wrap. Found your channel not long ago but your videos are very helpful. Cheers

[@ShrikeGFX]

If you find yourself bypassing a limit of 16 textures you hopefully make a terrain shader with layer based culling or offline cinematics Dont make the mistake of building game assets like this and then later have to redo everything

[@andreamacor4135]

Thank's for great informations about material editor of Unreal Engine!

[@tovermoran4360]

Fully awesome process, thank you Riley! Look forward to Unreal having the same blend power as Fluent, maybe in the future.

[@CarisTheGypsy]

This is amazing! Great presentation. I’ve been ignoring materials for a long time, but recently started digging in and have been amazed how much you can do to improve them. Though the more I learn, the more I discover just how deep the rabbit hole goes!!

[@dragondev2617]

the highest quality tutorial I've watched

[@yuezhang5551]

I almost forgot how to hook everything up again until I saw this video, just have to use time stamps to skip the Blender part😁 great explanation! Thanks!

[@Hallis6818]

Would love to see more videos on this topic, as there are very few videos on creating more useful parameters or systems such as falloff masks etc.

[@thebasemesh]

Such a well put together tutorial. Great work and thank you for sharing :)

[@rileyb3d]

Thank you! Any topic in particular you’d hope to see covered?

[@thebasemesh]

@@rileyb3d Ooo good question! I'd love to see more on the breakdown of World Position texturing you mentioned at the end, perhaps combined with adding in some decals to add further breakup

[@MichaelEmbers]

wow i hope you get more into this.

[@kaizu4914]

This is really a genius way to reuse texture!

[@kaizu4914]

This method will not work with Trimsheet though (in Trimsheet UV will overlap)

[@SkyemLeaks]

11:35 why don't you use the RGBA channel under the alpha channel of the texture instead of RGB + A channel with the "append" node? :)

[@davisburnside9609]

You're a pro at this

[@BerkeAltay]

pretty good tutorial.

[@caminanubemusiclist2326]

gracias,super util la verdad i was searching for sometinhs like paint landscape but for objects , i dont know i exists

[@eligijuspranskunas3509]

nice!

[@TigraPolosatiy]

Great video! But I would also like to see a tutorial with an analysis of Substrate material, its pros and cons in comparison with standard material sets. Thank you

[@rodrigocrespo3960]

What a video!!

[@borakian]

Great video. New sub😊

[@takerefuge3d]

Great Video!

[@rileyb3d]

Thanks for the visit

[@jamesc5801]

Does unreal have any equivalent edge and cavity mask nodes that'd be worth using? Or would that quickly become too expensive. I'd imagine having a seperate cavity mask for each asset in a large scene would also become quite expensive. I suppose you could make a cavity map trim sheet of sorts. I suppose you're managing tradeoffs whichever method you chose 🧐

[@JazzMann0121]

The limit of 16 texture samples is actually connected to hardware restrictions, not the number of texture files being used. GPUs have 16 physical samplers on them which is where we get the "16 texture sampler" restriction. You can turn on Shared: Wrap/Clamp in sampler source to use more than 16 textures. What you are doing is making a queue of textures that will all get passed through a single texture sampler on the GPU. The downside of this is that each texture gets read sequentially, so you can slow your shader down. The upside is that you're going to be freeing up other texture samplers so the GPU can be sampling textures for other shaders as well.

[@ShrikeGFX]

How is the implication of this exactly? 16 samples without branching is already terrible, will this prevent the long lookup time the GPU has to wait for the samples from cache and just make it 1 lookup? If we talk "slow down" - 16 samples is already brutally slow, is that relative to 16 samples or relative to 1 sample? You could use an atlas but it requires some fixing of the seams

[@JazzMann0121]

@@ShrikeGFX I think you're getting things mixed up. Think of it like this, you have 16 gates. A texture can pass through each gate one at a time. Now if your material has 16 textures to read, it can do so in two ways, either each texture gets sent to its own gate and they all pass through at the same time OR the textures queue up based on how they are used. Will sending all the textures to different gates be faster? Yes. But what if you have 17 textures to read? What about other shaders trying to execute? If all the gates are occupied then you've bottlenecked the GPU. You should absolutely NOT use all the samplers available in a shader, but you absolutely can use more than 16 textures in a material if you want. To be clear I'm not saying that you should use 100s of textures and there are other ways you can stack textures like texture arrays or like you mentioned, atlases. Everything has pros and cons, its about finding the balance.

[@baeac]

Crazy! Good to know when I get back into game making (or is this better for film production?) Also, fluent materalizer seems like an absolutely amazing add-on I will definitely check that out

[@rileyb3d]

I think the principles are useful for a wide variety of uses. Game and film alike. Thanks for stopping by! Yes, fluent is a must have! If not for procedural textures, the edge and cavity mask alone is great.

[@serwizzart]

I just found your videos and I will definitely subscribe to your website to check out your asset creation videos! I really want to get into game asset creation and I hope to learn from you!

[@ShrikeGFX]

Keep in mind that this is a cinematic workflow For games you at the very least have already 5 to 9 texture samples for just 2 layers, and texture samples are hands down the most costly part of a surface shader 9 samples for this is extremely inefficient, then if you want to add a baked normal or such it is getting pretty crazy. Also keep in mind that samples get increasingly more costly the more you have and you cannot cull samples based on texture masks for performance. If you were willing to use 9 or so samples, you could do very advanced things in a monolithic shader, so this is a very brute-force approach. TLDR Id stay below 6-7 samples for sure, thats already quite expensive, no matter the texture size, so 2 layers are doable, 3 get very expensive if you do the naive approach. You need to know what you are doing there and how the shading pipeline works.

[@MonsterJuiced]

This is good to know but I'm conflicted, I watched a whole other video by Sumo Digital and that guy is using material layers for every asset in the game and says it's far far more performant than a traditional master material type setup with duplicated material instances everywhere. His setup isn't for cinematics either it's for the actual game itself and he shows how this is industry standard practice for huge games, especially open world ones. He's a Tech Art lead and he seems very confident about his assertions. Oh an don't forget, if you played Elden Ring they clearly use material layers for almost everything in the environment from the huge structures to the terrain and you can see where the materials have been blended in specific areas using vertex painting. I think it would be ludicrous to use baked out textures for every building and prop since they're mostly all modular and constructed in engine, and require unique material blends.

[@ShrikeGFX]

@@MonsterJuiced What he surely meant is draw calls. Many games dont have drawcall issues however. Im sure it is usable if you optimize it well but you should really know what you are doing there. You cannot just use 10 samples for your every day props that is mental. Using 2 layers the naive way will be fine but if you want to use this properly you need to find optimizations for you so you can have 3 layers without using more than 6-8 samples. Its possible but you cant just naively slot 3-4 materials and call it a day, thats spelling disaster. Texture samples are hands down the most expensive in your shader as the GPU needs to wait for the cache to return the sample. You need to be extra careful because with this setup you cannot just remove a layer to optimize on lower end hardware, doing so will drastically change the look. So try use layering but without using a sample for everything. Do you really need an albedo? Do you really need a roughness? Is my rust really needing a normal map and all or can it just be derived from something else? etc. Then you can use this. But being this "blunt" requires also to be smart. If you just slot in normal materials with 3-5 samples each you will get into big trouble.

[@ShrikeGFX]

@@MonsterJuiced In his video he uses highly stripped layers, unlike in this video. Using the Naive approach and just slotting different fully stacked layers will get you into big trouble. Rendering performance wise nothing will beat a stupid old standard shader setup, but drawcall wise this might be superior for sure, although if you do have a unique layer per asset I dont think it really can be as you will still have a new drawcall, however your folders will be way cleaner. You definitely need to do your homework and know how shaders are optimized before jumping into something like this for a real production.

[@ShrikeGFX]

@@MonsterJuiced about elden ring, many companies use things that look like layered shaders but are monolithic, of course you wouldnt uniquely texture a mountain. People have been using layered shaders for a very long time but these are usually very optimized and reuse textures from one layer in another, while this is a system for combining unique materials into layers, which is not the same thing but has a lot of convenience and project cleanness benefits and yes some companies also adopted this but they will definitely not go over a handful samples and it will look more like in the Sumo video than in this video.

[@MonsterJuiced]

@ShrikeGFX I will definitely need to learn some more about this layered materials workflow. I have done quite a lot of modding for sekiro and elden ring and I can see how extensive their use of layered materials is. The optimisation you're talking about is likely how the guy in the sumo video is doing it. Using textures that is around 1024 resolution and tiled a lot. In elden ring these can be as low as 128 for albedos, 512 to 1024 for normal maps and a separate layer altogether for a channel packed sample that contains AO, metallic, roughness, ID mask. And then placing a height in the blue channel of the normal map for blending or anything really. In Elden Ring they use the blue channel for metallic maps. Do you mean this kind of optimisation?

[@embacherjames]

grreat video

[@kxdproductions2375]

it would also be great if you could make a future vid going more in depth about the world space driven layers, i have been stuck trying to get rvt to work

[@harrysanders818]

I ask myself if with the new Modeling Tools, which have an AO baker integrated already, Unreal will may at some point offer the ability to author or even paint masks right inside the editor for immediate and flexible use with Material Layering.

[@flaviogonzalez5068]

I wanted to mention that, I usually bake those maps straight in Unreal

[@Mrjononotbono]

Just found your channel and loving your videos man. Also considering your store as I always love new assets! I was wondering how you know Blue Prints so well? I'm trying to learn how to use them but just don't understand so much of this stuff. Although its visual scripting it feels like its still coding and maybe that's why I'm struggling to understand Blueprints... cause I've never been a coder 😂 A video teaching Blueprints would be killer man!

[@kyota002]

And this dude only got 32k follower, srly ytb your algorithm sucks. Clean explanation, smooth, calm and not speedy as hell with great result information and god damn good voice ans music. I just follow man. 👍

[@polyowl3D]

When it comes to having your asset UVd, is the blender bake attached to the UVs? The ones in substance painter rely on the bake, so i can't have UVs outside the 0-1 quadrant, thereby reducing the quality of the procedurals from substance painter.

[@mac5er]

would be cool if substance would be able to export this as an unreal material like the one you made in one click or just substance inside of unreal

[@kxdproductions2375]

is there a way to blend in a glass material?

[@AI_CG]

how do u set-up overall world space driven layers??

[@phalhappy8612]

please talk about texture bombing set up in substrate. please please please

[@jamesfield8023]

This is fine but until you generate the masks in Unreal, this is still only half a solution. In the modelling tools in recent versions of the engine, you can select meshes and bake AO…. I know that’s not the same as cavity, and it’s CPU-based, but it’s a start. If it had a cavity option, then Blender could be eliminated from this particular process altogether. Also, I can see Strata superseding the current model and then things will be different again. Well-explained and well-produced video however. Nice one.

[@slackamacgaming6721]

I mean I got it to work...after I changed my 'mask' texture to Use only as Mask no sRGB...but it looks a lil underwhelming...maybe I can play around with height maps to get the textures feeling a lil less just floating on top the mesh...ya know what I mean... Edit: nevermind...I just baked a normal map with my B/W mask...then lerped it with my original normal map...so now I've got my base metal normal, rust normal, and basically a third normal map 'digging' the rust into the metal...looks a lot better now...

[@juancho9118]

Im having a issue where the layer parameters in not appearing in the instance material

[@jys2702]

Why didn't you export from blender to usd? Is it better to export to fbx?

[@edgardsimon983]

if i understand well this is what i could interprete from unreal to substance painter ? Material = texture set Material Layer = Layer Material Layer Blend = Layer Mask

[@lucianodaluz5414]

Jesus teachs Unreal. :) Great

[@rileyb3d]

Let he who is without bug cast the first physics object.

[@lucianodaluz5414]

@@rileyb3d 🤣 Loved. But, for real. loved the sytle and the teaching. Lots of work on it I know. Just subscribed.

[@rileyb3d]

Thanks for the kind words on a few vids this morning! Any topic in particular you'd hope to have covered on the channel?@@lucianodaluz5414

[@BraggsTippingPoint]

One thing that Unreal really lacks is similar procedural texturing tools that blender has. No geometry based edge detection methods, ambient occlusion, noises, etc. really would be awesome to bridge that gap in unreal.

[@Yokitolakaka]

you can bake AO, edge, bent normals inside Unreal using modeling tools.

[@Cazaq]

5.4 actually introduces some tools for baking that data. It's a new texturing mode inside the editor.

[@lizkeres2593]

You can't really do that, as complex materials really impact performance in games by a lot.

[@Cazaq]

@@lizkeres2593 I'm saying you can use the modelling tools and new mode to bake curvature, ao, etc. to drive material layers. There's nothing complex about it. One DX5 texture can store all of it.

[@THEcucufate]

Love your stuff always, but you really should also add the word "Blender" in your title, as to do the thing in this video in UE you HAVE to do al that baking setup in Blender regardless, or it won't work. Would've saved me time since I personaly don't know Blender and was led by the title of this video "MATERIAL LAYERING SYSTEMS in UE5 🔥 (Advanced Materials Tutorial)"

[@rileyb3d]

Good call, thanks! I made an initial title change, but will review this more closely later.

[@ahmadjames151]

Can we just make texture only in UE ? and how ? thanks!

[@rileyb3d]

Can you clarify the question a bit? Do you mean like we did here, but without the step of baking edge masks?

[@ahmadjames151]

@@rileyb3d Modeling raw without texture it in blender and then texture it in UE 😐

[@rileyb3d]

​@@ahmadjames151 Yeah, Blender was a used here to help explain concepts, but it could be built in Unreal just with the tileable maps. The only piece of the puzzle Unreal is missing alone is the edge mask. As far as I know you'll need substance or Blender or some other texturing program to at least bring over edge, cavity specifically.

[@asharacrauwels]

UE 5.4 Texture Graph Plugin, some tutorials available. Currently simple but really eager to see where it goes. Epic promised Quixel Mixer would be back in a totally different for, maybe this is the start.

[@TheJackalxy]

That's pretty cool but is it optimized for real time too? I can see a reduced draw call utilizing that as a master material, but isn't the layering too expensive? It would be great to see a comparison with a big map and a lot of props

[@rileyb3d]

To answer simply; yes. More and more modern games go with in-engine layering and tiling approaches for a reason. Imagine not compiling 50,000 shaders with all of their map groups. The leather material on a sofa can be the same leather on your character, yet still have variety and be visually differentiated. Use the instances approach I’ve shown here. Unreal is calling on very few resources to populate materials on a massive amount of potential assets. Not only is it acceptable, it’s an improvement, and one of the strengths of this approach. As with anything there are trad-offs. I suggest using a combination of techniques you’re comfortable with. Layering and tiling are must-have at one point or another though. Especially on large assets.

[@TheJackalxy]

@@rileyb3d Thank you very much, I'll defintely try that

[@evanlane1690]

​@rileybrown3d Great response! What sort of materials would you think benefit most for this? I'm thinking a lot of organic, repeating patterns like leather and concrete, but is this also more efficient for one-off texture use?

[@ShrikeGFX]

Texture samples are the most expensive in your shader. It depends on your sample count. Id not go over 6-7 samples total. This approach is quite sample inefficient but can definitely work for a 2 layer with some optimized extras approach using highly packed maps but id be very careful and you should know what you are doing.

[@DrTheRich]

The only problem with this that i have in blender, is that dynamic blending in most cases just doesn't give realistic natural results. It's always too obvious that it's some procedural method. Also the algorithms for sharpness, edge detection, cavity and occlusion in blender are pretty bad compared to say substance. They have too little control and nuance and are too reliant on topology.. Baked blending masks from substance still look better imo.

[@rileyb3d]

Trade-offs for sure. Do you see any benefit for layered and “in engine” tiling in Blender? Obviously in something like a game it’s impossible to get by without at some point on a project. I’m interested if you see a use-case in blender though.

[@edgardsimon983]

I think i created a monster, im tring to do a material layer with a subsurface profile shading model if someone want to know if it work well work for human skin ill post if i succed here

[@zarodgaming1844]

"optimitze our scene" is kinda a lie, given the GPU is being both filled with GBs of memory and told to calculate the same fragment 100 times, sampling a texture every 5 steps or so :/

[@buttlesstwigg1634]

thank you sir !

[@rileyb3d]

Thanks for stopping by to watch!