
Explore mesh paint to blend snow and sand using red, green, blue channels and falloff. Use material instances to swap textures and create liquids, wet maps, and aging concrete.
Explore Virtex blending by adding a height map driven alpha transition in unreal materials. Use red and green channels, clamp and divide for falloff, and paint with channels for variation.
Create mix maps to blend liquid and hard-surface materials in Unreal, using a splatter map, offset tiling, and noise to break seams.
Enhance snow with vertex displacement in Unreal by offsetting geometry along the z axis using the alpha channel and world normals, controlled by a scalar parameter and an environment map.
Explore integrating an environment map and color tint into soft and hard surface materials, using the texture sample parameter cube, lerp, and static switch controls.
Create a new material instance constant from the master hard surface to blend sand. Swap in sand textures (color, height, normal) and tune height, normal, and soft surface diffuse.
Learn to create a procedural wet map in Unreal Engine, painting a rim around liquid using the red and green channels, with alpha, offset, and environment map refinements for realism.
Turn water into blood using a hard surface liquid material and material instance constants, tweaking red/blue channels, environment map color intensity, and translucency to create an opaque bloodstain.
Learn to create an entropy painting material in Unreal that sinks red-channel cracks with a bump offset, ages concrete with green discoloration, and offsets vertices using blue and alpha channels.
Finish the entropy painting material in Unreal by balancing specular, alpha, and vertex offset, and learn to paint cracks using red, blue, and alpha channels in a shader-driven workflow.
This tutorial takes an advanced look at UDK’s mesh painting features for game art (often called vertex painting). We’ll go in-depth on how to create several advanced blending materials such as snow icing over stones, puddles that react to light, and cracked and weathered concrete.
About the Instructor:
Ryan Smith is a Technical Artist at Gearbox Software, who specializes in technical art and visual effects. With over 10 years experience working with the Unreal Engine, he is highly proficient with 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Zbrush. His specialties also include Shader Authoring, Visual Effects, Technical Art, MAXScript, and Optimizing Workflows.