Finally, we are going to blend the baked normal map and AO map over the top of all of that, adding in secondary details. While these maps are going to be too large to fit into texel density, this will be covered up by all the tiling textures we are using. These masks could still be tweaked to get more definition out of the model, but you can see how helpful it is to layer these tilling materials.

All of these features are very easy on their own, but the challenge was in getting all the masks to blend together correctly when every feature was being used. A good master material was very useful for quickly getting the cave walls and other expansive areas of tiling textures to look less repetitive and get a lot of detail based off of world direction.

Blending the Materials

Every material in the scene is an instanced version of my master material. Using exposed parameters you can very easily adjust all of the textures and masking in real time. This led to pretty quick results when implementing new assets into the scene.

Here are some more examples from the master material graph. All very simple blueprinting, the key here is knowing your Photoshop blending modes, multiply, add, subtract, etc. and knowing how to blend all of these masks together. Unreal Engine documentation is fantastic for anyone just getting started with blueprinting to learn more, I recommend just googling whatever it is you want to do specifically in a blueprint. I’ve found almost everything on the UE4 message boards.