I've been developing a master material in Unreal Engine 4.2 which handles tiling and variations using a mask, a normal map, and a noise texture for variation. Using this system, I found that a grayscale mask and a normal map as small as 128
2 pixels and a 256
2 pixel grayscale noise map can generate perfect tiles that have enough variation to cover the screen without noticeable tiling effect. There's also a cool glass shader with parallax refraction and Subsurface Scattering, emissive glow, falloff blending to simulate grout occlusion at oblique angles (at a much cheaper cost than relief mapping), and a dual color algorithm that uses a single texture to provide two different color variations.
I made 20 tile presets already, and the total texture memory requirement is only 269 Kb. Because the colors are parameterized, you can feel free to change the color of any material without adding any more to the memory requirement.
Planned features include support for tile textures via overlaying (useful for ceramics), maps for differentiating between glass and nonglass tiles, maps and other options for metallic tiles, new assets for bricks, and non-square tile designs.
It's a very powerful, scalable shader, and may be coming soon to the UE4 marketplace. I'm planning to release the system and all assets/presets for only $15 Stay tuned!
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