Chapter 6. Advanced Material Techniques
If we look at the different input pins that a typical Unreal Engine 4 material has, we'll see that the first few entries are named like this: Base Color, Metallic, Specular, Roughness, and so on. We can already say that we've used most of them with the Normal node so far. This is no coincidence, as they are the most common features we'll need when creating a material. However, there are times when we need to move beyond those boundaries and use other more specific features within our materials in order to enable certain effects. This is what we are going to be focusing on in the next few recipes.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Painting a mesh with vertex painting
- Using decals to add granularity to our scenes
- Creating a brick wall with Parallax Occlusion Mapping
- A brick wall using displacement
- Proximity-based masking with mesh distance fields
