Creating a semi procedural material

So far, we've worked on examples of materials that were applied to relatively small 3D models, where a single texture or color was enough to make them look good. However, that is but one case from the many different ones that we can encounter in a real-life project. Sometimes, we will face other scenarios where we have to deal with bigger meshes, making the texturing process not as straightforward as we've seen so far. In those circumstances, we are forced to think creatively and find ways to realistically shade that asset. Thankfully, Unreal provides us with a very robust material editor and several ways of tackling this issue, as we'll see next.

Getting ready

We are about to use several different assets to semi-procedurally texture a 3D model, but all of the resources that you will need come bundled by default with Unreal Engine 4. Be sure to include the Starter Content if you want to follow along using the same textures and models I'll be using, but don...