hello everyone my name is dylan abernathy and thanks for taking the time to come check out my new game art resource. What this is is a master material i made for unreal engine 4 that aids in the multi-uv workflow for games. I had quite a few people reach out to me and asked me to do a breakdown for this. I recently made a tutorial all about uv layouts for games and the final chapter, as you can see here, is on multi-uv workflows. In that video, I sort of go over this material here and I decided to include it on my gumroad as a separate download for those of you who just want to quickly set this up. And that's what this video is all going to be about, is installing it, setting it up, and a walkthrough of not only the full pipeline but how to sort of use the material in unreal engine itself. So with that being said, first of all, what exactly is the multi-uv workflow

so this workflow is something that's great for making lots of assets quickly, using only a handful of tiling textures. So what happens is, like normal, we lay out our UVs of whatever we're modeling to a texture that is kind of already a tiling texture or a trim texture or whatever. The example I have here is this broken brick wall. So this started off as a plane, and I applied a tiling brick wall material to it, cut it out as so. So the normal UV ones were exactly as they should be, very standard stuff. But then what we do is we make a second UV channel, which we lay our stuff out again, and we use that channel to show where we want things to blend. That way we can sort of have a correct textile density in our first UV channel and stack things if we want to. And then the second UV channel, we can have everything laid out uniquely, do whatever we want to squash them, stretch them, but just fit them into that zero to one space so we can make a mask for blending.

like so, um, and yeah, it's super useful. This is great because it allows us to reuse textures, um, the same few tiling textures over and over again in-engine, rather than having to do custom stuff for everything. But we also still get that kind of custom look with the blending here. We take a hit on the details a little bit. Obviously, it's not going to look like if we sculpted this in ZBrush or something like that, um, but it's way, way quicker, and it definitely has some benefits. So let's say we're making a ruined city scene or something like that, and there's going to be a hundred of these broken brick walls. We're only going to be using the one tiling brick wall texture for all of them. We're not going to have to bring in anything else. And then if we wanted to be really, really optimized, we could only have one sort of mask showing where the second material is blending. So we'll have one main material, one blending material, and um, one unique mask for like hundreds of

assets potentially. If, if we wanted to push it that far, it's gonna save on draw calls and only, uh, um, and also, sorry, speed up our workflow a ton. So, um, it's definitely situational. You're not gonna be using it for everything, but for sort of set dressing stuff, uh, it's, it's pretty common and, uh, like I said, really, really quick to get something, uh, of this quality. Not, not more than like an hour or two to, uh, start cranking out multiple walls like this. So, that's why I chose the wall as an example and, uh, yeah, with that out of the way, let's go ahead and get started. It'll probably be a lot more clear for those of you who aren't totally sure what I'm talking about once we actually dive into the pipeline itself. But the very first thing we're gonna have to do is actually install the materials. So, if you're watching this on YouTube, there'll be a link in the description to where you can get this folder. And if you're, uh, someone who's already

found this tutorial video in the gumroad package. Uh, then you should already have this, and all you have to do is open up your Unreal Engine scene folder, go to the content section, and just drag this guy in. As you can see, I already have this here, which means if I open up Unreal Engine, I'm going to already have this multi-UV workflow material folder in the content section. Now, one thing to note is, um, I made this using Unreal Engine 4.25. So, this is only going to work with version 4.25 or higher. If you're using 4.24 or anything lower like that, you'll either have to upgrade your version of Unreal Engine or start a new scene with a new version of the engine. But I just want to make that very clear before we start this, that that is a requirement. So, wrote that in the description, make sure that's as clear as possible. And if it's not working, uh, you should probably double-check which version of the engine you are using. Um, but with that out of the way, let's

actually get started here inside of Maya. So, this is the wall that you guys saw earlier in this video. And I actually want to quickly shout out something. The lighting scene that you're seeing me use is actually something I downloaded on ArtStation by a guy named Scott Knapp. I wanted to shout that out because it's super useful, and I highly recommend checking it out if you want to do some quick lighting setups in Unreal Engine. Yeah, I always want to give credit where credit is due. So, moving forward, let's actually get this started. So, this brick wall is pretty standard. There are three materials applied to it right now. So, there is a material for these loose bricks. They have a unique bake on them. There is a material for this bottom area, which is sort of like a concrete trim. And then there's the tiling brick wall itself material. And that's what we're going to be blending and sort of giving its own second UV channel and then special treatment here. So, let's go ahead and see how we do that.

every modeling package is going to have very similar tools to this, so I highly recommend sort of following along now and then. When you do apply this to your modeling package of choice, just know the terms that I'm using here, and you should be able to follow along with whatever you're using. So, let's just open up that UV editor. As you can see, my UVs are pretty crazy. So, these bricks are some of these larger shells. This wall here is packed in the corner, and then the trims are shooting out of the side. For those of you who are less comfortable with UV layouts, like I said, I did a tutorial on this, and that is free as well on my YouTube channel if you do want to go check that out. So, this kind of stuff will be totally explained, and um, yeah, if you're less comfortable with that, we go over exactly this kind of stuff there as well. But, all I want to do is make a second UV channel so that we can blend this tiling.

brick texture. And because of so, I'm just going to select all of the brick area by double-clicking this main spot, and I can see, okay, it's kind of spread out all over the place. Uh, this shell on the back and this shell here are stacking. I don't really want that. I want both of these things to have sort of unique mask information, and we're not getting the best use of our resolution this way. It may be to textile density this way, but if we're making a mask, I want to fill up as much of this space as possible. So all I'm going to do is go to UV sets, create or copy UVs to UV set, and then copy into new set. And what that has done now is I have map 1, which was our original UV set, and custom mask, which is what we just copied our UVs into. So now we can sort of move these over here or something like that, and we still have that original UV set and a second one. Now the original UV set

is what our texture map is going to be based off of. We're going to be projecting textures based off whatever our original uv map, uh, layout is. Whatever this is, we can do whatever we want with it. Traditionally, it's going to be used for light maps inside of Unreal Engine, but that's going to change once we do this, and we'll be going over that as well. So, I just sort of want these bricks here because of. So, I'm just going to isolate them. So, I'm going to select everything else, and I'm just going to sort of put them off to the side. We don't want to include that in the mask because they're different materials, right? So, I'm going to move them over here. Um, and they could potentially get their own material if you wanted to do that. That's a whole other thing, but right now we're just focusing on the brick wall. And, uh, because of. So, I'm gonna move them over here so that when we do texture this area, um, we're not wasting any space on this bonus stuff like this.

is something totally different trims and and unique bakes. That's that's a whole other business. We don't need to worry about that. This is all about the tiling textures and all. I'm going to do. It's really simple. Is just do a layout. So modify layout um the beauty of the custom mask system is that we can keep this low res because we're going to be blending it with high res. [Music] Sort of blend masks. And those are just going to be a series of patterns and textures that are more high res and detailed so that when we do blend this um even if this this mask file is like a 128 or 256 texture uh we're getting that crisp 2k detail from those blend masks. So I'm going to keep this at uh we can go to 512. Why not and give it some shell padding of about eight by eight. That should be fine and just sort of pack it in there. Gonna be doing five packing iterations and uh see what that gives us. There we go. Sorry about that. I

accidentally, um, packed the first UVs into a mask rather than our custom mask, and that's something really important to note. Uh, always make sure you're using the correct maps for each. So, we want our very first map to be what our UV texture layout is because, once again, that's what the textures are projecting by. And we want the custom mask to be what our mask is because Unreal Engine is going to be looking for this second UV channel as a source for what our mask should be sort of, um, projecting to our model. So, make sure you have these in the correct order and double-check when you're packing this in that you have the right stuff. So now we sort of have this nice layout here. We have everything showing, um, we could stack things if we want to be more, um, uh, useful of our texture space. That's totally fine, but I think it should be good in this case, um. And as you can see, we could just paint on this if we want to, and then we can sort of use that mask as

something to blend between in Unreal Engine. So if you really wanted to, you could take a snapshot of this, bring it into Photoshop, manually paint it. But we're actually going to be doing this inside of Substance Painter, and I'm going to show you guys how Substance Painter can actually let you sit back and relax and let it do the heavy lifting. And yeah, it's going to really take care of a lot of the work for us, just making sure everything here is set up correctly. Okay, and yeah, we should be good to go. So let's go ahead and see how exactly we would go about doing that because we can't really bring this into Substance Painter right now and say, Hey, let's start texturing with that second UV channel. Substance Painter will just by default texture off of whatever is in the first UV set. So we're going to have to make a different model for this. We could go ahead and export this into Unreal Engine and it'd be totally fine, but for Substance Painter, we're going to

have to do something a little bit special, so I'm gonna duplicate this guy. And um, what I'm actually gonna do is take this UV set and make it our primary UV set. So, with this second one selected, I'm just going to do copy UV sets to UV set map 1. And now our map one is this new layout, and we can go ahead and delete the second one. So it just has this one UV set. So whatever we texture off of um, inside of Substance Painter is going to be using these UVs. And because of so, we have all this extra stuff here, we don't really need it. It's going to go ahead and delete it. And now we have this model with this as our primary UV set. And whatever we um, texture here, we can use as a mask for our model inside of um, Unreal Engine. So I'm going to go ahead and export this guy over to Substance Painter. I believe I already have something here, brick wall painter export selection. And if I go into Substance Painter, as you can see, I was already messing

around here, but I can do new bring that guy in here. We only have this as a 512 texture, and yeah, that should be fine. So even though we originally made that as our second uv channel, you can see that's what our uvs look like here. Um, and we have this second material here, which we don't need. If you really want to get rid of, um, any chance of this happening, just assign like a Lambert or a blend or whatever across the entire model, bringing it in. But, uh, that should be fine. I believe I had some exposed brick here, yeah, on the end, but that shouldn't be a biggie. But essentially, all we're going to do is make a mask like we normally would, and like always, we're going to start by baking out our maps here in Substance Painter so that we can start using some of these smart masks and get some cool-looking effects right away. So I'm just going to start by baking everything out so we get that ambient occlusion and curvature.

thickness. Yeah, and I'll show you how we can quickly make a map here. So, I'm going to start by making a fill layer, and I'm just going to call this bg for background, and make it black. This is just to help us see what we're doing here and crank the roughness up. And then let's make a layer that we can actually use for blending and making our mask. I'm going to start by giving this a black mask, and let's go ahead and apply under smart masks, just a ground dirt, for example here. And yeah, this is kind of what we want our mask to be. So, you can start painting in here. You could add a paint layer if you wanted to. You could add more fill layers or generators, whatever you want. But, uh, this is where you would start making that mask that you like. And the kind of look I'm going for here is, um, just like a dirty bottom to the, um, the brick wall. So, we could also crank the curvature up, just sort of add a little bit more.

interest around the edges. Turn the contrast up a little bit. Do we want more or less texture? Maybe a little less contrast. Let's try something like this. But once you're happy with the mask, and you should definitely spend more time on this and get a lot more detailed with it. Like add drips, add more targeted damage. I'd highly recommend sort of adding a paint layer in here and actually painting in detail. Right, so spend a lot of time with this. But all you have to do then is right-click the mask and go to export mask to clipboard. And then in Photoshop, all you have to do is simply paste it. So there's our mask right there. I'm just going to go ahead and save this to the desktop as a PNG. You can use whatever file type you like. I'm just going to call this custom mask. I suppose t underscore custom mask for texture. Brick wall one. And yeah, that's pretty much all you need to do to make your custom mask. So we got our special version imported.

here where we had our second UV channel as our main UV channel. Right-click and copy it, save it out from Photoshop as an actual file, and now we can start assembling stuff inside of Unreal Engine. So first things first, let's go back and export our main model here with the second UV channel. I'm gonna export selection and um, I've already exported a version called brick wall_demo. Let's go ahead. It's going to be this guy here. And just to sort of speed things up, I already set up these other materials for it, but I still want to go ahead and sort of break this down for you here. So let's go ahead and take a look inside of the model itself. Like I said, we have these two other materials. One is these decals here, and yeah, as I remember, the exposed brick is part of the trim sheet. But let's go ahead and take a look at the UVs. So normally when you import a model into Unreal Engine, there's only UV channel 0 and UV channel 1.

so uv channel zero is your standard uvs. This is what's going to be um like how you laid this out for your model essentially um how you want your textures to be projected. As you can see, this is how it was in Maya originally for us as well. And typically, uv channel one is your light map uvs. But for us, we've gone ahead and made that our unique or custom mask uvs, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, those are looking pretty pretty good. And then now our uv channel 2 is going to be our light map uvs. So we can still go ahead and generate light maps. We can still change all the settings, but I just know that we really need for this material to work, our mask to be in uv channel one, because the material is looking to draw the mask information from uv channel one. But with that said, we can go ahead now and look at the package. So when you download this, you'll be getting something that looks like this. I might swap out the generic brick and

dirt materials for something else maybe just solid colors for simplicity's sake, but you'll be getting two materials and the default maps. The default maps are just going to be all of the um standard maps that I've plugged into these two materials, so you don't really need to go into here, but they're essential for making these work. And then these two are pretty much the exact same material, so if I drag one onto here and drag one onto here, as you can see, they're not changing anything. But what the difference here is, is that this is multi-uv master material rma, and this is multi-uv master material standard. This guy here utilizes packed textures, so rma stands for roughness metallic and ambient occlusion, which I have packed into one texture file. Uh, so roughness is r, metallic is g, and ambient occlusion is b, and this just sort of has all of them split apart. So I always pack my textures as an rma, but if you don't do that, you can use this one here, totally up to

you so I'm going to use the rma one here drag it on, and the only thing left to do is import that cool custom map texture that we made should be on the desktop, and here we go just going to open this guy up and make sure he's set to masks save that out for the most accurate use possible, and now that we have this multi-master material guy here all we have to do is right-click him and create a material instance which we can call mi for material instance underscore brick wall, and this is what we're going to want to put on here because this is going to allow us to edit a ton of things which I'm going to be going through right now okay let's start with the most basic stuff which is going to be the blend maps and the object maps these two are going to have the same settings but I'm going to go through object maps because this is a little bit more relevant but essentially what all of these are are the settings for our standard foundational asset material so in this

case it's the brick wall. So I have the brick wall texture, the brick wall normal, and the brick wall rma. We also have the option to change colors for all this stuff, change the normal intensity. So I just turn that way down, make it negative to go up, and then a roughness value. And then we can also change the tiling here. And these are the exact same settings for the blend map, but the blend map is going to be what we're mixing it with. So in this case, it's going to be this dirt by default. So I can make this tile more to make it a bit crispier. I can kind of darken the color a little bit, make it a bit more muddy looking almost. And uh, yeah, looks a little bit nice with a bit higher tiling, a little higher roughness. And that's what the blend maps is. We also have some cool things, um, which I'll get to in a second. I just kind of want to tweak the color of this a little bit, maybe make the brick a

little bit less saturated, devoid of color, and we can sort of bring it over here to see how it looks in our proper scene. Okay, cool. Um, yeah, so sorry, we have some other normal map information. So we have macro normal, which I will be showing you on a different example, but essentially, this is if we still want a unique normal on something. Say we have a big rock and we want a tiling rock texture on it, but we still want sort of unique sculpted damage that we made for a much larger asset. We can choose to turn this on. And yep, as you can see, this is kind of broken, but it allows us to sort of import another normal that overlays on top, which is pretty useful. But then we also have detail normal. So detail normal is cool because it allows us to get more defined sort of mesh detail on here, even though we're using a tiling texture. We can still get this to look pretty cool. So you can see when I turn this up and down, we're getting this sort of like very

finite detail here, and if we look at the normal, it's just kind of like a generic bump. So feel free to add whatever you want here. I made this open so you can put whatever um, but we can change the intensity if we want it to be really, really rough, make it smoother and barely noticeable. But what it does is allows us to, even though we have just a very generic tiling brick material texture, it allows us so that when we get closer with our camera, it still looks very detailed. [Music] And that's because the tiling is up. The textile density on this is higher than the bricks in the background. So as we lose that detail when we get closer, we gain more normal detail. And it sort of um, compensates for that, that sort of uh, loss of detail by bringing our camera closer up. So that's really cool as well. But the meat and potatoes of this whole thing is going to be the blend mask and the custom mask. So this is what's going to kind of give

us that custom asset look without actually giving it custom textures. And the first thing we're going to need to do is bring our custom mask into the custom mask section. As you can see, we kind of have that targeted dirt here. It's also making it very apparent that I kind of want to bring more light and color into the stuff, same with the dirt. I think we went a little too dark with that, or maybe we want it to kind of like it being extra dark. Actually, let's stick with that. But anyways, we're just going to sort of tinker with these settings here and these are just more contrast and power settings to sort of add more intensity, maybe smooth it out a little bit. Specifically regarding the mask we inputted, the blend mask is a little bit different. So, what this is, is if we look at the views here, a series of tiling textures that are going to be overlaid on top of where we told the materials to blend between. So, even though the mask might be low

resolution. We're blending it with this sort of 2k high-resolution grunge mask, and we can tile this up more and more. And this is going to be the detail we see blending it together so we kind of get the best of both worlds even though our custom mask is low detail. Our blend mask is higher detail, which is cool. And on top of that, I actually included a small bundle of three of them, one that's more directional, one that's good for metals, and one that's more specific to dirt. But you can swap between the R, the G, and the B here. So this one seems to be giving a nice dirty look. I can turn on all the stuff and let's start messing with some settings. So you can turn the contrast up or lower it if you want more of a general dirty look. The mask power is going to be some intensity, but then we also have the same things to change here. You can change the tile amount for the blend mask, so I'm going to want to turn that up so it's a bit

more detailed maybe lower the power of this change the contrast of the um textures blending with so you can see even though our blending texture is really really low res. We're still getting these like crispy details here. Turn the power up a little bit and we're getting some like nice grimy dirty look. Obviously, this is a bit intense and let's go ahead and bring this back to full screen but it's nice that we can sort of tile this and then you can sort of go back and forth and say hey which one of these do I like the most. I think the b is working pretty nice so you can mess with that and you can always go back and forth between painter and change the um the mask settings but I'm not going to go too too deep into that. I might just so to make this a little less intense and let's bring the roughness up a little bit and then we have normal intensity as well. Maybe we want that to pop a little bit more and just kind of

go back and tweak that a little bit. Foreign, definitely don't want that to be green. Nice. I'm gonna change the lighting setup, maybe we'll get something a little bit better. There we go, let's definitely work in with us a little bit more, but we can just keep going back and tweaking some of this stuff until we get something we're happy with. And in this case, I'm getting a little bit more happy with how that's looking. Um, obviously not the ideal lighting setup I think for this, but I can live with that. But yeah, that's how we can start blending stuff together. Obviously, you're going to want to spend a little bit more time and put a little bit more love into the Substance Painter portion of this. This was very, very, um, rushed. And you can stack your UVs if you want to and, uh, save on texture space to get even more resolution. But that's the basics of how we can sort of use two UVs using this material here to, uh, get a custom look with only using

tiling textures and a single small file size custom mask. So that's the main example I do want to go over two other examples here one of those being a rock so that I can show you what it's like to actually utilize this um macro normal and then I'm also going to show you how we can blend or use multiple different assets on a single custom mask material to blend and save texture space even more. So let's go ahead and dive into those examples and uh I'll meet you guys in Maya in just a moment. Okay, here we are back inside of Maya and as you can see I've gone ahead and put together two more examples. What I've done here is the exact same workflow as before. So here is a pre-existing model I had of a rock cluster and I made a second UV set for it and the version behind it is um similar to what we did with this brick wall. I've just sort of put the secondary USB set as the main to bring into Painter.

and same story with these poles. So let's focus on one at a time here with these guys. Let's focus in on the rocks. So inside of Unreal, this is how I have them set up. Pretty generic. It's just using tiling textures for sort of like a caked-on dirt and the actual rock itself. And if we go look at the material for it, the only thing that really makes this stand apart, and the main reason I wanted to use this as an example, was the normal overlay. So if you look at this rock, this is it with no custom normals, and this is it with the option to turn on custom normals. So I wanted to include that here just as an option for if you did want to bake something down to get kind of more of a unique detail on this, but still have it primarily using other materials. That's kind of what that looks like in real time. And I also used a different blend mask here. So this was the metals blend. Actually looked really nice on this. Got some cool effects tiling in here.

the power was making quite a bit of a difference, and you'll notice once you get your stuff in here, you'll be playing with these settings quite a bit and tinkering until you get a look that you're pretty happy with. But let's leave that one for now. The other example that I had set up was these poles here, and this is something that this workflow works really good for. It's going to be super helpful for things that are um really tall or can't fit into a standard UV shell or anything that uses trims. For example, here's a great example of that: these large poles that wouldn't normally fit in a standard texture. So, they're just using a tiling texture, and then I have the mask set to sort of blend to some kind of dirt at the bottom here, as if they're sticking out of a construction site or an old demolished building or something. And the cool thing about these guys, and the reason I wanted to make these and show them off inside of Maya, is because they're all different assets.

so let me zoom in on this. I guess it'd be easier if it was on this side, right? So these are all different assets, as you can see they're sticking way out of the zero to one space in some cases, but I would with that being totally fine because these are tiling textures, right? But even though they're all different assets, if you go to the uv sets and go to custom mask, I think I have to do that for each one of these. If I select them all, as long as you fit the ball into one of these spaces, um, it's more than fine to have multiple things sharing a single mask. So all I then did was duplicate them, merge them into one asset, and exported this to Painter so it's easier to texture with. But, uh, yeah, they can all be using different, um, individual sort of model identities inside of Maya and Unreal, but share the same custom mask. That's totally more than fine, and it's super useful because I'm sure you'll, you'll come across plenty of

models where you're going to have to do something like that. I think a good example of that would be these brick walls. You could make a kit of like 10, 15, 20 brick walls and have them all sharing maybe like a 2k blend mask, for example, and really cram them in there. And that way, there's 20 walls all sharing the exact same textures, including the blend mask, and it's super, super, you know, low on on draw calls, which is really nice. Trying to think if there's anything else I want to include here before wrapping up. One thing that's also nice is, as you can see, I've really stretched these shells on the smaller ones because this guy is obviously way bigger, but I've gone and stretched this way up. So if we turn on the checkerboard, you'll notice that the small guy is super stretched here and even this guy's stretched quite a bit, and even though they're stretched, it's blending totally fine here inside of Unreal. And the reason that is is because

the mask is just telling us where things are blending, and then the other details are driving the actual blend information. So we're actually getting the cool blend details from this guy here. The mask is just saying, Hey, this is where we want it to go. So you're more than welcome to squash and stretch stuff, and things are still going to turn out fine. But those are three examples here, all of these I've whipped up really, really quickly. You should definitely be giving them more love. And on top of that, they're all blending with the same texture, so these are all in the exact same scene. This, this, and this, they're all using the exact same dirt, so no extra draw calls between these materials as far as what it's blending with. Um, so yeah, that's pretty awesome. That being said, if you wanted to look better, I highly recommend giving them their own custom textures. Like I think this works really well. This guy could certainly use some love with like a proper mud or something like that. And this wall works fine the way it is.

but, uh, yeah, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. That's how you can use a second UV channel and this material here to blend, um, tiling textures together inside of Unreal. Hopefully you guys learned something, and thank you so much for purchasing this, um, material pack for Unreal Engine. Um, I think this is a really useful thing, and there isn't a lot of information out there on it. I recommend using it for, like I said, kits with a lot of different pieces that you need to get out really quickly, or set dressing things, or anything like this where it has to be using a kind of tiling texture or a trim sheet to make it work. But that's pretty much all when it comes to this stuff. Hopefully, like I said, you learned something. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments of this video or contact me on Twitter. And with that out of the way, thank you everyone for checking this out. Hopefully you have a great day, hopefully you find some good uses for this, and I'll catch you in the next video.

Double UV Workflow for Game Art (+ UE4 Download) | Blending Tiling Textures in Engine

Double UV Workflow for Game Art (+ UE4 Download) | Blending Tiling Textures in Engine

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