multiple materials

[copain]

HEY

Can anyone help me explain how to add multiple materials to one mesh?

I imported a mesh from maya with 3 uv channels, how do I assign more then one material to a mesh?

THANKS!!

[jansoft88]

This is a photo from hourences modeling tutorial.
http://phalanx.planetunreal.gamespy....modeling/5.jpg
It shows that there are two "Elements" in the LOD info. Here the mesh was exported from max with multi materials assigned. How do you do that in Maya though, is beyond me. I think you have to export with the layered material.
See this tutorial too.

http://hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3modeling1.htm

Hope that helps.

[Waylon]

In Maya, assign multiple materials to your mesh like you would if you were just going to render it. (Select the faces, apply a different material.) When you bring it into Unreal, it should have one element per material, like jansoft88 showed.

Just be careful, it's trial and error to figure out what material goes into which slot, and if you're working with the mesh a lot the slots can switch order.

[copain]

thanks for the help guys

it worked for the meshes that have seperate faces assigned to the different materials.
But this does not work for layered textures.

Hey Waylon how would you do this with a layered texture?
The first material is the texture and the second one is a dirt layer, so the way to select different faces will not work as they share the same ones.
Exporting a layered texture does not seem to work, or does it?

[jansoft88]

for the dirt layer, you'll have to combine the two textures in the UT3Ed mat editor. Just add your two textures before plugging them into diffuse. If your dirt layer has the alpha in it, it should work .

[DGUnreal]

Alternately you can simply render-to-texture a single skin such as a 1024x1024 texture. This allows as many textures and effects as you want in the mesh in Max/Maya. This also has the advantage that the single unwrap for the skin can also be used as the unwrap coordinates for the lightmap. Plus single texture meshes render in-game faster.

[Waylon]

Single-texture meshes render a tiny bit faster, but a 1024 texture will add a lot to your download size.

Like Jansoft said, you'll have to make a custom material. There are lots of different ways to combine your textures (Add, Multiply, LinearInterpolate, plus combinations of those), and you can make your textures use different UV channels using a TextureCoordinate node.

See if you can find a good tutorial on the material system, or just start goofing around, it's fun to work with.

[DGUnreal]

Even if he uses two imported DXT5's for a blended Material, that is close to the same content size as a single 1024 DXT1 skin, except the skin have have a lot more texture detail.
If a few 100k hurts download for the ability to have a more complex mesh skin, then better give up on mapping now...

[copain]

Cheers guys it worked!!
I applyes an alpha to the dirt layer,used a texturecoordinate node, and then a multply node to combine two textures.

Thanks again for the help
steve