Lead Technical Environment Artist Ryan Honey, whom we interviewed a couple of years ago, is currently delving into Material Layers for his upcoming environment piece and shared how Substance 3D’s baked masks are simplifying the process. Rather than manually painting wear and grime, Ryan leverages Curvature, AO, and Edge masks to create effects like edge wear, dirt buildup, and rust in Unreal Engine.
His key takeaway is that custom textures aren’t always necessary: smart masks allow materials to stand out while maintaining consistency across assets. This approach helps save texture memory and reduces production time, ensuring materials are both efficient and high-quality.
If you’re new to Unreal Engine 5 and want to get started with Material Layers, we recommend watching this detailed video from Sumo Digital. It covers the benefits of this feature and provides helpful use case examples:
Also, check out Ryan’s most recent project called Offworld, a high-quality sci-fi asset pack for Unreal Engine 5, featuring customizable environment-building pieces, rain VFX, and more:
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