Unreal PBR Environment Materials
Role:
Solo
Date:
Jul 2025
Engine:
Unreal 5
A UE5 materials study exploring Blueprint-driven, PBR shaders for environments. I built a reusable base, detail, distance fade, decal, foliage, and post-process materials, focusing on parameterizations, performance, and fast look development.
Base Material
A lightweight, parameterized PBR base (albedo/normal/ORM) with switches for metallic and non-metallic, and exposed UV tiling to adjust tiling scale.
Could be used to quickly create instances like painted metals.
Base Detail Material
Extends the base with a second, high-frequency Detail Albedo/Normal layer and controllable blend. Adds crisp, detailed texture while keeping the master simple.
Distance Fade Material
Computers camera-to-object distance and lerps toward a faded color/normal beyond a radius. Useful for LOD-style soft fades and hiding faraway repetition to optimize performance.
Distance Fade Detail Material
Combines distance fade with the detail system: close-up shows the full detail maps; when far away, the shader gradually removes detail albedo/normals to save cost.
Sin Wave Material
A small FX material that uses sin(time*speed) to modulate emissive and color-lerp. Useful for pulses, warning lights, or other lighting.
Prop Weight Material
vertex painting moss on rock
Uses vertex color to blend between two textures (albedo/normal).
For example, blending rock and moss, or clean and dusty materials. Great for painting snow buildup, wet edges, path wear, etc.
rock & moss reference
Foliage Material
Adds SpeedTreeColorVariation for natural hue/brightness offset and SimpleGrassWind for World Position Offset swaying. Works for leaves, grass, bushes, flowers, etc.
Mesh Decal Material
Deferred decal using Parallax Occlusion Mapping, driven by a height map, plus color/contrast tweaks. Projects convincing depth for things like manhole covers, chipped paint, tile grout, wall graffiti, or engraved signage.
Coustics Decal Material
Animated Caustics Decal that blends two panned caustic maps with a ripple normal and world-space masking, to create fast, tintable water-light patterns projection on surfaces.
Water Material
Depth-based Water Material with dual panned normals, optional flowmap distortion, and shoreline foam masks. Parametrized color, waves, and foam, useful for ponds, rivers, or coastlines.
Post Process Eye-Blinking Material
A parameterized post-process eye-blinking effect that uses centered screen UVs, elliptical scaling, and smoothstep feathering to animate eyelids closing over the frame. Useful for stylized POV cuts and scene transitions.