How to combine textures of different sizes in a Material Blueprint?

This is NOT a question about adjusting UV scale to change the tiling scale of a texture on an object (just saying this so I’m not sent to one of the many threads about this).

What I am trying to do, in general:

Combine 2 textures in a material blueprint, one of which is much smaller than the other, while maintaining control over the scale and position of the smaller texture relative to the larger one.

A specific example:

This is a texture for the base color of a material which is used on a column:

I have a whole series of small images that I want to use as additional decorations to this base column texture, which are small files, such as:

66588-column_icon_overlay_v1.png

What I want is a way to combine these two textures together, such that the result is a final input into the Base Color, which looks like:

If you simply blend or add these two textures together, the small image is remapped to the size of the larger one, and you get something that looks like:

66590-column_overlay_example_1.jpg

So, how can you blend two images of different sizes while controlling the scale and position of on the smaller one relative to the larger one?

Things that I know work:

  1. Obviously, I can make 8 complete textures in PS, composed of the same base layer, with the small decorative layer on top, and import them and use them individually. This seems like a huge waste of memory, given that the base texture at scale is 2.7Mb, and thus 8 of them represent almost 22Mb of data, for adding only 172kb of detail to the base 2.7Mb image (each of the smaller images is only 22kb of data).

  2. I can save the small decorative images on a transparent canvas of the same size as the base image and then blend, but these are also huge files and have similar problem as above.

Isn’t there some BP procedural way to add these two together, specifying the position and scale of the smaller image, and then have a single material that switches between 1 of the 8 possible additional decorations?

Thanks in advance to the community and UE4 for their help.

1 Like

I had the same problem and for my case the solution is this:

Combine that with a Lerp or so and it may be what you need

What was the solution? You just linked to a page.