Layered Materials

I’m wondering what would be the proper way to create a layered material ? I’m reading through the Layered Material DOCs but am not up to speed on everything mentioned. I do not have access to UDN so I can not look at the example posted there.

My intentions were to create a layered material for a simple wooden chain link fence. Wood slats and their normals would be one layer and the metal chain plus it’s normals would be another layer that would display on top of the wood slats. It would be simpler to just merge all the layers in Photoshop and create the normals from that but I’m curious to see if it would look better as a layered material with each layer having it’s own normal maps.

I don’t think this would benefit much from a layered material approach. If it’s easier for you to make it normally, I would just do that.

In my experience, layered materials are usually most useful for large objects that require specialized per-layer detail, or things where you vertex paint the different layers where you want them.

Layered Material might be slightly misleading term. I guess it was named like that for easier understanding by artists. Essentially, material layering just blends your textures in the material, and thus increases its complexity. There are cases where it can be very useful, but as a general rule of thumb, If you can blend your textures before importing them, do so without any hesitations.

That does make sense. What I’m trying to do would probably look better if the chain link were a mesh. Maybe even make them both a mesh, texture both then combine them.