Blockout Material (Auto-UV & Color)

To assist in rapid prototyping I’ve created a material that automatically aligns UVs based on world position and applies Color based on surface normal.

Get Free Access to this and the full Materials Bundle.

How does it work?

The material consists of two main components. The first part aligns the texture UVs with XYZ in world space. This allows any object to always align with it’s neighbor or other intersecting geometry.

The second part applies color based on the vertex/pixel normal of the surface. In the demo, vertical surfaces get orange and horizontal surfaces use grey.

ue4_mockup_mat_03

Intersecting BSP geometry will seamlessly blend together.

UE4_MockupMaterial_Preview

Overview of material. Could likely be optimized, but performance is not critical in the block-out stage with only simple geometry and few moving parts.

Feel free to use the downloadable material in your project. Please leave any feedback in the comment section!

13 Responses

  1. Hey, Tom,

    Tthanks for the asset. I just wanted to say that it has problems working properly on 4.23 version of UE4. Didn’t check with previous ones and I hope this request doesn’t sound silly, but if you’d be interested in upadting this or maybe giving me a tip what might be the issue, I’d appreciate that, along with other people who might download this in the future.

    Here’s the screen of the issue, which is material getting all jagged in X and Y axis when the rotation is 0,0,0 :
    https://imgur.com/a/eMiLO5U

    Cheers!

      • I’ve fixed the material issues in the download package on Gumroad. Newer engine versions no longer agreed with my material for some reason. Now it’s all good.

  2. Thank you Tomlooman, this is going to be very handy. Not just for the actual prototyping but for certain co-oridinate based effects I’m after as well.
    Much appreciated Good Sir.

  3. Hi,

    This mockup material is a really nice idea. I’ve started to use it for my small tests projects, thanks for sharing it with us!

    It is such an improvement from the UE4 default one that I feel that they should at least add such bi-colors to it…

    Cheers,
    SRombauts

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