This sprint, Cameron and I have been working on creating two (and eventually more) seamless materials in Substance Designer with the intent of using alphas exported from Substance Painter for edge wear, and blending the two materials in Unreal Engine. This will help unify the materials and make the texturing process a bit quicker.
This was my first time working in Substance Designer, so it was a bit of a learning curve, but I created a basic damaged metal material and exported that. Next, I took one of the meshes from our project into Substance Painter after checking that the UVs were okay, and made a basic black and white material we will use as an alpha that basically just highlights the edges with a curvature generator. Cameron plugged this alpha into the blended material he created with his smooth metal and my rough metal in UE, and we went back and forth a few times with different settings for the alpha in Substance Painter to see what will work the best. I still need to update the damaged metal material to make it more dramatic based on the results we saw, but the process is well on its way.
Here's the first pass of this material blend on an item in-engine.
You can see the black and white alpha I made here in the 'edge texture' parameter within the material Cameron created. The white parts display the damaged metal, and black represents smooth metal.
