Cliff Shader

This is a shrimple cliff shader with triplanar mapping, texture layering & other features, which should provide artists enough flexibility to keep cliffs detailed enough at any scale. Texture layering can be done by providing an existing mask texture, or using a dynamic one.

• Triplanar Mapping: control texture tiling, size, and blend factor. Your cliff texture is not locked to your mesh scale, allowing it to freely transform it without losing any detail.
• Texture Layering: add second texture that will be rendered on top of your mesh. It can be done by passing your own mask texture, or let shader generate it at runtime. (+Z axis)
• Normal/AO strength: control the intensity of normal/Ambient Occlusion maps.
• LOD Mode: "lightweight" mode that can be used for separate cliff LOD materials.
• Peaks, and Dirt: add extra detail without having to paint any textures by yourself. Import curvature and cavity (or AO) maps, and use them to make cliffs look more detailed. Intensity of both maps are controlled by sliders in material editor.   

Assuming that you already have a high poly mesh of your amazing cliff (or any other mesh), you will only need to bake these maps:


• Normal map (it will go into "Global Normal" input in Material Editor)
• Ambient Occlusion map (marked as "Global Ambient Occlusion")
• Curvature map ("Peaks" in Material Editor. Highlights the curvature)
• Cavity map ("Dirt" in Material Editor) 
• Direction map (used for static projection)

And of course, you will need a seamless material for the mesh itself. It will be applied to your cliff mesh using triplanar mapping. Albedo, normal, AO, roughness, metalness, basic PBR stuff.

Some tips:
1. Cavity/curvature/direction maps can be generated in Marmoset Toolbag. I assume that this should be absolutely possible in Substance Painter too. 
2. For better curvature highlight, I recommend creating two identical curvature map layers, then blurring second one, and then combining them. 
3. If you don't like how cavity map looks like on material, you can use AO map. Or anything else.

Have fun! Hopefully it's not a total mess and will be useful for your nature assets.

Made by wheatleymf, originally written for My Summer Cottage, now released publicly. 

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