Road Signs
This is a collection of road signs I made, from my earliest iterations to my latest versions. This includes my most recent road signs which I made for the dual purpose of testing my retroreflective shading model, and to create an Unreal Engine/Fab marketplace pack that I can sell with the material-only retroreflection function. In here I’ve also included some screenshots of the road sign generator tool I made in UE4. This tool saw several iterations, including a version specially made for the survival game Dead Matter.
My final iteration of the road signs utilizes a procedural material setup —
By laying out the first UV channel of the sign mesh in a quad, I am able to use a simple 128x color quad texture in Unreal Engine to dictate which parts of the mesh receive which material layer. I use this method on a lot of my procedural materials as it’s a very useful setup for quick 4-layer lightweight procedural materials.
The material is relatively simple when broken down — 4 layers are created, each with base color, specular level, metallic, roughness, normal and ambient occlusion. These are then fed into make material attributes nodes, after which layer 1 has the sign symbol mask applied to it, along with the sign face texture and a color selected.
After the symbol mask is applied to the first layer, each subsequent layer is put through the ‘wear layer’ material function, adding procedural dirt/grime/rust to whichever layer the end user wants it on.
Finally, each layer is then combined using the quad mask texture and the UVs on UV channel 0, resulting in the final sign.
When applied to the sign mesh, the symbol mask texture selection, symbol selection, sign color and symbol color can all be set using custom primitive data parameters on the static mesh itself.
