Procedural Brick Pattern Shader - Advanced Materials - Episode 28

In this shader tutorial for Unreal and Unity, I show how to create a simple procedural brick pattern. Some advantages of generating patterns procedurally (over sampling a texture) are:

1. They can cover infinite area without tiling artifacts
2. They don't use any texture memory
3. In some cases they're cheaper than texture samples

Currently, the pattern is very simple, but in the next few weeks we'll be adding more features to this to make it really nice looking.

Here's the playlist for the set of procedural brick videos:

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Here's last week's tutorial on improving the animated flag:

Here's the playlist for all of the videos in the series:

Shader Book Recommendations

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Theme Music
Peace in the Circuitry - Glitch Hop

Background Music
Speo - The Little Things

#UnrealEngine #shadergraph #Unity

[Max_Stupa]

What else can you expect from Ben's video other than a brilliant explanation? Thank you for the great tutorial!

[LlamAcademy]

I always enjoy eating breakfast and watching your tutorials. Looking forward to the next brick ones 🧡

[Jeff-]

This was great! Looking forward to the rest of the series. I'm really enjoying these projects broken into shorter weekly videos. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us!
Here are some things that might be fun to show in the brick material:
- brick and mortar textures/colors
- variation in individual brick color
- mortar/bricks that are not totally even
- normals that show the mortar sinking in from the bricks
- top brick lines that match up with the sides (so it appears realistic when seeing the top and sides of a cube with the material for example)

[TheNikolaMNE]

Great video Ben and very useful stuff. I was trying to find a way to do this a couple weeks ago for some floor tiles but I couldn't pull it of so I ended up making a map I in substance designer which I used as a mask. Looking forward to see the future videos of this pattern serial!

[alexleonardkrea]

Very cool! I can't wait for the follow ups.

[needlessToo]

I don't know what do DDX/DDY nodes do but the rest was pretty easy to follow. Thanks!

[Deericon]

May you could make a tutorial of post-process fog ? I am so looking forward it！

[essillore]

The brick-pattern i did has small squares in big grey, and I don't understand the vector math to understand, where I've got the mistake. The second frac shows similar, so I suppose I did something wrong in the rectangle creator in Unreal.
Edit. With values 0.555 and 0.6 in the width and height, the pattern is much more similar to yours!
Thank you for the tutorial!

[Chris-jozr]

As a 3Ds Max user (and Unity now) I much prefer Shadergraph, not just for looks also, but Unreal really has that mid 2005 Maya user interface look going and it's just a bit ugly.
Granted, looks don't matter at all but I do love a nice grey UI as much as I love these great snippets, they give us a small tool that we can apply to many other uses as we learn more.

[MegaMitrandir]

Great tutorial as always! maybe you could make a tutorial on a shader that gives the final picture an aquarelle-like hand paint effect, I saw some tries but with no success. It would be interesting to see, whether it's even possible? what kind of thinking approach one should use to do it, will it be some kind of layer blend or something...

[meowyang]

I like this shader tutorial, but I find it prone to flickering lines.

[_g_r_m_]

"Texture samples are some of the most expensive things that gpu's do", how updated is that statement? My recent experience tells a different story

[tbunreall]

Is it possible to edit this to make small diamond shapes instead of rectangles, and use it as a mask to create a chain linked fence effect?

[LEHtJong]

I was wondering, how does this hold up at glancing angles and far distances. Using a texture sample trilinear filtering sorts that out. Does the ddx/ddy help with this in your custom function?

[elpainto]

Very handy stuff! I'm a bit curious why we'd use the DDX nodes rather than a step function to get the bounds for the rectangles. Are the results different?

[fleity]

On Math is cheaper than texture sample, do you have any reproducable examples or measurable data on this? I know at a certain point there is this point where the instructions become more expansive than the texture sample (if it wasn't any kind of texture baking and software like substance designer would not exist / would output the instructions instead of a texture). But it is suuuuper hard to gain any reliable knowledge on WHEN that happens.

[carlosrivadulla]

I can't understan the math in UE if u don't press "preview selected node"

[LlamAcademy]

I always enjoy eating breakfast and watching your tutorials. Looking forward to the next brick ones 🧡