World in Concrete: Using Megascans Materials Smartly

Vladimir Somov has recently shared Ray-Tracing study renders made with UE4 and Megascans. In this digest, he listed all the materials he utilized and re-used throughout five amazing minimalistic scenes.

This entire scene was built using only two materials. All the visual variation comes from a very versatile Megascans Basic Master material. Typically, I would change Albedo tint, Roughness, and Normal intensity as well as tiling and x,y cropping.

1. Concrete Slab 2×2 M is my go-to material for any brutalist inspired scene. I added a Roughness map contrast parameter in the shader in order to have more control over levels of visual noise in cases where concrete was lacking visual interest.
2. Smooth Precast Concrete 2×2 M. By modifying basic parameters like Tiling, Tint, and Roughness I was able to get a good variety of smooth plastered-looking concrete as well as more coarse areas.

1. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (1) is another version of the workhorse concrete slab material. Since it was used in multi places I had to adjust shader parameters to hide the fact that it is the same material used repeatedly. Something that I constantly had to keep an eye for is the natural scale of details and making sure that details like grooves, dirt deposits, and flow are meaningful and contextual with the geometry (meaning that the leaks are flowing in the correct direction, edge dirt is in the right place, etc.). That, hopefully, gave a desired photographic look to otherwise very simple geometry with few tillable materials across the scene.
2. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (2) is one more variation of my favorite concrete slab. This time geometry had custom UVs to add variation in the tiling scale that makes it look like two different concrete tiles were used. Puddles were added using Megascans Blend material and a simple procedural noise as a mask.
3. Smooth Precast Concrete 2×2 M. I reused it again for this scene. Similar purpose as before, to add visual contrast with a more smooth surface.

1. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (3). At this point an absolutely legendary material, with amplified contrast in the Roughness. 
2. Smooth Precast Concrete 2×2 M
3. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (1)
4. Concrete Tiles 2×2 M with modified contrast in the Roughness map to add wetness on the ground around the pool.
5. Icelandic Rock Cliff stretched and applied to a cylinder. I also used displacement with tessellation enabled to break up the silhouette.

1. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (3) with added contrast in the Roughness map.
2. Gravel Surface
3. Dead Tree

A lot of the visual noise and texture breakup in this scene was done by decals with leaks and grunge.

1. This was a custom material I made in Quixel Mixer using Mud Tracks 2×2 M and Wet Soil 2×2 M. Puddles were vertex painted using Megascans surface blend shader.
2. Creeper Ivy Atlas was mapped to an Ivy Generator done in 3ds Max.
3. Red Rusted Metal Barrel
4. Concrete Slab 2×2 M (4)
5. Rusted Metal Sheet 2×2 M

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