Hextile Material in Unreal Engine

In mid 2022, I came across a paper by Morten Mikkelsen called "Practical Real-Time Hex-Tiling". The paper outlines an effiecient way to tile a material in such a way that breaks up repeating patterns in regular materials. I used this paper as a learning opportunity to try out Unreal Engine 5, and to see if it was possible to build out the technique in Unreal Engine without custom HLSL nodes.

In the end, I was able to successfully reproduce the technique in Unreal. As an added bonus, the limitation of no HLSL nodes forced me to learn about and implement some basic matrix math functionality with only unreal material nodes.

I've uploaded the final project to GitHub as a learning resource for others who want to implement this technique, or learn more about material authoring in general.

Published

Sep 05 2022

Skills

  • Shaders
  • Unreal Engine