With all due respect to Team Torque and our boys from Bremen, attempting advanced material creation with Torque 3D is a fool's errand. Having prior experience with the Unreal Engine and its detailed material system doesn't help. That said, I have managed to create a few workarounds; this thread is dedicated to little material tricks I use to squeeze a little extra modularity out of materials; feel free to add your own. Overlay Textures I've used this with everything I've released. Basically, you create a detail texture, and apply it over the diffuse. However, you also set the detail scale to less than one (.5, in this case) so that it provides extra variation to the diffuse coloring without increasing the size of the diffuse texture. Vertex Coloring This is most beneficial when working with a uniform, largely colorless surface. By using a lightly-shaded and -colored diffuse map, and enabling vertex coloring, this allows the material to show up convincingly with completely different colors on different objects. It does require a little extra work in your 3D modelling program, however. This method is not at all convenient, but does prevent you from having several materials wherein the only difference is color. Similarly, it can be used to add a little extra variation among larger surfaces. This requires extra geometry, but can be used to subtly break up tiling without having to use decals. Gradient "Masking" A play on gradient mapping, a very cool and extremely modular system that, sadly, isn't really truly possible in Torque. A somewhat more forced version is, however. With a gradient mask, you take a simple all-white texture, and place it in the first layer's diffuse slot. Then you take the second layer, and add a white, alpha-masked version of whatever texture you plan to use in the second layer's diffuse slot. Using Torque's default diffuse coloring, you can assign both layers their own color–in editor, in realtime. Further layers of coloring are possible, and you can mix the overlay technique from above to add variation to this modular approach. Multiple unique materials can now be made with the same textures.
Nice guide. To add to the vertex colours, in Blender you are able to bake AO to that, but the downsides are: -accuracy depends on the object vertices count -colour blending may seem really odd in certain cases Also, in Torque3D most 'advanced textures' like the overlay textures can use the secondary UV map of an object if it exist. With that for example, you could have a 'tiled' primary UV map and a quickly 'lightmapped' UV map as secondary. You would use a tile able texture in the first, and you could bake your AO in the second. Useful for certain models, but the AO map should have the 'white' replaced with full transparent colour, else it will make things brighter.
Wow, I wasn't aware that Torque had support for multiple UV channels. Thanks. Now what would be even niftier would be if there were support for multiple Vertex Color layers. Then you could, for instance, use vertex color to separately define the colors of both the bricks and mortar in those second brick materials, for a one-material-fits-all approach. But perhaps I've made this process complicated enough already.
