Hi, I’m pretty new to UE and want to recreate the texture style seen in a concept I’ve worked on before. I have researched into post process materials on how to create some sort of a handpaint or digital oil paint effect. But I want the paint strokes to use the brush I have used in Photoshop to recreate the textures seen in my concept. Would this be possible? And is there any similar or existing post process materials available that allows me to custom the alpha brush strokes? Thank you!!
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I've looked into something similar for my project and aside from manually adjusting the textures inside the materials (which takes forever), there is one post process material that can add a somewhat "painted" look. It's called the Kuwahara Post Process. The one I used was a free download and was pretty easy to migrate into my project. Getting it to look right was the tough part though.
Would there be any way to incorporate the alpha texture of a brush in photoshop?
Lots of ways to do it. I’ve found videos just by googling. But here’s a hint: you can emphasize brush strokes by painting them into your normal map, or any of the PBR channels (roughness, metallic, etc.). That yields a more pronounced effect that the color channels.
Depending on the game, scope, etc. You could instead use meshes as input with a particle system, the particle system uses your brush from photoshop as it's alpha and takes the color information from the underlying mesh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT4smmI03zM
Without doing a ton of work this wouldn't be very optimized for a large scene, but for a small scene or a video/screenshot it'd be plenty fine. Benefit of this approach is that you can do a lot of cool animations with it like having it blow away from the character as it approaches or other cool things like that.
Other option would be to use a postprocess material and take in the scene color and such and manipulate that as shown in this tutorial which also covers adding in custom brush strokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RJGttIYNrY
Much more performant, though would likely still need some optimization done on a large scene. Keep in mind though that this tutorial specifically goes over how to do it for the static mesh's material rather than in a postprocess material, but you can find other tutorials which show post process materials to close the knowledge gap on that.
Alternatively, you can combine both methods and have specific gameplay things use the particle method and the rest of the scene use the custom material or post process method.
Hope that helps!