Personal project: Procedural, minimal and stylized horse shaders
Can a single Unreal Engine default texture be bent into producing infinite stylized horse coats? Yes.
The shader
1x default UE texture
1x material instance
Shader instruction count <300
Texture memory cost: 85KB
Coat iteration & authoring BP
One blueprint for authoring & iteration
Assigns custom primitive data
Saves new presets as structs
Fetches or shuffles presets
Per-category presets: Base coats, face markings, body markings
The shader
2x default UE textures
Shader instruction count <220
Texture memory cost: 32KB
The blankets (and halters)
The horse shader
Vertex paint used for primary area masks: Base body gradients (G), hooves and face details (B), mane and tail (R)
Rest is done with object space masks and noise sampling.
Lean, scalable, simple systems for prototyping purposes to deliver endless variety with minimal asset bloat or authoring overhead.
So I could focus on the fun part; coat creation, not asset management.