The ability to stack multiple texture layers within a single material — similar to how Photoshop handles layers, or how Unreal Engine 5 handles blend materials with Megascans.
Concretely, this would mean being able to:
- Overlay a secondary normal map (micro-detail / imperfections) on top of a base normal map, with independent scale and intensity controls
- Add a dirt/wear mask layer on roughness or albedo without having to bake it into the source texture beforehand
- Blend two albedo textures using a mask map (black & white) to drive transitions between materials on the same surface (e.g. concrete + moss, plaster + stains)
- Control each layer’s UV scale independently (large-scale base texture + small-scale detail overlay)
Why it matters:
Right now, achieving this kind of surface complexity requires pre-compositing all layers in Photoshop or Substance before importing into D5. This breaks the non-destructive workflow — any change to the base material means re-exporting and re-importing textures.
A layered system inside D5 would allow:
- Faster iteration directly in the viewport
- Reusable imperfection overlays applied across multiple materials (fingerprints, dust, weathering)
- More photorealistic results without increasing texture file count or external round-trips
This is especially relevant for architectural visualization, where surface aging, material transitions, and fine detail variation are critical for believable outputs.
References / prior art:
- Unreal Engine 5 — Blend Materials with vertex paint
- Corona Renderer — Multi-layered material with mask-driven blending
- V-Ray — VRayBlendMtl
- This has already been requested here: Multi-layered texture (2023) and Multilayer materials (2024) — consolidating those requests here with more detail.