RDR2‑Inspired Log Cabin - One Material, Real‑Time (Unity HDRP)

A fully game‑ready log cabin built around one guiding constraint: maximum visual richness for minimum runtime cost. The entire building - log walls, shingle roof, stone chimney, doors, window frames and props - runs on a single material and just 7 textures, while every surface can still be individually art‑directed with hand‑painted wear.

Layered, paintable materials. Instead of a unique texture set per object, I authored one atlas‑based material with a custom layering system: a base atlas plus up to four hand‑paintable overlays - moss, mud, aged wood and ground moss - blended by height and procedural noise so transitions read naturally instead of as a flat mask. I wrote a small Blender add‑on to paint these layers straight onto the mesh (one click per channel), then packed every wall, roof and prop mask into a single RGBA atlas.

Aggressive channel & texture packing. AO, Roughness, Metallic and Height are packed into the RGBA channels of one ORMH map — three maps doing the work of six. Whole‑building budget: base Albedo/Normal/ORMH + overlay Albedo/Normal/ORMH + one mask atlas = 7 textures, 1 material.

Parallax depth instead of geometry. The slate roof and stone chimney get real volume from region‑gated Parallax Occlusion Mapping in a custom HDRP Shader Graph - self‑occluding depth read from the packed height channel, with zero extra polygons. Parallax is masked to only the surfaces that need it, with rebuilt tangents and mirrored atlas tiling to stay seam‑safe.

Stats: 38.3k tris total (house 23.5k · props 14.8k) · 4K atlases · 1 material · 7 textures · Unity HDRP.
Pipeline: Blender (modeling, UVs, texture atlasing, custom paint add‑on) → Unity HDRP (custom Shader Graph, PBR).