Recently got the chance to collaborate with the Dinusty Empire community for DinCon and give a talk on **Surface Stacking**, or what most people might know as **Material Layering**.

This is a workflow I’ve been using and talking about for a while now. Building environments around reusable material libraries instead of relying entirely on bespoke texture sets for every asset.

In the talk, I break down some of the methodology behind Surface Stacking, how I approach layering materials, where it can help reduce texture memory and production overhead, and some of the tradeoffs you have to keep in mind when it comes to shader complexity, geometry, and performance.

There’s never really one workflow that solves everything, but I think Material Layering is an incredibly useful tool to have when you understand where and why to use it.

Big thanks to Dinusty Empire and Jeremy for having me as part of DinCon!

https://www.artstation.com/dinusty

You can watch the full talk here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZzZudKh8Ho&t=2s