How to Make a Brick Wall Material in UE5
Brick is a rhythm material — the running-bond pattern and the recessed mortar do most of the work. What separates a good brick material from a flat one is per-brick variation and honest depth in the joints.
Channel by channel
Base color
Reds and oranges with strong per-brick tonal shifts (some bricks browner, some darker-fired) and lighter, grey-beige mortar. Uniform brick color is the #1 tell of a procedural texture.
Roughness
High overall: bricks 0.7–0.85, mortar rougher still, ~0.9. Glazed or painted brick variants can dip individual bricks toward 0.4.
Metallic
0.0.
Normal
Deep mortar recesses (the strongest feature), plus pitted, slightly uneven brick faces. Consider Parallax Occlusion Mapping for close-up walls — brick joints are exactly where flat normals break.
The hand-building tip that matters
Add subtle edge damage — chipped brick corners in the normal and a touch of albedo lightening on the chips. Perfect rectangular bricks read as new construction even with grungy color.
New to the four channels? Read the PBR basics first.
Or generate it in seconds
MaterialForge builds this material for you — seamless textures, derived PBR maps and the UE5 node graph, applied into your open editor in one click. The prompt is prefilled:
Generate “brick wall” in MaterialForgePrompt variations to try
Applying into your editor happens through the free Cosindra desktop app (Windows & macOS).