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 start with a material brief
MaterialForge generates a UE5 material recipe, with seamless textures and derived PBR maps where needed. Preview the result, then apply it through the desktop app. This link prefills your prompt:
Try “brick wall” in MaterialForgePrompt variations to try
Applying into your editor happens through the free Cosindra desktop app (Windows & macOS).
Want alternatives or a set of different surfaces? Follow the MaterialForge workflow →
Common questions
How do I get real depth in brick mortar joints in UE5?
Normal maps alone break at grazing angles on deep joints. Add the ParallaxOcclusionMapping material function: feed it a heightmap where mortar is dark and brick faces are bright, start around 16–32 steps, and route its offset UVs into your texture samples so the joints self-occlude up close. Reserve it for hero walls — the per-pixel ray march has real cost.
Why does my brick wall read as a flat printed poster?
Usually uniform brick color. Real walls mix browner, darker-fired and lighter bricks, so add strong per-brick tonal shifts in the albedo. Then break the geometric perfection: chipped corners in the normal map with slight albedo lightening on the chips. Identically colored, perfectly rectangular bricks read as wallpaper no matter how much grime sits on top.
How do I turn a red brick material into whitewashed brick with worn paint?
Lerp the albedo toward an off-white paint color through a wear mask, with grunge-driven holes revealing the red brick underneath — concentrate the wear on brick edges and high points where paint fails first. Let painted areas drop roughness to around 0.4 while exposed brick stays at 0.7–0.85, so the two layers separate in specular as well as in color.