Week 4 Day 2 - UE4 Materials

Channel:

Bill Kerney

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2,640

Published on February 5, 2021 1:38:41 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbGaVhqCCgo

Duration: 1:21:22

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Today we learned how to make materials in UE4:
1) From the content browser, right click and choose new material
2) Double click the material to edit it
3) Connect nodes to the various inputs in the material. If you want to feed a constant value into the material, connect a constant3 (for an RGB value) or a constant (for a single number) to it. Shortcut, hold down 3 and click for a constant3 or hold down 1 and click for a constant.
4) Make a constant3 and use the color picker to choose a color, then hook up the RGB output of the constant into the "base color" of the material.
5) Back out in the world editor, drag your material onto an object to apply the material to it.

6) Hit apply (you'll be doing that a lot, basically after every change) and you'll see the change reflected in the world. (You can split screen your monitor so you can have your material editor on one side and the world on the other, so you don't have to click back and forth.)
7) Hook up a constant to metallic and set the value of the constant to 0 or 1. 0 means not metallic, 1 means metallic. Apply the changes and see how it looks.
8) If it's not metallic, hook up a constant to specular, and choose a value between 0 and 1 to control how shiny it is.
9) Hook up a constant to roughness and give it a value between 0 (perfectly shiny) and 1 (super rough) which controls the specular/diffuse lighting bouncing off of it.
10) You can import a picture into the materials editor by dragging it in from the content browser. Drag in a normal map and hook it up to the normal node. The r,g,b channels of the normal map correspond to the normal vector at each point of the surface (the normal vector being the direction the surface is facing) allowing you to simulate bumps and cracks on the surface simply. If you need to adjust the scaling of the texture, use a texcoord node and hook it up to the uv input on the texture node.
11) There are lots of other options here, like making translucent materials, or doing subsurface scattering, or doing clear coat. Try it out!

I then went through the grass texture and showed how they used lerping (blending) between different frequencies of noise to create a grass texture that doesn't repeat at any visible scale. Lerping between a value A and a value B takes a third parameter called alpha, a value between 0 and 1 that blends between A and B.