Look, let's be real for a second. A lot of people want to learn Unreal Engine, but are intimidated by the size and complexity of this program. You see all the cool stuff, you hear all the hype, but you have no idea how, when, or even why to

dive in for yourself. And you know that it's going to add value to you as an artist, but even though it's free and ready to be used right now, you're stuck bridging the gap between Blender or C4D or whatever and Unreal Engine. I get it. I

was there. The goal of this video and all of my other Unreal Engine videos on this channel is to help you bridge that gap because at the end of the day, this program is awesome. It's the freaking best. So in this video, we are talking materials in Unreal Engine. You guys know

how important materials are. They make your art look good. They make the difference between a photo-real scene, a stylized scene, and sometimes they make you just go 'ah', just you just want to like get your fingers on it and touch it, feel it. Materials are the best. Without materials

all of our 3D art would just be black and white. And without a knowledge of how to control and art direct your materials, let alone how to set them up, you're going to get stuck no matter what program you're using. So for the next

little bit, I invite you to kick back, open up Unreal Engine if you can, because by the end of this video, materials and Unreal Engine won't be a problem for you anymore. We're going to create one material, that's it, a master material.

that all our other material instances will spawn from across all our future projects and we're doing it together step by step in six levels of complexity but look if you'd rather just pick up the master material that we're going to create over the next 20 plus minutes you

can grab it right now 50% off for the next week I got it on Gumroad it'll be on the Epic Games Marketplace in the next day or so I got you with a link in the description down below thanks for the support y'all and let's get to this

material but we can't really understand what we're about to do if we don't have a bird's-eye view of the material workflow in Unreal so usually in Blender or C4D we make a material made up from a bunch of textures and we use nodes to

control those textures to make the material that we want to make Unreal Engine kind of works the same way but where in other renderers they give you controls for free and Unreal we have to make them ourselves from scratch now that bit alone is what scared me off in

the beginning but I promise you it sounds tedious it's a little it's a little tedious but it's not as bad as you think cuz we only have to make one material a master material that all our other materials will spawn from called material instances that we'll have full

control over and be able to tweak in real time the material instances is what will populate our scene with another reason that we only use instances in our scene is because they're really light on your system and like I said they run in real time Master materials you would

never put those on the meshes in your 3D scene because they're chunky, they run really slow, they just bog down your system. You'd never do it. So you could think of the master material as like the factory that we have to build up. We got

to build the walls, we got to fly in the machinery, all the parts, and build it up so that it can produce a bunch of material instances. Right now, I love me a good metaphor. So if you have any solid Unreal Engine material metaphors, 

hit me with them in the comments. It's going to help other people wrap their heads around this, and I'll pin my favorite ones at the top. So let's get started with the most basic level one master material setup. And to do that, we'll need to make a master material by

right-clicking in our content browser and selecting material. I'll call it 'MM' for master material. Right-click it, and immediately we'll create that material instance. All right, and let's double-click and open our Master material. We're in. Let's do this. Let me just explain

what we're looking at. This whole left side of the screen, this is our Master material. This is where we're going to be building out all the nodes and having a good time. On the right side is the material instance. All of the stuff that we add to the master material, all the

parameters that we add, they're going to be reflected here in the material instance on the right side. All right. So I just have this window docked up on the right. So the easiest way to make a material is hit Ctrl + Spacebar and let's drag out our text textures from

any asset you got online you drag them into here and you pipe them into the appropriate slots so let's do that we got our normal map this gives our material texture right so you can actually see up here it's looking like rough concrete really nice we have our

color map I'm going to take that RGB and pipe it into base color we're looking nice here and then we have our roughness and our specular and how do we know which one is which so if you highlight one and look down here you can see

that's our specular we don't need to drag the RGB we just need one of these channels it's a black and white texture so I'll pipe this into specular this into roughness and we have the most simple version of a material in Unreal

Engine you know you apply that material instance to your model make sure you save it but here's what we're going to do the first thing we're going to do we're going to right-click each one of these and we're going to convert them to

a parameter essentially what this does if I hit save by converting it to a parameter you can check this box and you can switch this out for any other texture you want So if we do this for the remaining four and save this we see we have all of our texture samples here

and we could switch these out say for uh a wall a wall concrete texture boom there you go right so this is the way that we can use a Master material to make a bunch of different instances and switch out the textures and apply them to a bunch of different meshes in our

Scene. The last thing that we'll do, we want to keep things organized. It's really really important to do that. So what we'll do is we're going to select all of these textures and under the group, I'm just going to type in here "textures", right? And when we save this

it's going to go under the texture category. All right. And that's level one. But before we move on to level two, I got a quick announcement for y'all. So last month, I was selected as a judge in the official Honkai Star Rail 3D art contest.

And since then, their challenge has wrapped up, and hundreds of artists created fun 3D art around the theme of "Dive into Dreams". And this Friday, May 17th, here on the channel, I'll be live streaming my favorite 30 renders, selecting the three winners and dishing

out cash prizes along with limited edition merch on behalf of Honkai Star Rail. It'll be a fun stream in the vein of our own Top 100 live streams that we do here on the channel. So if you're into those, mark your calendars and stop by

this Friday, May 17th. But for those of you who don't know, Honkai Star Rail is a free-to-play turn-based RPG by the team who brought you Genshin Impact. Honkai Star Rail is set in a sprawling

open world sci-fi landscape and was recently updated with a brand new planet called Pentacon, with a city built on dreams at its center, hence their 3D challenge theme "Dive into Dreams". But it's time we dive back into these materials. So look, I'll catch you guys on

Friday, May 17th, for the Honkai Star Rail 3D art reveal. So, for level two, we want to actually control the contrast, brightness, tint, the saturation, roughness, and specular, and the intensity of our normals, starting with the color texture. So, first off, 

let's just make a little brightness adjustment. I'm going to use a multiply node. All right, so you have all these nodes on the right on your palette. I'm just going to be calling them out and hitting you with the little hotkey, so M. 

If you hold M and left click, you're going to make a multiply node. We'll pipe this in here, here, right, so it's running through the multiply node, and if we hold S and left click, that's going to make what's called a scalar parameter, and a 

scalar parameter is basically a node that we can adjust in the material instance, and we're going to pipe this in, and you'll notice by default it's totally dark because our default value is zero. We want that to default to one, okay? And it's going to look normal like 

we never plugged it in, and if we save it, if you look on the right here, you'll see the global scalar parameter values. If we check brightness, we can adjust our material instance on the fly. That's working, that's great. Next, let's do a contrast adjustment. So, I'll hold E, left 

click, and we get a power node. Let's pipe this through, right? So, it's running through the chain, it's running through. Let's hold S for scalar parameter, default this to one, and pipe it in. All right, and if we again save, then you can see, boom, right there, we have, we have 

brightness, we have contrast, let's keep moving forward with a saturation. So I'm going to right-click and it's actually a desaturation node, which means we need to invert this. We're going to use a one minus node. Hold O, left-click, all right.

We'll pipe that in. We want a scaler parameter and we default it to one and save. We see the saturation pops up and we now have a real-time saturation slider for our material, fantastic. One last thing to close out the color adjustment or the albedo adjustment is a

tint. All right, I want to tint it green, red, purple, blue, whatever. So we're going to need a color and the best way to do that is to hold three and left-click, and that creates a constant three Vector, three Vector for RGB. We're going to pipe

this in with a multiply node. Hold M, left-click, get this running through, pipe this RGB. Little toggle, if we save, we'll notice that the tint doesn't pop up in here because this is not a parameter. We got to convert it to a parameter and we'll save. And by default, we want the

color to be white because currently tinting it black just makes it super dark. We don't want that, so save, and boom, there we go. But it's in a different group, all right. So let's group our albedo adjustments together. I'll select all

these and I'm actually going to hit C and that just groups things here in our blueprint view so we, we can move this around nice and then let's grab all of these parameters that we made and type albedo and we'll hit save and look at that.

they're in the little albo group now that's great but what if I'm going to take it one further what if you want to adjust the order of how these parameters are laid out well what you can do is go through here and change the sort

priority and I'm going to just do like 10 20 30 and 40 and that way if I create new ones later which we are going to we can slip them in between the cracks I guess if that makes sense right so there you go there's our uh albo adjustments

super fun all right so let's move on to the specular and the roughness now this is a tutorial we we could copy paste but let's let's rep it again guys we're we're here to rep it so hold M left click we're going to multiply this we're

going to do a brightness all right hold s and left click with a default of one cuz zero is just zero brightness which means it's dark then we'll pipe this into the specular looking good and if we save it toggle this here you can see that

working in real time great amazing it works let's do a contrast adjustment hold e for a power node let's pipe this through and let's hold s again for a scaler parameter with a default of one you guys know it we've been here before

boom boom let's go ahead and select everything hit C select our parameters group them under specular and let's go ahead and save this and there you go boom let's do it again for the roughness all right so hold M two parameters and hold e again

for that power node and we'll pipe all this in make sure you guys default your stuff if you don't default your stuff you'll be getting weird errors hit C again we'll grab these roughness parameters and group them under roughness of course and save and finally

normal so normal is a little bit different what we're going to use to control our normal intensity is a flatten normal node all right and just like our desaturate node we needed that one minus to invert it this is flattening our normal we don't want to

flatten it we want to increase it so hold O for one minus pipe that in here hold S for scaler default of one and we'll pipe the RGB there into the flat normal we'll take all this hit C grab that normal parameter and put it in the

normal group and lastly right we got to pipe this out to the normal slot there and boom look at that level two is complete we can do a lot with just this but I want to do more so what we're going to do is make some switchers that's going to allow us

to toggle back and forth between these textures or just a base default color or roughness or specular value so the node that we're going to use to switch between our albedo texture or just a base color is called a static switch parameter if it's set to True

right so we want a constant 3 Vector we're going to right-click it and convert it to a parameter let's default it to White and that goes to True all right but by default I don't want it to be a base color I want it to be my actual

texture all right so we're going to pipe this into false we'll pipe this into base color and by default the default value is unchecked the default value is false let's go ahead and group our switch parameter we'll pipe that into albo we'll pipe our base color also into

the albo section so if we save we have this enable base color check box and if I check that it's going to forget everything else and it's going to go the true route cuz I checked it it's true if I uncheck it it goes the false route

which is our texture if I check it it goes the true route and we can change this to whatever color we want all right so like already that's looking super cool I love that but one other thing I want to take this enable base color and

put it up at the top let's take this uh static switch parameter take that sort priority and just change it to zero and it's going to go up to the top let's go ahead and include this in our little setup here that's great here's another

little tip you can take this little Pi whip here and reroute it so it's called a reroute node just to clean things up right I'm OCD about all this stuff so you'll probably see me doing that a lot all right let's do the same thing with

specular and roughness so let's give ourselves a little bit of room I will make a couple static switch parameters pipe that into false and then this will carry through to specular by default it's unchecked it's it's working how we want it to work all right but but it's

erroring us out because it needs the true. We're going to hold 'S' and left click with a default value of one, which will pipe into true. And let's go ahead and select both of these and make sure they're in the right group and make sure

enable base specular. Sort priority is zero. That way, when we save it, it's at the top. We can check it, and we can just give our material a base specular. It's not using the texture anymore. It's just using just a 0 to 1 value. Next

up, we'll do the roughness switcher. This will pipe into false into our rough. Come on now. Come on, boy. Into roughness. Hold 'S', left click. We'll default it to 0.5, pipe that into true. Hit save. Let's make sure to put it in the right group and

sort priority on the switch parameter to zero, so it starts up at the top. Now enable base specular, enable base roughness. Good to go. All right, so that's base roughness. We'll check that. We can see it works. It's not using the texture. It's

actually just using the roughness value of 0 to 1. Perfect, so we can just make a smooth yellow shiny little ball, and that's maybe that's what you need. Again, we're trying to give ourselves the largest variety of materials from this one master material. Okay, and here we'll

do you one extra. Let's right-click the metallic parameter. Let's promote that to a parameter, and we're going to put it in its own group, metallic, and the default will be zero, cuz I don't want stuff to be super metal by default, but let's set

that to one right we can set this to chrome ball right there you go you got your chrome ball and yo that's level three complete time to level up to level four we're going to give ourselves some position scale and rotation control over these textures and the reason it's level

four is because we're going to be using a technique called material functions which is essentially a way for us to set up a little shortcut for ourselves let's get started control spacebar gets us into our little browser here I'll right-click go to material and grab that

material function bam get up in here we see we got nothing we're going to basically make some cool stuff pipe it into here with nothing selected let's just hit expose to library save this okay and when we go back into our Master material and we search for MF PSR boom

it's right there we got this little node it's doing nothing but it's eventually going to go into all these little UV slots here and we're going to have all these fun little parameters like this but for scale position rotation all that good stuff right so let's double click

this and hop back in and start building let's start with a texture coordinate node I'm going to hold U and left click for that it's the first thing that we're going to need to make any of this stuff work let's start with rotation that way

no matter when we move the scale or the position the rotation will pivot from the center point okay so the first thing we want to pipe out into is what's called a custom Rotator rotation Center we don't have to mess with it we just need to bring this out to a divide node

and then we're going to use something a little different we've been using the scalar parameters by holding S and left clicking but we're not going to do it that way because if we did it this way all of the duplicates all of the

material instance duplicates will all be affected by this one value we don't want that we want individual control over each material instance all right so what we need to do is use an input all right it's called an function input we'll select it we'll

call it rotation and we'll pipe it into the A and the B is going to divide we're going to divide by - 360 which is going to allow us to just use this in a reasonable way with we're going to grab all this hit C pipe this into our

output save this thing and then now you see we have this little rotation guy we can right click that promote it to a parameter oh and we messed up a little bit but that's okay look so it's like not a value it's a color so we're going

to go back in we're going to take this input rotation we have all these different modes that this can be we chose that Vector 3 we've used it for tint we've used it for base color we just want it to be a scalar all right

that's it so we'll save it it'll update let's pipe this in and I'll show you how this works and um then we'll build out the rest of it boom we have a rotation let's put it in a group 0 _ PSR 0 0

because I want it to appear at the top all right and when we rotate this thing it rotates and let's go to a cube so we can kind of get a better look at this and you see it's rotating from the middle fantastic it's exactly what we

want let's build out the rest of this thing let's go back to the material function let's do scale next so we're going to divide it again hold D left click get this running all the way through looking nice we want essentially two of these inputs we want a U tiling

and we want a V tiling but there's not two slots for this we need to append this thing what that means is if I select the texture coordinate and you see it has U and V tiling right these scale settings are baked into this thing

we want to pop these out in into controllable little parameters and appending them is separate them into their individual parts so I'm going to pull up a pended Vector node pipe that into A and B drop that in there and you know we're clean around here so we're going to hit

C scale save this and you'll see we have V tiling U tiling V tiling looking nice up in there cleanliness orderwise let's get our priorities straight all right one and we'll set this to two just so they show up in the right order okay we

want tiling group together and we want the offset group together which we're going to build out now hold A left click that's our add all right we're going to do the same thing we're going to copy this paste it drop it into B pop it into

the output we're just going to name them different things this is our U offset and this is our V offset make sure sort priority continues we're going to go uh 0 1 2 3 and four that way these guys are grouped together select them all hit C

and call it position save this thing and we're looking good all right so let's go ahead and promote all of these to parameters awesome and by default you'll notice look it is just a gray blob it's not our material anymore that's because our UV tiling is set to zero our scale

is set to zero so I'm going to just set that back to one which will bring us back to a normal look in material let's make sure all of these are grouped in that PSR group I'm going to grab all this we'll call this PSR y'all know the

deal let's go down the line and let's get the sort priority going so tiling we'll set to one 2 offset is three and four and rotation will leave at the end right so our scaling is looking nice our tiling is looking nice and no matter

what we rotate it from the middle and we have full control over that freaking awesome we're on our way y'all we're on our way we're going to use this position scale rotation material function a couple more times because we're going to now enter level

five this is my favorite part surface imperfections tell a story of where your material has been it makes it feel more realistic with you know smudges fingerprints and the best way to get started with surface imperfections is to add one again control space bar to open

Open your little browser here and we're going to go to the surface imperfections. These are all of my custom ones that I shot out. You guys can grab these in the link above if you'd like. So I'm just going to drag in the smudges I love.

These smudges boom and if we pipe them into the roughness right and we save this out, let's get a better look at what this is doing. So the best way for me is I'll make a chrome ball, enable base color, set it to white. That's great base metallic.

We'll set to one, let's drop the normal intensity down to zero. So there we go, we got a nice little chrome ball with surface imperfections on it, but I want to see more of this surface imperfection cuz right now we have no control over it.

The first thing we want to do to control this, what if we want to switch out our imperfection right? So we'll right-click this, convert it to a parameter and let's go ahead and group it in its own category, surface imperfections. Sweet, we'll save and we

have our little surface imperfection group that we're going to be adding to this. So the first thing we'll want to do is adjust the brightness and contrast. So you all know how we do this. Brightness, hold M for multiply, hold S for a scalar parameter with a default of one, pipe it

in, get this flowing through into roughness, save that out. Let's get that contrast right out the gates too, holding E for that power node, imperfection contrast, boom, default to one, get it all piped in and let's go ahead and group this, y'all know where

we're at surface imperfections save it out and let's get a better look at what's going on here so for me I love to lower the contrast so 0.5 you're going to see uh a lot more of this thing if I

pipe this into the base color you'll get an idea of what we're looking at the black values are shiny and the white values are rough all right but by lowering the contrast we're kind of making the effect more apparent we're getting more smudge by making it a

little bit brighter I guess you could say so that's kind of what it's doing if you guys ever want to know what the heck you're working with plug any texture into the base color and you'll kind of get a better sense of what's going on

right so that's really nice we can of course adjust the brightness of this and make it more intense but what if we want the brightest point the most smudge point of this material to be half as much well that's our next little adjustment so we're

Unreal Engine Materials in 6 Levels of Complexity

Unreal Engine Materials in 6 Levels of Complexity