Materials in Unreal Engine 5

Name: Materials in Unreal Engine 5
Author: Ken Geary

Creating and working with materials, textures, and material instances.

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Course: On-Demand

Hello. In this lesson, we'll learn how to create materials in Unreal Engine. Launch Unreal Engine and we'll create a New Project. Select Games, Blank and deselect Starter Content. We will name this project Materials, click Create. Most of what we've seen so far in past lessons have been gray shaded objects. We can make objects in our level look much nicer by either importing or creating materials. Materials will add color, glossiness, reflection, bumps and you can even animate parameters in your materials. Let's create our first material. First, save our level. Go to file, Save current level As- Right click, make a new folder, name it Maps. Open Maps. Once again, we'll name this Level 1. Click Save. Next, we'll open our Content Drawer. We'll right click, create a new folder. We'll call this Materials. Open the Materials folder. Right click, select Material. We will name this M_Blue. The M_ is commonly used to designate materials when working in Unreal Engine. Double click the Material. This will open up the Material Editor. The main tab is material graph and this is where you'll create nodes and wire them together rather than writing code. The inputs of makeup of material are the base color, metallic, which will add reflection, specular which works different in Unreal than other renders and it's default is 0.5, giving a non-metal reflectivity. Roughness, is as its name says, is how rough a surface is. If it's very rough, it won't look smooth or shiny. An isotropy is more detailed version of specular and good when making brush metals. Emissive color allows a material to admit colored light, like a neon sign. A normal map is an advanced form of bump map and will simulate small detailed bumps or crevices. The rest of the inputs are for more advanced shading networks. Some inputs like opacity, which is the opposite of transparency, will appear if you change the material type in the Details Panel. To start building our material, we usually start with the base color pin. Click and drag out a connecting line O wire. When you let go of the mouse, you get a menu with many options to choose from. We are looking for a constant 3 vector because we need values that are red, green and blue channels that mix and match like mixing paint. Type in 3 vector and you'll see a constant 3 vector value. We will select that. A shortcut for the 3 vector is also holding the 3 key and clicking with your mouse in the graph window. If we look at the preview sphere, we see no change. Because the full color is 0, 0, 0 or black. You could type in values and try to get the color you want. But if you double click the 3 vector node, Unreal Engine supplies you with a handy color wheel to interactively pick color. You need to select your color and its value, which is sort of how bright the color will be. You can pick colors all day but if your value is zero, it'll still be black. I'll select a blue hue, then drag the value slider all the way up. In the moment, the node changes to that color as well as the preview sphere. Click Okay. Congratulations. You've just made your first basic material. Be sure to click Save, then exit the editor. Let's drag your shape into our View Port. Click Create, Shapes, Sphere. The sphere is a good shape to test materials, especially if they're shiny or reflective. Now we gotta assign this material to our sphere by dragging and dropping directly into View Port. I'd advise against doing this because in a complex level with many overlapping shapes, you may drop onto the wrong one or drop onto several by mistake. A better way is to select your sphere in the View Port or in the World Outliner. And as you can see, if you scroll down a little in the Details Panel, you'll see Materials menu, you can click, type in Blue. It's like your blue material. Let's make another material. This time it'll be a shiny metal. Opening Materials folder, right click, and create another material. We'll name this M_Chrome. Double click to add it. You can also right click and select Edit. This brings up the Material Editor. For a base color, we will select white. A shortcut for our color channel, which is a 3 vector, is hold the number 3 down on your keyboard and click with your left mouse button. Drag from the pin output into the base color, then we'll double click the node and change the value all the way to white. Click Okay. Now, because it's gonna be Chrome, we want this metallic, drag out the wire from the metallic pin, let go the mouse and this time we'll type in Constant. We only need a constant 1 vector, which is also called Constant. We only need one value and metallic will work with either zero or one. One will be fully metallic. Type in 1 in the Details Panel. In our preview, I'm seeing some reflection but it's very faint. That's cause we need to polish up the sphere or in other words, change the roughness value. So we need another 1 vector added to our roughness channel. A shortcut for that is hold the 1 key on your keyboard and click the left mouse button. Click and drag into the roughness. The roughness is zero, would be the same as if it were shiny of a value of one, which would be completely shiny. Click Save, exit the Editor. Let's create another object. This shape will be a cylinder. Open our Content Drawer and we see now we have our M Chrome material. Select the cylinder. Then under Materials, I'll select our Chrome. We'll save all. Save selected. And now you know the basic workflow to mix and match values and create all types of materials for your project. In the next lesson, we're gonna learn how to add and use textures in Unreal Engine. Thanks for watching.

Beginner Provider : Ken Geary 3 Lessons · 22m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

Unreal Engine 5 renders your levels in high quality and real time. One of the factors that adds to this level of quality is the use of physically-based materials, where a material can have multiple inputs to control parameters, such as roughness, color, bumpiness, and metallic to name a few. In these lessons, you will learn how to create materials, add textures to the materials, and create material instances to allow real-time adjustment of parameters you set up in the material editor.

With the proper connections in the material editor, a material can look photorealistic when applied to an actor in the level, such as a wood floor with all the grain, indents, and glossiness. You can also access the Quixel Megascans library, which is free to use for subscribers to Epic Games and contains high-resolution, multiple-texture maps for each material type.

What You'll Learn

Create materials and add textures within the Unreal Engine 5 material editor
Build material instances to allow real-time adjustment of parameters set up in the material editor
Control material parameters such as roughness, color, bumpiness, and metallic using physically-based materials
Apply materials to actors in a level to achieve a photorealistic look, such as a wood floor with grain, indents, and glossiness
Access the Quixel Megascans library of high-resolution, multiple-texture maps available free to Epic Games subscribers
Enhance the overall quality of your levels through proper material connections

Key Takeaways

Unreal Engine 5 renders levels in high quality and real time, and physically-based materials are one factor that adds to this quality.
A physically-based material can have multiple inputs to control parameters such as roughness, color, bumpiness, and metallic.
Material instances allow real-time adjustment of parameters that were set up in the material editor.
With the proper connections in the material editor, a material can look photorealistic when applied to an actor in the level.
The Quixel Megascans library is free to use for Epic Games subscribers and contains high-resolution, multiple-texture maps for each material type.

Frequently Asked Questions

What will I learn in this course?

You will learn how to create materials, add textures to the materials, and create material instances that allow real-time adjustment of the parameters you set up in the material editor.

What topics do the lessons cover?

The lessons cover creating materials, working with textures, and creating material instances and adding parameters.

What are physically-based materials in Unreal Engine 5?

Physically-based materials are materials that can have multiple inputs to control parameters such as roughness, color, bumpiness, and metallic, helping render levels in high quality and real time.

What is the Quixel Megascans library and can I use it?

The Quixel Megascans library contains high-resolution, multiple-texture maps for each material type and is free to use for subscribers to Epic Games.

What skills does this course help develop?

This course covers skills including Material Components, Material Design, Material Selection, Materials Studio, Unreal Development Kit, and Unreal Engine.