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Materials & Textures in Unreal

Game Development 2

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Goals

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

  • Define what a material is
  • Define what a texture is
  • Create a material
    • Base Color
    • Metallic
    • Specular
    • Roughness
    • Opacity
  • Create a textured material
  • Apply textures and materials to objects throughout your project

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What are materials?

  • A Material is an asset that can be applied to a mesh to control the visual look of the scene.
  • A Material as the "paint" that is applied to an object
  • It can also be defined as the type of surface from which your object appears to be made.
  • You can define its color, how shiny it is, whether you can see through the object, and much more.
  • In more technical terms, when light from the scene hits the surface, a Material is used to calculate how that light interacts with that surface.

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Before Materials

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After Materials

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Side by Side

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Activity 1

Making a Material

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Making a Material

  1. In the content browser, create a materials folder to hold all the games materials.
  2. Inside this folder, create a new material asset. Name it “DemoMaterial”
  3. For the material node we will be using the following:
    1. Base color - Constant 3 Vector
    2. Metallic - Constant
    3. Specular - Constant
    4. Roughness - Constant
    5. Emissive - Constant

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What are textures?

  • Textures are images that are used in Materials.
  • They are mapped to the surfaces the Material is applied to.
  • Textures are created externally within an image-editing application, such as Photoshop, and then imported into Unreal Editor through the Content Browser..
  • A single material may use several textures that are all sampled and applied for different purposes.
  • A simple material may have a Base Color texture, a Specular texture, roughness, and a normal map.

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Activity 2

Making a Textured Material

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Making a Textured Material

  1. In the content browser, create a materials folder to hold all the games materials.
  2. Inside this folder, create a new material asset. Name it “DemoMaterial2”
  3. For the material node we will be using the following:
    1. TextureSample
  4. In the TextureSample node, select the texture of your choice.
  5. At this time you could also add and adjust the metallic, roughness, and specular constants.

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Adding Materials to Actors

  • Select the actor you want to add a material to.
  • In the Details panel find the “Materials” options.
  • You can either drag a material from the content browser or select one from the drop materials dropdown.