Playing with Materials in Unreal

This week we were introduced to and started playing with Unreal Engine's Material system. What I expected to be somewhat difficult or a challenge was, surprisingly quite simple to use. Unreal's Material system allows the user to create a large range of beautiful textures, colours etc to apply to objects within an environment. In this instance, we applied materials to simple cube and sphere objects. This was to demonstrate how materials behave differently on different objects and in different lighting. Loading up Unreal's Starter Map alone will reveal a whole host of existing materials that the user can play with, including water.

Materials are handled in a similar fashion to Blueprints. They still use nodes and is very much the same set up. When creating a new material, the user is greeted with a single node with a whole host of pins that can be dragged off. These include Base Color, Metallic, Roughness and Normal. These were the main ones we were introduced to, as these are the most common used.

The Base Color does exactly what it says on the tin, handles the material's colour. Colours in Unreal are handled by Vector 3 Constants, which applies the RGB values to the material. Vector 4 is possible which adds the Alpha channel to allow more change.

Metallic and Roughness do exactly what you expect. Combining these with Base Color truly allows for some interesting creations alone, but the fun starts when you add images in place of colour. In my example I added a lion line art image found on a webpage from Google. By adding this image to the metallic pin, the image will be made metallic and blend well with the base colour chosen. Same with roughness. Further to this, adding a photo to any of these pins will have the same effect, which can result in interesting and nightmarish concoctions.

The final pin we experimented with was the 'Normal' pin. What this does is handle 'normal maps.' These are essentially used for texture effects. Largely an image such as say an image for a bark for a tree tile will come as both a standard image and normal map image. The normal map image applies the 'depth' to the material without the colouring of the standard tile. This opens materials up to many possibilities.

Part of the Survival assignment requires at least three custom materials to be created. So far I am aiming to complete my own custom tree trunk material. Either used as a chopped down tree or just special trees. I also want to create some sort of textured brick for the asylum exterior wall as well as either a footpath/dirt path material, or simply a material of sorts for one of the pick up items. These textures shouldn't be too difficult to create, but should vary up the standard assets enough to keep things looking good.

User supplied images.

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