Unreal Engine: Master Materials in 6 Levels

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 in 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 eyye 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'll 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 SL salmon 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 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 control space bar 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 rightclick 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 yall so last month I was selected as a judge in the official Hong Kai star RI 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 Hong Kai 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 those of you who don't know hongkai star rail is a free-to-play turn-based RPG by the team who brought you genin impact hongkai 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 Hong Kai 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 normal 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 hot key 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'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 rightclick 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 realtime saturation slider for our material fantastic one last thing to close out the color adjustment or the albo 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 albo 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 albo 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 BAS default color or roughness or specular value so the node that we're going to use to switch between our albo 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 rightclick 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 boox 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 based 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'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 a a 0er to one 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. five 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 rightclick 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 scaler 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 scaler 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 penned 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 ad 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 unv 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 yall 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 up 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 imperfection 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 rightclick 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 yall 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 cont 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 smudi point of this material to be half as much well that's our next little adjustment so we're going to make what's called a lurp and aurp is basically like a mix node or a mix RGB node I'm going to hold L and left click it's really simple it's just blending between two different things via a number value or in this case our texture so we're going to plug this texture in and we're going to give ourselves A Min and Max so I'll make two here it'll be a minimum of zero and an imperfection Max of one and by default if I plug these in the max into B the Min into a and we plug all of this into roughness and save it we should get the exact same thing perfect right so we're at that default value let's group these and if we toggle them and I take that Max down to 0.5 it's it's not really like adjusting brightness it's actually bringing the ceiling down by half so whatever's white is now 50% gray I can bring up the floor too so like if we want to say we just want this by default to be at least 2 rough it's going to be point2 rough we can bring that that ceiling back up to one right and you guys can kind of see here we have more control over our surface imperfections let's take it one step further and I'm going to show you how to blend between this surface imperfection we set up and the roughness texture here cuz what if we want both at the same time I'm going to use use that static switch parameter again and if we just go into true for the surface imperfection false to the normal roughness kind of setup that we we got going and plug all that into roughness and we save this then by default it's going to be the roughness texture that we plugged in for our material let's go ahead and group this into surface imperfections and we have this enable surface imperfections toggle box now so if I click that it's going to switch over to our smudges but we want both at the same time with a control slider of how much of each we're going to use this lurp node once again in order to do that L left click and we want to blend between these right so let's say a is our surface imperfection we want to blend between a we also want to blend between the roughness okay that'll go into B and all of this will go into true and how are we going to blend between these with a slider so I'm just going to right click this Alpha promote remote it to a parameter and I'm going to go ahead and add it to our surface imperfection group and by default we're going to blend by5 so that just means we're going to have half of our surface imperfection half of our roughness and I'm going to group all of this into its own category surface imperfection blend now if I did this right we can save and we'll check the blend box and I should be able to blend between there you go one or the other so now we have the power in our hands we can go between both call it 0. five by default and we're getting the Best of Both Worlds amazing the last thing I'm going to do to wrap out level five is give ourselves another position scale rotation control over this surface imperfection cuz I want to be able to make the smudges smaller separate from the texture since we made that material function all we have to do is look up that material function fun PSR and we can use the same guy and plug this into our surface imperfection I'll promote all of these to parameters and name them something different than this okay cuz if I name them the same as this these will be linked and we don't want that we want them to be separate so I'll name it like imperfection tiling imperfection offset and just remember by default you want to set the tiling to one because otherwise it's going to be so small that you can't even see it and lastly we'll want to make sure our order is correct so I'm going to do tiling as one and two offset as three and four and rotation at the end put them in the surface imperfection category save this and we have all of this here now we can order this however we want so if we want to have the enable surface imperfection at the top which I do I'm going to go ahead and grab this and sort priority zero make sure things are in order so if we save this you can see we have enable surface imperfections at the top right so we can turn this on turn it off we have our imperfection texture as number two we have the rest of our controls so that's surface imperfections we've reached level six look at what we've built so far this is crazy and and it even goes further in these material functions too like you guys are killing it leave a comment down below if you guys made it to this point or if you're just following along we're on on to level six adding dirt over top of our albo and the best way to get started with that is once again A texture so I'm going to go back to my Surface imperfections and I'm going to grab let's say these Footprints all right and the best way to kind of get this set up here is again with a lurp I'm going to hold L left click and bring up that lurp all right we want to blend between two different things we want to blend our actual texture here that we' set up our albo texture and we want to blend between some dirt and the best way and the easiest way to grab some dirt is to just hold three and left click grab that constant 3 vector and pipe that color into B I'm going to rightclick this we're going to convert it to a parameter and we'll just grab some brown or something like this as default all right and we're going to mix between these two textures with this surface imperfection and we can rightclick this of course and let's plug this into a dirt category so let's grab this type dirt same deal here we'll pop this into dirt and if we plug this lurp into base color and save we're going to get this dirt category and there'll be some dirt over top of our texture now we want all the same controls in this dirt texture that we had set up for our surface imperfection so by this point y'all let's see if um you know the answer I'm just going to go for it and uh hopefully you guys can match me by the end let's do a [Music] brightness all right got that that default value of one and we'll plug it into the dirt group let's do contrast [Music] [Music] next same deal make sure it's in the group good stuff you all made it this far sweet all right let's get that Min and Max set up with the lurp right so since this is new I'll hit you with this hold L left click we're going to be blending between a Min and max value with our Alpha here with this texture plugged into Alpha that's going to go into that one and then we have our Min and Max so holding s left click dirt Max with a default of One Max goes into B Min goes into a make sure these are in the right group and let's C clean it up this is going to be our dirt and then let's go ahead and make sure our order is all good here and then of course we want to be able to toggle the dirt on and off so we're going to do that again with a static switch parameter enable dirt great this will be grouped in the dirt group and if it's true if we are enabling the dirt we're going to want to pipe this in this lurp the end of our chain into true and this will go into the base color if it's false if it's just the texture we want and no dirt we're going to come out of this uh this texture here our albo into false and by default it's false so if we save this it goes back to normal and when we enable dirt the dirt is added on top and we can change this texture say for um I have like water spots or something right bunch of water spots and we can change the contrast of this to bring a bit more of this out we can get the brightness going and I think the last thing we got to do is add our position scale rotation values to the dirt texture itself right click we want that material function position scale rotation get this all lined up like we've done and pipe it into the UVS make sure your order is all correct right with the sort priority and that's all good to go all right but now that we have this all built out okay we we have our albo we have our dirt all with the controls we got specular with toggle switches on all this stuff surface imperfections it's all toggleable all controllable roughness normal position scale rotation on everything what more could you ask for I'm sure there's a lot leave a comment down below what you guys want to add to this but the next step here is how to use this in all of your future unreal projects we don't ever want to have to build this from scratch ever again we did did the work let's just do it once be smart and use this in all of our projects moving forward and the easiest way to do that is by making a master material folder you call it whatever you want and put all the stuff that we use to make this master material inside of it that includes the textures of course including the surface imperfection and dirt textures the master material yeah as well as an instance if you want it and the material function don't forget that material function we use that as well to make up our Master material the next thing you want to do the last thing you'll want to do to ensure that we can copy this over without any problems is to make sure that these textures here are the ones we're using inside of our Master material because we copied them over from another place in our project file right so if you notice I click on this normal map and I click down on this here there's two floor one normal 4ks we want to use the one that we just copied into our Standalone Master material folder if you notice the path up top it's coming from pishers Master materials slash textures that's the one we want as opposed to this one which is coming from somewhere else in our Unreal Engine folder structure right so just make sure all of these are coming from the folder that we just made everything is self-sufficient save it and if you rightclick any one of these and we go into show and Explorer it's going to pull up where that's at in our project file folder structure and if we go a couple folders back you can see these folders match the one we have in unreal this is our content folder structure this matches this one: one all right so these are the same and if we go one more back we can see this is our entire project file folder structure you can get to this folder by going to the epic games launcher right clicking your project and show in folder it's going to pull up the same path and what you'll want to do to copy that Master material over to other projects let's say this is a new project this is some other project we want to go to that content browser we want to find our pishers Master material IAL folder and drop it into the content folder of any future project and then you're set you don't have to do this every time you start a new project we got it right here boom just drag and drop all right look now this video is super long I know but it wouldn't be complete if I didn't show you how to use what we just made Let's do what we do best let's make some art so I'm going to show you how to make this smudgy rough metal I'm going to show you how I'm getting these water spots up on top here I'll show you how to do a little Chrome ball and I'll show you how to drop some Textures in and we'll start with this smudged rough metal so I'm just going to go ahead and like wipe it this is default what we set up as our Master material in the beginning I'm going to go ahead and open this up and on the right we have our stuff so let's go down one by one and kind of reset things to how we want it position scale rotation we don't need to worry about that right now the albo we don't want to use the texture we want to enable the base color and I'm going to give it like I don't know just some dark some dark dark metal we'll come back to that and bring it in as we need it it's not metallic though you could check that specular yes we want to enable the base specular all right base specular set to one is good we also want to enable base roughness we're we're not using any texture maps for this base roughness cool the normal map we don't want to use it so I'm going to set that to zero and I believe that's everything for now let's get this metal looking kind of similar to the metal here on the teapot so first thing is I'm going going to bring the brightness down and let's go ahead and bring our roughness to like4 that should give us a nice look there now the surface imperfection that's where this comes in all right so I'm going to toggle the surface imperfection and we have it set to these smudges now the first thing is I want to see something I want to make this really drastic so the first thing the blend I'm going to make sure the blend is set to zero in this case that's full surface imperfection it's not using any of the base roughness and then I want to increase the contrast and the brightness until I start seeing something another thing that is going to stop us from seeing it is the scale right I dropped the contrast down to 0.5 and we're seeing something but it's too big so let's go ahead and adjust our scale until yes we have something now and let's offset it until we find like a bit that looks nice we just want to kind of reduce the intensity of this so let's go ahead and check in Perfection Min and Max and make it a little bit more subtle I'll take the max to like 6 the Min to4 and we can take that brightness back down to.5 and there you go it's super subtle take it back to our wide you don't need to go really intense with it now for this top here with the water spots let's build that out the way I'm going to do that I'll duplicate the material we just made for the actual base of this teapot apply it here and you'll notice it's very different it's not what we want let's double click it and we're going to turn off the surface imperfection we're going to turn on the dirt already you can see we have nice little bootprints on top they're brown but we want to change both of those things we want to change the actual texture map we're using to this water spots texture I have and we also want to change the color to white it's that hard water it's that California hard water it builds up it's elusive the next thing we will want to tweak is probably the scaling so let's go ahead and make it a little bit larger that feels right to me and it's just really intense all right so we can do a couple things we can take the brightness down to 01 we can take the contrast up right so it's just showing the highlights and we can take the max maybe down to5 and that's pretty much it really subtle let me just show you how I'm doing this little Chrome material down here so we'll start from scratch we'll drop our instant on there let's open it up and go down that list again scaling we don't got to worry about albo we want base color and we want that to be white all right we want it to be reflective white metallic yes Chrome is metal let's take it up to one already we're getting close specular let's enable base specular of one exactly the roughness is what's given us this little look here as well as the normal so we want to enable base roughness and set it to zero okay and really close we the last thing we have to do is just get rid of that normal intensity and that is our Chrome we can do the same thing for this brushed Chrome ring around the teapot and just give it a little bit of roughness like 2 or something and you can kind of see how we get that brush metal look so easy as that y'all super simple and all these objects on the right here are photo scans I'll put them up on my patreon for you guys if you want to grab them but they're just made from a diffuse material and a normal map so I'm just going in swapping out these two textures giving it a base roughness a base specular tweaking those nice and that's all there is to it you can do so much more with this you can upgrade this material and for those of you'all who didn't build out the master material with me it's okay I got it for sale I'm running 50% off this week only it'll support more videos like this it'll support the channel I really appreciate it and I'll be updating it as I upgrade my master material and use this thing so any feature requests that you guys have I'll be throwing it in there I want to urge you all to follow what excites you and if Unreal Engine is something you're trying to learn then download it boot it up and check out my other tutorials heck subscribe while you're at it because I make a lot of these Unreal Engine videos I try and make them really easy to follow super chill but most importantly my goal with these is to make you realize you can actually do it it's not as hard as you think if you like this video then you'll like this Forest environment we created together step by step or if you're more into the Dance Club Vibes then I got you step by step over here and I got an Unreal Engine playlist linked below if you want to go even deeper and if you're into weekly art challenges with a like-minded community I got my free Discord link down below as well happy creating youall I'll be seeing you soon peace

look let&#39;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&#39;s going to add value to you as an artist but even though it&#39;s free and ready to be used right now you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;re going to get stuck no matter what program you&#39;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&#39;t be a problem for you anymore we&#39;re going to create one material that&#39;s it a master material that all our other material in instances will spawn from across all our future projects and we&#39;re doing it together step by step in six levels of complexity but look if you&#39;d rather just pick up the master material that we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;all and let&#39;s get to this material but we can&#39;t really understand what we&#39;re about to do if we don&#39;t have a bird&#39;s eyye 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&#39;s a little it&#39;s a little tedious but it&#39;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&#39;ll have full control over and be able to tweak in real time the material instances is what will&#39;ll populate our scene with another reason that we only use instances in our scene is because they&#39;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&#39;re chunky they run really slow they just bog down your system you&#39;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 SL salmon Unreal Engine material metaphors hit me with them in the comments it&#39;s going to help other people wrap their heads around this and I&#39;ll pin my favorite ones at the top so let&#39;s get started with the most basic level one master material setup and to do that we&#39;ll need to make a master material by right-clicking in our content browser and selecting material I&#39;ll call it mm for master material right click it and immediately we&#39;ll create that material instance all right and let&#39;s double click and open our Master material we&#39;re in let&#39;s do this let me just explain what we&#39;re looking at this whole left side of the screen this is our Master material this is we&#39;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&#39;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 control space bar and let&#39;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&#39;s do that we got our normal map this gives our material texture right so you can actually see up here it&#39;s looking like rough concrete really nice we have our color map I&#39;m going to take that RGB and pipe it into base color we&#39;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&#39;s our specular we don&#39;t need to drag the RGB we just need one of these channels it&#39;s a black and white texture so I&#39;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&#39;s what we&#39;re going to do the first thing we&#39;re going to do we&#39;re going to rightclick each one of these and we&#39;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&#39;ll do we want to keep things organized it&#39;s really really important to do that so what we&#39;ll do is we&#39;re going to select all of these textures and under the group I&#39;m just going to type in here textures right and when we save this it&#39;s going to go under the texture category all right and that&#39;s level one but before we move on to level two I got a quick announcement for yall so last month I was selected as a judge in the official Hong Kai star RI 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&#39;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 Hong Kai star rail it&#39;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&#39;re into those mark your calendars and stop by this Friday May 17th but for those those of you who don&#39;t know hongkai star rail is a free-to-play turn-based RPG by the team who brought you genin impact hongkai 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&#39;s time we dive back into these materials so look I&#39;ll catch you guys on Friday May 17th for the Hong Kai 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 normal starting with the color texture so first off let&#39;s just make a little brightness adjustment I&#39;m going to use a multiply node all right so you have all these nodes on the right on your palette I&#39;m just going to be calling them out and hitting you with the little hot key so M if you hold M and left click you&#39;re going to make a multiply node we&#39;ll pipe this in here here right so it&#39;s running through the multiply node and if we hold s and left click that&#39;s going to make what&#39;s called a scalar parameter and a scalar parameter is basically a node that we can adjust in the material instance and we&#39;re going to pipe this in and you&#39;ll notice by default it&#39;s totally dark because our default value is zero we want that to default to one okay and it&#39;s going to look normal like we never plugged it in and if we save it if you look on the right here you&#39;ll see the global scalar parameter values if we check brightness we can adjust our material instance on the Fly that&#39;s working that&#39;s great next let&#39;s do a contrast adjustment so I&#39;ll hold e left click and we get a power node let&#39;s pipe this through right so it&#39;s running through the Chain&#39;s running through let&#39;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&#39;s keep moving forward with a saturation so I&#39;m going to rightclick and it&#39;s actually a desaturation node which means we need to invert this we&#39;re going to use a one minus node hold o left click all right we&#39;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 realtime saturation slider for our material fantastic one last thing to close out the color adjustment or the albo adjustment is a tint all right I want to tint it green red purple blue whatever so we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ll notice that the tint doesn&#39;t pop up in here because this is not a parameter we got to convert it to a parameter and we&#39;ll save and by default we want the color to be white because currently tinting it black just makes it super dark we don&#39;t want that so save and boom there we go but it&#39;s in a different group all right so let&#39;s group our albo adjustments together I&#39;ll select all these and I&#39;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&#39;s grab all of these parameters that we made and type albo and we&#39;ll hit save and look at that they&#39;re in the little albo group now that&#39;s great but what if I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s our uh albo adjustments super fun all right so let&#39;s move on to the specular and the roughness now this is a tutorial we we could copy paste but let&#39;s let&#39;s rep it again guys we&#39;re we&#39;re here to rep it so hold M left click we&#39;re going to multiply this we&#39;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&#39;s dark then we&#39;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&#39;s do a contrast adjustment hold e for a power node let&#39;s pipe this through and let&#39;s hold s again for a scaler parameter with a default of one you guys know it we&#39;ve been here before boom boom let&#39;s go ahead and select everything hit C select our parameters group them under specular and let&#39;s go ahead and save this and there you go boom let&#39;s do it again for the roughness all right so hold M two parameters and hold e again for that power node and we&#39;ll pipe all this in make sure you guys default your stuff if you don&#39;t default your stuff you&#39;ll be getting weird errors hit C again we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ll pipe the RGB there into the flat normal we&#39;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&#39;re going to do is make some switchers that&#39;s going to allow us to toggle back and forth between these textures or just a BAS default color or roughness or specular value so the node that we&#39;re going to use to switch between our albo texture or just a base color is called a static switch parameter if it&#39;s set to True right so we want a constant 3 Vector we&#39;re going to rightclick it and convert it to a parameter let&#39;s default it to White and that goes to true all right but by default I don&#39;t want it to be a base color I want it to be my actual texture all right so we&#39;re going to pipe this into false we&#39;ll pipe this into base color and by default the default value is unchecked the default value is false let&#39;s go ahead and group our switch parameter we&#39;ll pipe that into albo we&#39;ll pipe our base color also into the albo section so if we save we have this enable base color check boox and if I check that it&#39;s going to forget everything else and it&#39;s going to go the true route cuz I checked it it&#39;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&#39;s looking super cool I love that but one other thing I want to take this enable based color and put it up at the top let&#39;s take this uh static switch parameter take that sort priority and just change it to zero and it&#39;s going to go up to the top let&#39;s go ahead and include this in our little setup here that&#39;s great here&#39;s another little tip you can take this little Pi whip here and reroute it so it&#39;s called a reroute node just to clean things up right I&#39;m OCD about all this stuff so you&#39;ll probably see me doing that a lot all right let&#39;s do the same thing with specular and roughness so let&#39;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&#39;s unchecked it&#39;s it&#39;s working how we want it to work all right but but it&#39;s erroring us out because it needs the true we&#39;re going to hold s and left click with a default value of one which will pipe into true and let&#39;s go ahead and select both of these and make sure they&#39;re in the right group and make sure enable base specular sort priority is zero that way when we save it&#39;s at the top we can check it and we can just give our material a base specular it&#39;s not using the texture anymore it&#39;s just using just a a a 0er to one value next up we&#39;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&#39;ll default it to 0. five pipe that into true hit save let&#39;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&#39;s base roughness we&#39;ll check that we can see it works it&#39;s not using the texture it&#39;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&#39;s maybe that&#39;s what you need again we&#39;re trying to give ourselves the largest variety of materials from this one master material okay and here we&#39;ll do you one extra let&#39;s right click the metallic parameter let&#39;s promote that to a parameter and we&#39;re going to put it in its own group metallic and the default will be zero cuz I don&#39;t want stuff to be super Metal by default but let&#39;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&#39;s level three complete time to level up to level four we&#39;re going to give ourselves some position scale and rotation control over these textures and the reason it&#39;s level four is because we&#39;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&#39;s get started control spacebar gets us into our little browser here I&#39;ll rightclick go to material and grab that material function bam get up in here we see we got nothing we&#39;re going to basically make some cool stuff pipe it into here with nothing selected let&#39;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&#39;s right there we got this little node it&#39;s doing nothing but it&#39;s eventually going to go into all these little UV slots here and we&#39;re going to have all these fun little parameters like this but for scale position rotation all that good stuff right so let&#39;s double click this and hop back in and start building let&#39;s start with a texture coordinate node I&#39;m going to hold U and left click for that it&#39;s the first thing that we&#39;re going to need to make any of this stuff work let&#39;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&#39;s called a custom Rotator rotation Center we don&#39;t have to mess with it we just need to bring this out to a divide node and then we&#39;re going to use something a little different we&#39;ve been using the scaler parameters by holding s and left clicking but we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s called an function input we&#39;ll select it we&#39;ll call it rotation and we&#39;ll pipe it into the A and the B is going to divide we&#39;re going to divide by - 360 which is going to allow us to just use this in a reasonable way with we&#39;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&#39;s okay look so it&#39;s like not a value it&#39;s a color so we&#39;re going to go back in we&#39;re going to take this input rotation we have all these different modes that this can be we chose that Vector 3 we&#39;ve used it for tint we&#39;ve used it for base color we just want it to be a scaler all right that&#39;s it so we&#39;ll save it it&#39;ll update let&#39;s pipe this in and I&#39;ll show you how this works and um then we&#39;ll build out the rest of it boom we have a rotation let&#39;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&#39;s go to a cube so we can kind of get a better look at this and you see it&#39;s rotating from the middle fantastic it&#39;s exactly what we want let&#39;s build out the rest of this thing let&#39;s go back to the material function let&#39;s do scale next so we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;m going to pull up a penned Vector node pipe that into A and B drop that in there and you know we&#39;re clean around here so we&#39;re going to hit C scale save this and you&#39;ll see we have V tiling U tiling V tiling looking nice up in there cleanliness orderwise let&#39;s get our priorities straight all right one and we&#39;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&#39;re going to build out now hold a left click that&#39;s our ad all right we&#39;re going to do the same thing we&#39;re going to copy this paste it drop it into B pop it into the output we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;re looking good all right so let&#39;s go ahead and promote all of these to parameters awesome and by default you&#39;ll notice look it is just a gray blob it&#39;s not our material anymore that&#39;s because our unv tiling is set to zero our scale is set to zero so I&#39;m going to just set that back to one which will bring us back to a normal look in material let&#39;s make sure all of these are grouped in that PSR group I&#39;m going to grab all this we&#39;ll call this PSR yall know the deal let&#39;s go down the line and let&#39;s get the sort priority going so tiling we&#39;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&#39;re on our way y&#39;all we&#39;re on our way we&#39;re going to use this position scale rotation material function a couple more times because we&#39;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 up your little browser here and we&#39;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&#39;d like so I&#39;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&#39;s get a better look at what this is doing so the best way for me is I&#39;ll make a chrome ball enable base color set it to White that&#39;s great base metallic we&#39;ll set to one let&#39;s drop the normal intensity down to zero so there we go we got a nice little Chrome ball with surface imperfection 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&#39;ll rightclick this convert it to a parameter and let&#39;s go ahead and group it in its own category surface imperfections sweet we&#39;ll save and we have our little surface imperfection group that we&#39;re going to be adding to this so the first thing we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s go ahead and group this yall know where we&#39;re at surface imperfections save it out and let&#39;s get a better look at what&#39;s going on here so for me I love to lower the contrast so 0.5 you&#39;re going to see uh a lot more of this thing if I pipe this into the base color you&#39;ll get an idea of what we&#39;re looking at the black values are shiny and the white values are rough all right but by lowering the cont contrast we&#39;re kind of making the effect more apparent we&#39;re getting more smudge by making it a little bit brighter I guess you could say so that&#39;s kind of what it&#39;s doing if you guys ever want to know what the heck you&#39;re working with plug any texture into the base color and you&#39;ll kind of get a better sense of what&#39;s going on right so that&#39;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 smudi point of this material to be half as much well that&#39;s our next little adjustment so we&#39;re going to make what&#39;s called a lurp and aurp is basically like a mix node or a mix RGB node I&#39;m going to hold L and left click it&#39;s really simple it&#39;s just blending between two different things via a number value or in this case our texture so we&#39;re going to plug this texture in and we&#39;re going to give ourselves A Min and Max so I&#39;ll make two here it&#39;ll be a minimum of zero and an imperfection Max of one and by default if I plug these in the max into B the Min into a and we plug all of this into roughness and save it we should get the exact same thing perfect right so we&#39;re at that default value let&#39;s group these and if we toggle them and I take that Max down to 0.5 it&#39;s it&#39;s not really like adjusting brightness it&#39;s actually bringing the ceiling down by half so whatever&#39;s white is now 50% gray I can bring up the floor too so like if we want to say we just want this by default to be at least 2 rough it&#39;s going to be point2 rough we can bring that that ceiling back up to one right and you guys can kind of see here we have more control over our surface imperfections let&#39;s take it one step further and I&#39;m going to show you how to blend between this surface imperfection we set up and the roughness texture here cuz what if we want both at the same time I&#39;m going to use use that static switch parameter again and if we just go into true for the surface imperfection false to the normal roughness kind of setup that we we got going and plug all that into roughness and we save this then by default it&#39;s going to be the roughness texture that we plugged in for our material let&#39;s go ahead and group this into surface imperfections and we have this enable surface imperfections toggle box now so if I click that it&#39;s going to switch over to our smudges but we want both at the same time with a control slider of how much of each we&#39;re going to use this lurp node once again in order to do that L left click and we want to blend between these right so let&#39;s say a is our surface imperfection we want to blend between a we also want to blend between the roughness okay that&#39;ll go into B and all of this will go into true and how are we going to blend between these with a slider so I&#39;m just going to right click this Alpha promote remote it to a parameter and I&#39;m going to go ahead and add it to our surface imperfection group and by default we&#39;re going to blend by5 so that just means we&#39;re going to have half of our surface imperfection half of our roughness and I&#39;m going to group all of this into its own category surface imperfection blend now if I did this right we can save and we&#39;ll check the blend box and I should be able to blend between there you go one or the other so now we have the power in our hands we can go between both call it 0. five by default and we&#39;re getting the Best of Both Worlds amazing the last thing I&#39;m going to do to wrap out level five is give ourselves another position scale rotation control over this surface imperfection cuz I want to be able to make the smudges smaller separate from the texture since we made that material function all we have to do is look up that material function fun PSR and we can use the same guy and plug this into our surface imperfection I&#39;ll promote all of these to parameters and name them something different than this okay cuz if I name them the same as this these will be linked and we don&#39;t want that we want them to be separate so I&#39;ll name it like imperfection tiling imperfection offset and just remember by default you want to set the tiling to one because otherwise it&#39;s going to be so small that you can&#39;t even see it and lastly we&#39;ll want to make sure our order is correct so I&#39;m going to do tiling as one and two offset as three and four and rotation at the end put them in the surface imperfection category save this and we have all of this here now we can order this however we want so if we want to have the enable surface imperfection at the top which I do I&#39;m going to go ahead and grab this and sort priority zero make sure things are in order so if we save this you can see we have enable surface imperfections at the top right so we can turn this on turn it off we have our imperfection texture as number two we have the rest of our controls so that&#39;s surface imperfections we&#39;ve reached level six look at what we&#39;ve built so far this is crazy and and it even goes further in these material functions too like you guys are killing it leave a comment down below if you guys made it to this point or if you&#39;re just following along we&#39;re on on to level six adding dirt over top of our albo and the best way to get started with that is once again A texture so I&#39;m going to go back to my Surface imperfections and I&#39;m going to grab let&#39;s say these Footprints all right and the best way to kind of get this set up here is again with a lurp I&#39;m going to hold L left click and bring up that lurp all right we want to blend between two different things we want to blend our actual texture here that we&#39; set up our albo texture and we want to blend between some dirt and the best way and the easiest way to grab some dirt is to just hold three and left click grab that constant 3 vector and pipe that color into B I&#39;m going to rightclick this we&#39;re going to convert it to a parameter and we&#39;ll just grab some brown or something like this as default all right and we&#39;re going to mix between these two textures with this surface imperfection and we can rightclick this of course and let&#39;s plug this into a dirt category so let&#39;s grab this type dirt same deal here we&#39;ll pop this into dirt and if we plug this lurp into base color and save we&#39;re going to get this dirt category and there&#39;ll be some dirt over top of our texture now we want all the same controls in this dirt texture that we had set up for our surface imperfection so by this point y&#39;all let&#39;s see if um you know the answer I&#39;m just going to go for it and uh hopefully you guys can match me by the end let&#39;s do a [Music] brightness all right got that that default value of one and we&#39;ll plug it into the dirt group let&#39;s do contrast [Music] [Music] next same deal make sure it&#39;s in the group good stuff you all made it this far sweet all right let&#39;s get that Min and Max set up with the lurp right so since this is new I&#39;ll hit you with this hold L left click we&#39;re going to be blending between a Min and max value with our Alpha here with this texture plugged into Alpha that&#39;s going to go into that one and then we have our Min and Max so holding s left click dirt Max with a default of One Max goes into B Min goes into a make sure these are in the right group and let&#39;s C clean it up this is going to be our dirt and then let&#39;s go ahead and make sure our order is all good here and then of course we want to be able to toggle the dirt on and off so we&#39;re going to do that again with a static switch parameter enable dirt great this will be grouped in the dirt group and if it&#39;s true if we are enabling the dirt we&#39;re going to want to pipe this in this lurp the end of our chain into true and this will go into the base color if it&#39;s false if it&#39;s just the texture we want and no dirt we&#39;re going to come out of this uh this texture here our albo into false and by default it&#39;s false so if we save this it goes back to normal and when we enable dirt the dirt is added on top and we can change this texture say for um I have like water spots or something right bunch of water spots and we can change the contrast of this to bring a bit more of this out we can get the brightness going and I think the last thing we got to do is add our position scale rotation values to the dirt texture itself right click we want that material function position scale rotation get this all lined up like we&#39;ve done and pipe it into the UVS make sure your order is all correct right with the sort priority and that&#39;s all good to go all right but now that we have this all built out okay we we have our albo we have our dirt all with the controls we got specular with toggle switches on all this stuff surface imperfections it&#39;s all toggleable all controllable roughness normal position scale rotation on everything what more could you ask for I&#39;m sure there&#39;s a lot leave a comment down below what you guys want to add to this but the next step here is how to use this in all of your future unreal projects we don&#39;t ever want to have to build this from scratch ever again we did did the work let&#39;s just do it once be smart and use this in all of our projects moving forward and the easiest way to do that is by making a master material folder you call it whatever you want and put all the stuff that we use to make this master material inside of it that includes the textures of course including the surface imperfection and dirt textures the master material yeah as well as an instance if you want it and the material function don&#39;t forget that material function we use that as well to make up our Master material the next thing you want to do the last thing you&#39;ll want to do to ensure that we can copy this over without any problems is to make sure that these textures here are the ones we&#39;re using inside of our Master material because we copied them over from another place in our project file right so if you notice I click on this normal map and I click down on this here there&#39;s two floor one normal 4ks we want to use the one that we just copied into our Standalone Master material folder if you notice the path up top it&#39;s coming from pishers Master materials slash textures that&#39;s the one we want as opposed to this one which is coming from somewhere else in our Unreal Engine folder structure right so just make sure all of these are coming from the folder that we just made everything is self-sufficient save it and if you rightclick any one of these and we go into show and Explorer it&#39;s going to pull up where that&#39;s at in our project file folder structure and if we go a couple folders back you can see these folders match the one we have in unreal this is our content folder structure this matches this one: one all right so these are the same and if we go one more back we can see this is our entire project file folder structure you can get to this folder by going to the epic games launcher right clicking your project and show in folder it&#39;s going to pull up the same path and what you&#39;ll want to do to copy that Master material over to other projects let&#39;s say this is a new project this is some other project we want to go to that content browser we want to find our pishers Master material IAL folder and drop it into the content folder of any future project and then you&#39;re set you don&#39;t have to do this every time you start a new project we got it right here boom just drag and drop all right look now this video is super long I know but it wouldn&#39;t be complete if I didn&#39;t show you how to use what we just made Let&#39;s do what we do best let&#39;s make some art so I&#39;m going to show you how to make this smudgy rough metal I&#39;m going to show you how I&#39;m getting these water spots up on top here I&#39;ll show you how to do a little Chrome ball and I&#39;ll show you how to drop some Textures in and we&#39;ll start with this smudged rough metal so I&#39;m just going to go ahead and like wipe it this is default what we set up as our Master material in the beginning I&#39;m going to go ahead and open this up and on the right we have our stuff so let&#39;s go down one by one and kind of reset things to how we want it position scale rotation we don&#39;t need to worry about that right now the albo we don&#39;t want to use the texture we want to enable the base color and I&#39;m going to give it like I don&#39;t know just some dark some dark dark metal we&#39;ll come back to that and bring it in as we need it it&#39;s not metallic though you could check that specular yes we want to enable the base specular all right base specular set to one is good we also want to enable base roughness we&#39;re we&#39;re not using any texture maps for this base roughness cool the normal map we don&#39;t want to use it so I&#39;m going to set that to zero and I believe that&#39;s everything for now let&#39;s get this metal looking kind of similar to the metal here on the teapot so first thing is I&#39;m going going to bring the brightness down and let&#39;s go ahead and bring our roughness to like4 that should give us a nice look there now the surface imperfection that&#39;s where this comes in all right so I&#39;m going to toggle the surface imperfection and we have it set to these smudges now the first thing is I want to see something I want to make this really drastic so the first thing the blend I&#39;m going to make sure the blend is set to zero in this case that&#39;s full surface imperfection it&#39;s not using any of the base roughness and then I want to increase the contrast and the brightness until I start seeing something another thing that is going to stop us from seeing it is the scale right I dropped the contrast down to 0.5 and we&#39;re seeing something but it&#39;s too big so let&#39;s go ahead and adjust our scale until yes we have something now and let&#39;s offset it until we find like a bit that looks nice we just want to kind of reduce the intensity of this so let&#39;s go ahead and check in Perfection Min and Max and make it a little bit more subtle I&#39;ll take the max to like 6 the Min to4 and we can take that brightness back down to.5 and there you go it&#39;s super subtle take it back to our wide you don&#39;t need to go really intense with it now for this top here with the water spots let&#39;s build that out the way I&#39;m going to do that I&#39;ll duplicate the material we just made for the actual base of this teapot apply it here and you&#39;ll notice it&#39;s very different it&#39;s not what we want let&#39;s double click it and we&#39;re going to turn off the surface imperfection we&#39;re going to turn on the dirt already you can see we have nice little bootprints on top they&#39;re brown but we want to change both of those things we want to change the actual texture map we&#39;re using to this water spots texture I have and we also want to change the color to white it&#39;s that hard water it&#39;s that California hard water it builds up it&#39;s elusive the next thing we will want to tweak is probably the scaling so let&#39;s go ahead and make it a little bit larger that feels right to me and it&#39;s just really intense all right so we can do a couple things we can take the brightness down to 01 we can take the contrast up right so it&#39;s just showing the highlights and we can take the max maybe down to5 and that&#39;s pretty much it really subtle let me just show you how I&#39;m doing this little Chrome material down here so we&#39;ll start from scratch we&#39;ll drop our instant on there let&#39;s open it up and go down that list again scaling we don&#39;t got to worry about albo we want base color and we want that to be white all right we want it to be reflective white metallic yes Chrome is metal let&#39;s take it up to one already we&#39;re getting close specular let&#39;s enable base specular of one exactly the roughness is what&#39;s given us this little look here as well as the normal so we want to enable base roughness and set it to zero okay and really close we the last thing we have to do is just get rid of that normal intensity and that is our Chrome we can do the same thing for this brushed Chrome ring around the teapot and just give it a little bit of roughness like 2 or something and you can kind of see how we get that brush metal look so easy as that y&#39;all super simple and all these objects on the right here are photo scans I&#39;ll put them up on my patreon for you guys if you want to grab them but they&#39;re just made from a diffuse material and a normal map so I&#39;m just going in swapping out these two textures giving it a base roughness a base specular tweaking those nice and that&#39;s all there is to it you can do so much more with this you can upgrade this material and for those of you&#39;all who didn&#39;t build out the master material with me it&#39;s okay I got it for sale I&#39;m running 50% off this week only it&#39;ll support more videos like this it&#39;ll support the channel I really appreciate it and I&#39;ll be updating it as I upgrade my master material and use this thing so any feature requests that you guys have I&#39;ll be throwing it in there I want to urge you all to follow what excites you and if Unreal Engine is something you&#39;re trying to learn then download it boot it up and check out my other tutorials heck subscribe while you&#39;re at it because I make a lot of these Unreal Engine videos I try and make them really easy to follow super chill but most importantly my goal with these is to make you realize you can actually do it it&#39;s not as hard as you think if you like this video then you&#39;ll like this Forest environment we created together step by step or if you&#39;re more into the Dance Club Vibes then I got you step by step over here and I got an Unreal Engine playlist linked below if you want to go even deeper and if you&#39;re into weekly art challenges with a like-minded community I got my free Discord link down below as well happy creating youall I&#39;ll be seeing you soon peace

Transcript for:Unreal Engine: Master Materials in 6 Levels

Transcript for:
Unreal Engine: Master Materials in 6 Levels