Introduction

This lesson was about creating materials in Unreal Engine 5 using a node-tree. Materials in Unreal are the equivalent of shaders in Maya.

Creating a basic material

To start, I added a basic prop to the scene that I could apply my materials to. I opened the content browser, navigated to the ‘startercontent’ folder, then the props folder and added the SM_MatPreviewMesh_02 prop.

I then created a new folder in my personal folder and named it ‘Materials’

I right clicked to create a material.

Named it ‘m_matpractise’.

open material editor by double clicking

(pbr texture system)

create colour node (constant 3 vector) by press and hold 3 and click

change it to a colour

add the node to the colour socket

constants (scalar node) are used to control roughness, specular and metallic on a material

right click search for constant

on left of screen change material expression constant to 1 and plug into metallic

the metallic look will be better when combined with specular and roughness

add a constant with 1 to specular

add a constant with 0 to roughness

creating material instance

right click on material and create material instance

drag to apply material instance to model

creating a glowing material

instead of connecting colour node to base colour, connect it to emissive colour, and use a multiply node to increase its luminance.

multiplier nodes are created by holding M and left clicking. they are used to connect one or multiple additional nodes into one when there is already one node connected to it

you can also right click and search for an M or *.

Change the material expression multiply to a higher number and save.

to add image as textures

right click search for texturesample

texturesample allows to import a png as a material

And this is a video of the moving texture.