Don't underestimate the importance of learning Materials in Unreal Engine 5
Environment creation in Unreal Engine 5 covers a wide range of different topics: world building, modeling, lightning and many other disciplines combined. But if you had to choose which discipline to focus on to improve the quality of your scenes I would advise you to go for Materials.
When I was working at Ubisoft I learnt a valuable lesson. It doesn't matter how good looking the model is, if the materials and textures are wrong, it's never going to look right. My art lead told me something I never forgot: "Materials and textures cover 70% of the visual quality of your game", and she was right.
I will teach you all the necessary knowledge to start creating Materials for environments in Unreal Engine 5. After finishing this course you will have a solid understanding on how to make your environments look better, while increasing the performance of your project and saving time.
Understand Physical Based Rendering
We will start by showing you what is physically based rendering and why its important to understand it to create different types of surfaces in the future.
Learn the most important nodes
The number of nodes available for you can overwhelm you. We will simplify the process by teaching you the most important operation nodes that you will use everytime no matter which material you are working on.
Create a library of Material Functions
Functions in Materials are incredibly powerful and allow you to reuse complex networks in different situations so that you are able to add more features without making it more complicated.
Learn Height Blending techqniues
Height blending is the standard in the game industry to increase the quality of your materials by blending different types of surfaces. We will explore all the different height blending and vertex painting options available so you understand which tools to use in the future.
Learn UV Mapping Manipulation techniques
You will learn how to manipulate the scale of UVs using different industry standard techniques.
Understand Optimization using Materials
The biggest bottleneck in performance for most game projects is related to Material complexity and textures. You will learn how you can optimize your games using Materials and use industry standard practices to ensure your project not only looks beautiful but also is performance friendly.
Your instructor
Mao is a professional 3D artist for video games who has worked on Ubisoft where he contributed to titles like Skull and Bones and Immortal Fenyx Rising - Myths of the Eastern Realm. He is also an Unreal Authorized Instructor for Epic Games.
Curriculum
- 1. Introduction to Materials in UE5 (1:04)
- 2. What are Materials (1:51)
- 3. Creating your first Material (4:32)
- 4. Understanding PBR (6:38)
- 5. Using Textures (7:39)
- 6. Multiply and Lerp Nodes (6:44)
- 7. Add and Clamp Nodes (3:36)
- 8. Material Instances (5:51)
- 9. How to import textures from Fab (3:17)
- 10. How to combine Texture channels (4:02)
- 11. Creating the Rock Master Material (5:49)
- 12. Adding Texture Color controls (5:12)
- 13. Creating our first function (8:22)
- 14. Using Static Switch Parameters (9:33)
- 15. Changing the Normal map intensity (7:23)
- 16. Blending Between 2 Materials (7:52)
- 17 Creating a function for our Simple Material (10:37)
- 18. Blending with Vertex Colors (6:13)
- 19. Introduction to height Contrast (11:57)
- 20. Using the HeightLerp node (3:33)
- 21. Using World Aligned Textures (5:07)
- 22. Adding Global color tint (8:10)
- 23. Adding the moss Material (5:51)
- 24. Creating the Slope Mask (7:56)
- 25. Vertex Painting on Nanite meshes (5:29)
- 26. Updating the Texture Tiling (3:23)
- 27. Object scale tiling (5:17)
- 28. Adding the Object Scale tiling to our function (5:15)
- 29. Updating the textures with new parameters (6:16)
- 30. Memory usage (4:57)
- 31. Wrap up (1:47)