From the course: Unreal Essential Training (2019)

Material Editor - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Essential Training (2019)

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Material Editor

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- [Narrator] Materials have a big role to play in the look and feel of your projects. They really make a difference between just okay and incredible and they go hand in hand with lighting. So make sure you have a decent light setup before fine tuning your materials. Ideally, you'll go back and forth adjusting both as you go. Let's take a look at what makes them material and Unreal Engine four, and how you can start using them to bring your projects to life. First, let's find the material in the Content Browser and double click to open it up. You'll notice some familiar panels from the other editors. We have a toolbar, the Details panel, and a preview window to act as our viewport. The palette over here contains every function or parameter that applies to the materials, all searchable. When you find what you're looking for, simply drag and drop it into the graph. That brings us to the graph editor. Here is where you'll lay out the instructions for your materials in a visual node network. Like this. Sometimes it's a bit more organized as well. To move around and interact with this environment, there are a few controls to know. The scroll wheel zooms in and out to control the scope and detail of what you see. You may notice some nodes or other markers, resizing automatically to compensate, right clicking summons the palette, similar to the panel over here. You can search and scroll through and navigate as well. And simply click on a function to drop it in the scene. Right clicking and dragging hands the graph editor around. This will allow you to focus what you're working on. And left click selects. Left click and drag is a marquee select so you can grab multiple assets at once and 'C' on the keyboard creates a comment box. Similar the one that I've created around this already. You can use this to group similar functions to make it easier to navigate your materials. Simply double click in the top panel or head over to details and type in the name that you want. You can also left click and drag on one of these handles to place a new node. Notice this wire that's hanging off. This allows you to plug into different nodes and pass information between them. Notice how if you let go of the wire in empty space, it'll bring up the palette automatically. And if you select one of these options, it will plug it in for you. This is part of the content awareness of the palette. And it will only make suggestions that are relevant to the node that you're plugging in. Ultimately, the goal is to wire up nodes like these to pass instructions or data through a chain leading to this result node for your final value. It's hard to believe that all these wires feed into a handful of parameters that can describe just about any material you can imagine. Now it may seem messy or complicated, but there is a straightforward way to break it all down and make sense of it with the material properties.

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