Unlocking the Unreal Engine Material Editor
What you'll learn
- Create practical materials based on real world uses for shaders within a game environment
- Learn the techniques and design philosophy behind materials and shaders for AAA game development
- Understand how to use color data in complex ways to create breathtaking effects for your materials
Requirements
- You should be able to use a computer, including file explorer navigation and common shortcuts like copy/paste
- You should have a computer capable of running Unreal Engine
- To follow along, it is recommended that you have Unreal Engine 4.20.3 or later
- You should be familiar with the basics of Unreal Engine (How to navigate between tabs, how to navigate the 3d-viewport, how to assign materials to objects, etc.)
Description
Find out the tricks and techniques to create complex, high quality shader effects for your games!
This course will teach you how to create advanced materials and shaders using PRACTICAL REAL WORLD examples!
The power of materials in a game environment is often severely underestimated. Many complex effects like animated grass, parallax shading, light absorption, and more are achieved with only an object's material and not with any complicated scripts. Good materials and shaders are becoming an ever more important facet of a game's overall look and node based shader networks are the industry standard for creating them. The Unreal Engine material editor is one of the best on the market.
This course will teach you how to use this powerful tool
Being a good material artist is all about understanding how to manipulate textures using math operations and information from the 3d-world. There is a special design philosophy that surrounds node based shader networks and it requires a new way of thinking about color and value and how they all interact. This is not only true of the Unreal material editor, but of nearly ALL node based shader editors. Meaning that you can use the techniques taught in this course in many different software applications! By the end of this course, this design ethos will be second-nature to you.
Learn by DOING
This course is divided into several projects. Each is intended to teach you a new powerful technique for creating materials. For each material, we'll go step-by-step through each node, what it does, and why it's used. By the end, YOU will make a collection of high quality materials that you can build off of for your own games!
Downloadable project files to help you follow along
This course includes a .zip file which can be extracted into an Unreal project directory. Within the project, you'll find all of the textures, meshes, landscapes, and map files that are used with each lesson so you can follow along from any starting point! This directory even includes all of the exact materials that I made during the curriculum's production so you can dive in and see how they were made or even modify them to create something new.
This course will cover:
The fundamentals of the Unreal Engine material editor
The differences between textures and materials
How to use information about an object like its position, rotation, and proximity to other objects to affect the material
How to combine colors and values using simple math operations to have total control over the material's look
How to create your own custom material functions
Get a Certificate of Completion when you finish the course!
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Who this course is for:
- Anyone who wants to learn about material creation in Unreal Engine 4, no matter their experience level
- People who want to learn tips and techniques for creating more advanced materials that can achieve a myriad of visual effects
- People who want to learn how to use node based shader networks both in Unreal and in other software like Unity, Blender, and Maya
Instructor
![Timothy Trankle](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 4.5 Instructor Rating
- 2,024 Reviews
- 22,147 Students
- 5 Courses
Hello, my name is Tim. The simplest way to put this is that I like making games. So much so that I've delved into every aspect of their creation from art and animation to programming and sound. If I had to narrow it down though, my biggest passions within this field are 3d modeling and FX animation.
I studied Digital Arts at Chapman University and I'm honored to have won the "Best Art" award from the IEEE GameSIG competition two years in a row. As a freelancer, I enjoy working on a wide variety of projects. From small indie teams to multi-million dollar foreign companies, I love it all and look forward to the challenges and experience that each has to offer. Most recently, I developed a VR experience to show off an AI program at a technology conference in South Korea. It was an amazing experience that helped me practice doing more abstract art styles as opposed to my usual realistic models and effects.
During the summers, I teach at a company called Digital Media Academy (DMA) where I teach topics like VFX, 3d modeling, and game development to high school students. The courses there are pretty fast paced because we have to compress about a college course's worth of curriculum into a one week bootcamp. Thankfully, this means that I now know how to compress and distill new ideas and techniques to their most crucial components so that YOU can learn them as fast as possible and get on the road to creating your own amazing games, models, and effects.