Check out the Honkai: Star Rail 3D Challenge here: hoyo.link/8sEiFBAL --- MATERIAL VERISON UPDATES AND WISHLIST: v3 RELEASED: - added snow/dust layer controls - redesigned the normal map node structure - added "color correction" dropdowns for anything that uses (brightness, contrast, saturation, min/max) - disabled unneeded plugins from UE project file - added switchers & controls to use textures for metallic, opacity and emissive (with placeholder black_solid in the texture slot) - using the terminology "scale" as opposed to "tiling" as it's more accurate. WISHLIST: -realtime edge and recesses matte (curvature map) -option for packed textures (ORM, ORDp, etc.) -displacement -named reroutes -world aligned node for meshes w/o UV's.
This was such a well presented and useful tutorial that has really inspired me. The step by step journey you are take us on is so approachable and gives a practical insight into materials. Would really love a new video to cover these new features as level 7 and beyond!
Thanks for this great video. Perhaps on a bit more advanced topic, my only request would be to include some love for glass materials. This is very important for architectural work. For example: 1) TINTED GLASS - Most glass has varying degrees of iron, giving it a green tint. It's more visible the thicker the glass is. Other glass is purposefully coloured. 2) REFLECTIVE GLASS - Has a thin layer of metallic or metallic oxide coating making it more reflective 3) DICHROIC GLASS - Can display multiple different colors depending on lighting conditions. (Maybe Substrate materials will be more capable of this) 4) TEXTURED GLASS - Displaced surface (Best seen with proper refractive ray tracing, which Lumen is still limited with)
Watched the whole thing, great explanation! Some good suggestion already in the comments: I would suggest generally using a few more functions to clean up your master, adding detail normal (u can use BlendAngleCorrectedNormals node for that), adding a texture slot for metallic. Also I would suggest you to look into some blend nodes for combining your imperfections (blend_screen for example). You could also add some blank texture samplers for when you need to swap your Shading model, or use different masters for each. Another great organisation tip is using named reroutes. Small but very useful workflow tips: - toggle "hide unrelated" at the top of the graph, makes working on large materials a lot more managable. - press q when having nodes selected to straighten the connection! For more advanced stuff, you can make your own shader using Material Attributes (Layered Materials). Also for anything shader related, Ben Cloward here on youtube is the best teacher!
so helpful clint. i’ve recently been hired as an unreal artist for a commercial studio and thought that my knowledge in blender would transfer over and it definitely hasn’t been as easy, especially with the the way materials are set up. the material instance feature alone is different enough that needed its own understanding. super dope vid
@lordnaps Which studio? I am also looking for start to career as Unreal engine artist. Is there remote job ? Can you share details like website or LinkedIn profile
30 minutes took me 4 hours to practice it in UE, keep it up, this is the best Material video I have watched in years, thank you for connecting with us and sharing the struggle at the beginning of the video.
I watched hours of tutorials about materials before finding this one, but this is the one I wish I had watched first. Outstanding job of presenting a logical progression of building up a basic master material with useful properties.
I've been watching you since the beginning of Corridor Digital. And if it wasn't for your 3D tutorials like these or showcasing of your guys' amazing skills through your short films, I wouldn't have a career in the industry. Thank you so much Clint and praying for your continued success always.
Nice start for a master material! Instead of migrating, though, I would recommend making your own plugin (which is super easy to do) and place your master material plus the necessary assets into your plugin and you're good to go. All you'd need to do is enable the plugin in whichever project you're working in. I do this with my own game development work and it's a great way to keep your custom library of tools in one easy to reach place.
@@HR-zg9cinot in the editor now but off the top of my head go into edit (top title bar menu) and click plugins. There should be a plus icon somewhere in the plugin menu that says add or new. Select content only, name your plugin (master material, etc) enter an author if you'd like and then hit create. Then it should create a new folder in your projects plugin folder under the name that you called the new plugin. Then you want to either migrate or copy your content (in this case master material) into that folder. Migrate is great if your content has a lot of dependencies/references since you can see/select what is essential to the content. If it's checked. It's an essential reference but you can uncheck if you know how to fix the unhanded/missing reference and want to reduce the size of the plugin. In the case of a master material you'd want to migrate the material itself as well as all texture assets that are used in the base (instance textures don't matter unless you want to migrate those instances too) Then you want to go back to the plugin menu window where you made the plugin, go to your list of plugins and find yours. With your plugin selected there should be a package plugin button. This will pack everything into a folder inside the directory of your choice. You can select your unreal engine install directories' plug-in folder so your plug-in will be available in any project that uses that engine version. Usually UE_(engine version)/engine/plugins. Or you could pack into any folder of your choosing and copy it into any project you need it for (takes up more space than having in engine plugins because of duplicates but it's your choice. Sorry, long response and not the greatest explanation but I'm pretty sure I covered everything. I'll check and edit when I can. This is what I do and it works well. Kinda annoying to set up but can save a lot of time and make things easier later so you don't have to migrate every time you need the same content in a different project
@@LucydDev Thank you so much for your detailed and thorough explanation! I really appreciate the time and effort you took to share everything so clearly. As soon as I find the time to try it out, I’ll let you know how it goes!
When rotating normal map UVs, you also need to rotate your normal map vectors. Example : normal map value of (x=1, y=0) vector is pointing right. If the UVs are rotated 90° CW it should now point down. However the value is still the same (1, 0), it needs to be rotated to be (0,1).
Great tutorial, well explained. I think the other things key to a "Master Materal' would be to have nanite displacement controls (for 5.3 onwards displacement is back) + alpha controls for masked materials. Would also be interesting to have a switch for transparent materials (not supported by nanite), so one could still use the same master material, but switch when you need a transparent material. Also material blending controls to remove tiling etc would be very useful. Keep up the good work
Now this is the type of vids I love as someone who hasn't touched any real work with this stuff just enjoy the content made about it. No video has made me want to begin working with this stuff then these. I hope the vid does well I know I'm sharing it around so I can see a lot more of this content :D Love it keep it up :)
Hey, great tutorial and a good starting point. I won't suggest new features as you are likely gonna add many in the future, but I think it is worth mentioning that it is generally better to have your power (contrast) nodes before your multiply ones. You can achieve the same results either way, but if you have modified the contrast, then the multiply will have a different impact (as the contrast turns linear changes into exponential changes) and it might be really finicky to get it right sometimes. On the other hand, if you swap them the multiply will always behave linearly and will be easier to control, as it is affecting the result of the power node. Keep the great job! It's always nice to see your content
Thank you so much. I've seen so many beginner unreal tutorials that tell you to use material instances, but none of them ever explained the performance benefits! I always thought it seemed like a lot of effort to go through just so you could see changes without clicking compile. Now I know better. Thanks Clint.
What is in this wideo about performance is not true. Yes- changing MI vs MM settings will be slower on MM because master is where the actual code is and it needs to recompile while saving, but MIs inherit the code so no recompiling. I was facepalming so hard my head hurt. Using MIs is a memory thing and a matter of convenience. Let say you have 2 assets, and you want them to use the same textures but different tiling. You DON'T want to use 2 different materials where the dif is only a tiling. UE doesn't know they are almost identical and it will keep both in memory. When using the same material with two different Mis, you will have just one code with parameters in memory. Its like building one slow blender for some gentle preparation and another very fast for liquefying something vs one blender with multiple speeds. Its faster in use and takes less space ;)
I fucking love you sir. I was digging the tutorial for the first three parts and then part four I was like "okay this is what I came here for" and it just got better and better as it went. I also love that by step six you were like "okay, they've done this enough times, let's see if they have truly learned what I've been teaching them". I've been dabbling in UE5 on and off for a few months now and this video kept getting recommended, and I just kept putting it off until I truly needed to work with materials on a more serious level. But one of your lovely Corridor Crew fellas Jordan came out with a great video explaining how he goes about learning new things and I decided to take his advice of treating the first viewing of the tutorial as a more "leisure" watch. See what things you're GOING to learn, but don't worry about following along until the second viewing. This is how I approached this video, I watched the entire thing first so I understood where we were going, and just that alone gave me enough insight to where I could certainly figure out probably the first half of this video now just from memory and my current familiarity with materials. Rewatching is just going to remind me of all the keybinds and allow me to follow at a much more brisk pace. So thanks to both you and Jordan for the amazing learning tips.
Thank you so much for your excellent and detailed tutorial! The way you explained everything was so engaging that the hour just flew by. You have a real talent for presenting information in such an enjoyable and clear way. I truly appreciate the effort you put into this!
I think it was brilliant to divide the video in "levels of complexity" like this, it makes it extremely easy to follow and super accessible for complete beginners. Hope you do more tutorials in this style!!
Hi there, just wanted to let you know (and thank you!) how these 45 minutes inspired me to move 60GB of StableDiffusion models worth of space to get 5.3 on my old 2060/32gb pc: "you'll never use a master material (...)" was the 1st most useful rule to learn about :D. This must be the BEST material related content for someone considering Unreal against the competition. I'm also looking for content on asset import and collision setup so I'm already hoping to find a suitable "deep dive" among your content. Keep up this awesome work of yours, I might even pay a visit to Patreon... :)
Hey Clint! Great work on this video, must have been a hell of an editing job...by the way killer thumbnail! I love filmmaking and virtual production in Unreal Engine, it changed everything for me. Keep up the solid work, It's not easy but you're killing it.
Amazing Tutorial man! Feel so lucky to have seen you do it live at the event last time :) Thank you so much for being such an amzing creator and sharing you knowledge!
I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago and had to piece together parts from multiple vids to get what I wanted. This vid has it all in one! Thanks Clint!
Thanks Clint for this amazing tutorial! It makes life so much easier! So many things I still have to discover in UE and I am happy there are skilled artists all around to teach me more :) Keep up the good work!
Great tutorial Clint! Thanks. I modified a couple of things to make it a little more accurate. 1) I changed the LERP for the Surface Imperfections to an Add. This doesn't change the material's intrinsic roughness, but adds the roughness. I just used a multiply on the Surface Imperfections to control how much I'm adding. 2) The Dirt should also affect the roughness, so I added a Static Switch that allows you to add the dirt to the roughness. I also set my version up to use packed maps for AO, Roughness & Metallic.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeees to number 2!!!!! I need to do this! And yeah im learning about packed textures, so it'll be in the v4 (v3 is live if you wanna redownload it)
@@pwnisher I'm glad you like the suggestions. The thing about the 1st mod is that it won't affect the areas that don't have surface imperfections. The LERP will change the underlying roughness values as a whole.
These kind of videos make Unreal seem very easy and approachable which really helps with getting the motivation and more drive into working in it. Thank you so much!
I'd probably describe this master material not with metaphors, but simply as a big material with all the functionality you could potentially want and material interfaces as a way to disable what you don't want and easily adjust what you need. 21:08 appending is adding one value to a new dimension of the vector. Appending one value to another makes for a vec2, appending one value to a vec2 makes a vec3, and so on.
I was literally searching for good UE tutorial to start finally learning and this video popped up ok no need for anymore sign. Thank you. Can I say I love you.
awesome tutorial dude. I have been using unreal for years professionally, mainly focused on environment/lighting and I picked up a bunch of little tricks for the next time im dipping into materials!
Beautiful valuable tutorial for a 40 year old beginner like me, one thing i kind off missed in this, i you could add, is, an option to lock the UV scaling with a check box, where a slider can scale both UV together, or allow to scale U and V seperately, which you have already covered.
Such an amazing, in-depth, and simple to follow tutorial! These sorts of videos are exactly what beginners (and others!) need to get into Unreal, thanks a lot! :)
Awesome Awesome Awesome! I realized at 30:30 that priority level is separate for each group, so thank you for showing that. I would have mentioned that earlier if it was me, but at least I get it now. You rock man. Also, for my MM I would add emissive toggle with intensity, color, maybe a mask for inner and outer radius. I would also add a way to make it look cell-shaded. I'm guessing you would use like an edge mask. And lastly, I would add the option to input a color pallete, mostly for Niagra effect purposes.
An absolute life saver Clint! Thank you soooo very much for sharing this! One cool feature would be to add directional dirt to, say, top of walls etc. I honestly have no idea whether this is possible or how one would go about doing this! Thank you again!
Started to get back into Unreal. Used to watch Corridor Crew when you where there. Thought I would check this out. Awesome and informative tutorial! I know someone who works over at Unreal, used to work with him. Good guy!
Ayo! No way, i stumbled on this video since im going through Unreal courses qnd found out you're one of the judges for the 3D renders! I participated in Multiverse Vistas for music, but just thought it was uncanny the way the algorithm worked (Honkai, Unreal Tutorials, etc.) Anyhow, thank you for this video. I do very much find your way of explaining this to be a very focused and understandable way to work with Materials. Though others have explained it fairly well (UnrealSensei with his MasterClass) I find just stimbling on this out of curiosity to tefresh on this to be pretty damn good! Wonderful work on this and you got a new sub~
Very helpful really I learned a lot of tip and tricks from this tutorial Just i want you to add some small details : • Global UV for all and option for each channel to control UV if we need • Give me access for Global UV scale uniform for X&Y beside X only or Y only for some purpos no need to use x only or y only • what about mask opacity, cloth, and big important thing GLASS & Curtain pass light with shadow 🧐 we need to learn all of this Specially curtains realistic passing light with/without raytracing shadow active • Displacement !! On/off option • AO I know this option to work in UE5 must turnoff Allow static light in settings But it's important to add it in Master material we need it with any hidden feature if it need That's what i remember for now Finally thanks for your effort really I appreciate it
One of the best tutorials I’ve watched on this topic. Great job! I’ve always struggled with understand how materials work with all these different channels. Trying to reverse engineer when I acquire an asset… As a result still staying in the safety of C4D standard renderer then trying to fudge what I need since learning Octane or RS or Arnold always felt like a commitment. And what if I chose the wrong one? :) Not only has this given me a true understanding, it’s confirmed that going the UE route tops any of the other render engines. Real-time is only gonna get more powerful.. Just purchased, more-so to as a thank you for creating and sharing your workflow than anything else.. thanks again @ keep it up!
I find many tutorials here follow a pattern for engagement (make this level or create this latest trend). I respect the hustle and understand the Algo but I find them over polished and often wasting time without teaching me anything more than the ability to Copy Paste. Your content was refreshing, a respectful amount of editing but not overkill to the end user and also diving into WHY we should do things, WHAT they do before the HOW to do it. Not enough people uploading tutorials cover the WHY or WHAT and it's really appreciated. Unreal Engine is overwhelming to someone new and learning the basics like how to create a basic level are often attempted before learning what makes a level. I really hope you continue to upload content like this. As for a metaphor on Materials. You can think of a Material like the blueprint of a house, It contains the detailed plans, colours and structure to define how the house will look. Once you have a blueprint you can build as many houses as you like, often people will want to change things like the wallpaper so each house is unique. That variation is known as an instance and it's much cheaper in resources to change some wallpaper than it would be to build another house from scratch just to change the colour.
Yoooo I really appreciate the kind words! Yeah to me its like, if I just start throwing technical info at you, do this then that than that, its the same as be lead blindfolded, not knowing where your going. I guess for me personally i like to know what and why I’m doing something before I do it. It lets me get more excited about it as I’m doing it. Anyway, yeah i really appreciate the comment and am glad you liked the video. I just dropped one on procedural environments in UE if you’re tryna go down that road.
@@pwnisher 100% I'll check that out. Just subscribed and also purchased the Material asset on UE, even though I built it with you I wanted to show support. If you ever wanted to do a series educating an absolute noob just holla :)
Awesome work loved every minute of it. Scary to fully commit to unreal but with Tutorials like that it gets easier and easier. Maybe next up a Master-Landscape Material?
@@pwnisher Hahahah yeah its so cool it adapts automatically depending how steep an area is. So for example if a mountain has a grass material the steeper areas will have a stone material. And you can do alot more for example height base textures to create snow at a certain height!
Well somehow it all worked, until I tried to use it. Must have messed up something basic. Wouldn't import into new project and said Unknown Extension uasset
Great tut. similar to my master material. 2 other things I'd add is a toggle to switch between ARM maps and specific maps, and a basic wind in the WPO to be used on foliage
HECK YEAHHHH thank you so much for making this video. I’ve been trying to go down this road and following your videos are so much more helpful than the patchwork of tutorials I’ve been looking at ha
I Loved this complete walkthrough of how simple vs complex a material can develop. Watched in full! One-stop-shop with you videos haha. I'm curious how UE will continue to develop the experimental Substrate material work flow. That might be another can of worms to unpack though a lot of the concepts from what was shown would apply! Thanks for this Clint!
Im soooo glad you feel that way about my videos! That's always my goal, one-stop-shop! You said it perfectly =] And yeah! Substrate just looked weird and confusing, and I probably wont use it until they force it on us, or until Winbush puts out a video thats called like "Youve been Sleepin on Substrate" and makes me think otherwise.
For organization: Named Reroute nodes help a lot, as it lets you have disconnected structures that are linked through separate nodes. So your common UVs can go into a node named "Common UVs" and then you can add an output of that reroute node everywhere you need it without wires going everywhere.
You can use multiply instead of devide for UV tiling. This way you can use hole numbers like 3.0, instead of 0.3. It achives the same results as the tiling made in a 3d software
Thanks for this. I was up until 1 am building and tweaking this. I've floated from Blender to CD4, back to Blender and now Unreal Engine. Blender / UE seem to be a great combo for me.
Normal control can also be: lerp(float3(0, 0, 1), Normal, NormalStrength). Works both ways - for lowering and increasing). That’s because your Normal map is in tangent space and float3(0, 0, 1) is a flat normal in tangent space.
Question about asphalt texture. If you look at dry asphalt in the dark, but on an avenue where there is a lot of lighting from different sides, you will notice the following effect: The asphalt itself is dry - dark, but since it contains patches of small, highly reflective grains, you can notice small “flares” “When you turn your head sharply - that is, it’s like a flickering of small dots. If you simulate this by making points with a strong reflection on the texture, you will not achieve such an effect. It is necessary to achieve an effect when the slightest change in the vector from which the observation is being made - a sharp change occurs and different points on the texture light up. There should be obvious flickering when you move or rotate the camera.
Using a master material directly does not add extra draw calls in itself; however, using material instances derived from a master material can be more efficient for modifying properties without additional overhead. Just wanted to throw this in here for clarity.
Awesome video, and brought a lot of answers to questions I've asked myself for quite some time! Wishlist: Would love to see a different way to use Surface Imperfections, as an overlay rather than a linear blend, how you would add some scratches on a polished surface by adding (screening) it on top of the base roughness map. Always struggled to do this in an effective way!
Great stuff! for the UV projection part I would add a Local/World Switch to get the additional option to enable projection of textures in world space. With Absolute World Position is an alternative to the TexCoord Input.
Brilliant! Ive been fumbling my way through UE for sometime. Can now see where im doing my textures wrong. The only thing that is difficult coming from other software, is learning how to create these materials using specific nodes. Nothing is very intuative in unreal. For example, you dont know which nodes to use to create say a contrast. Youve shown it here, but i would never have thought to look for those specific nodes. Thats where the problem comes in. Why didnt unreal just create an albedo, spec, contrast, normal etc node to plugin? Why make it so complicated? I have to keep googling to just find out how and what nodes to use most of the time. This video is a life saver on explaining what to do and why. 👍
I would suggest add something for emmisive, detail normals(for large objects), opacity option, and an option for objects that do not have any UV's, so an WorldAligned option. Oh and an option to use packed textures (quixel and SubPainter use that a lot)
I wouldn't necessarily add the opacity option, rather create a second master material specificly for translucent materials. The reason is, if you want to use opacity at all, you need to set your Shading Model to 'Translucent' for the whole material (and all instances), which is less performant than the default 'Opaque' option.
@@pwnisher It's pretty common to have seperate master materials for use cases anywho. So having one master material specifically for baked texures. One specifically for tiling textures, one for world aligned. At least from my experience in games companies. Obviously when it's personal projects it's all up to the individual how they want it setup. However in games companies having a single master material with 20 artists working in the same project, can be problematic when you want to change 1 specific thing in the 1 master material that controls literally everything. Whereas if you have like 5 master materials the weight of changing one thing isn't as drastic.
@@sebastiankraus109 You actually don't. I'm not sure if it was a recent change to unreal. But there is a drop down menu in instances where you can swap the shading model to a seperate one. So you can setup the translucent stuff in your master but keep it still set to opaque. Then in your instance just swap over to that specific shading model in just that instance. I do think having seperate masters is the way to go though for just management in general. Over complicated master materials can make it hard to find specific things and that can be even worse when working in a large team.
Man i hated textures and materials. But you made this so clear and understandable. Also those shortcuts man i love it! Handy F dandy! You just helped me getting over the anxiety of materials.
Great tutorial took AGES to follow along and complete it but i only got unreal yesterday. one note You forgot to Blend Dirt in the same way you blended the imperfections so is texture or dirt. but from what you taught me earlier i was still able to add that functionality, :) Thank you for taking the time to make this tutorial you got my like and sub
Wow, I'm amazed that Unreal doesn't have these types of controls built into Unreal Engine. Learned a lot of new nodes. I use blender and it's interesting to see similar nodes. Thanks so much for this.
awesome tutorial. brilliant! i cant seem to find an awesome glass texture that reacts to lighting properly. A master glass would be awesome. great work!
Check out the Honkai: Star Rail 3D Challenge here: hoyo.link/8sEiFBAL
---
MATERIAL VERISON UPDATES AND WISHLIST:
v3 RELEASED:
- added snow/dust layer controls
- redesigned the normal map node structure
- added "color correction" dropdowns for anything that uses (brightness, contrast, saturation, min/max)
- disabled unneeded plugins from UE project file
- added switchers & controls to use textures for metallic, opacity and emissive (with placeholder black_solid in the texture slot)
- using the terminology "scale" as opposed to "tiling" as it's more accurate.
WISHLIST:
-realtime edge and recesses matte (curvature map)
-option for packed textures (ORM, ORDp, etc.)
-displacement
-named reroutes
-world aligned node for meshes w/o UV's.
This was such a well presented and useful tutorial that has really inspired me. The step by step journey you are take us on is so approachable and gives a practical insight into materials.
Would really love a new video to cover these new features as level 7 and beyond!
@@peetroar Thanks so much for the love and support! Yeah if things align, I don't see why not a part 2 wouldn't be fun =]
Thanks for this great video. Perhaps on a bit more advanced topic, my only request would be to include some love for glass materials. This is very important for architectural work. For example:
1) TINTED GLASS - Most glass has varying degrees of iron, giving it a green tint. It's more visible the thicker the glass is. Other glass is purposefully coloured.
2) REFLECTIVE GLASS - Has a thin layer of metallic or metallic oxide coating making it more reflective
3) DICHROIC GLASS - Can display multiple different colors depending on lighting conditions. (Maybe Substrate materials will be more capable of this)
4) TEXTURED GLASS - Displaced surface (Best seen with proper refractive ray tracing, which Lumen is still limited with)
@@Junglejuz there's a package on marketplace called Advanced Glass material. check it out
you change my life thanks
Watched the whole thing, great explanation!
Some good suggestion already in the comments:
I would suggest generally using a few more functions to clean up your master, adding detail normal (u can use BlendAngleCorrectedNormals node for that), adding a texture slot for metallic. Also I would suggest you to look into some blend nodes for combining your imperfections (blend_screen for example).
You could also add some blank texture samplers for when you need to swap your Shading model, or use different masters for each.
Another great organisation tip is using named reroutes.
Small but very useful workflow tips:
- toggle "hide unrelated" at the top of the graph, makes working on large materials a lot more managable.
- press q when having nodes selected to straighten the connection!
For more advanced stuff, you can make your own shader using Material Attributes (Layered Materials).
Also for anything shader related, Ben Cloward here on youtube is the best teacher!
My god! Thank you for ALL of this!!!
replying here just to have a reminder to self!
same i will forget immediately
@@curtissmith1507 me too
thxx
so helpful clint. i’ve recently been hired as an unreal artist for a commercial studio and thought that my knowledge in blender would transfer over and it definitely hasn’t been as easy, especially with the the way materials are set up. the material instance feature alone is different enough that needed its own understanding. super dope vid
YES! So glad u can benefit from this!
The blender node system is more straightforward.
But materials and Niagara system are quite powerful!!
@lordnaps Which studio? I am also looking for start to career as Unreal engine artist. Is there remote job ? Can you share details like website or LinkedIn profile
Damn… same situation!!!
Blender is trash, the Ui rotted your brain. Thats why unreal is so difficult to grasp.
Thanks!
Dang dude this is a solid tutorial! Master class level stuff
You are awesome man, I follow you of course and I like your tutorials very much..
30 minutes took me 4 hours to practice it in UE, keep it up, this is the best Material video I have watched in years, thank you for connecting with us and sharing the struggle at the beginning of the video.
I watched hours of tutorials about materials before finding this one, but this is the one I wish I had watched first. Outstanding job of presenting a logical progression of building up a basic master material with useful properties.
I've been watching you since the beginning of Corridor Digital. And if it wasn't for your 3D tutorials like these or showcasing of your guys' amazing skills through your short films, I wouldn't have a career in the industry. Thank you so much Clint and praying for your continued success always.
I've watched a lot of material tutorials, and this one by far had some of the most useful information and it was the easiest to follow. Thank you!
Yo that means a lot! Thank you and I'm glad it was helpful!
Nice start for a master material! Instead of migrating, though, I would recommend making your own plugin (which is super easy to do) and place your master material plus the necessary assets into your plugin and you're good to go. All you'd need to do is enable the plugin in whichever project you're working in. I do this with my own game development work and it's a great way to keep your custom library of tools in one easy to reach place.
would be nice if you make a tutorial for that, would be appreciated :)
@@HR-zg9cinot in the editor now but off the top of my head go into edit (top title bar menu) and click plugins. There should be a plus icon somewhere in the plugin menu that says add or new. Select content only, name your plugin (master material, etc) enter an author if you'd like and then hit create. Then it should create a new folder in your projects plugin folder under the name that you called the new plugin. Then you want to either migrate or copy your content (in this case master material) into that folder. Migrate is great if your content has a lot of dependencies/references since you can see/select what is essential to the content. If it's checked. It's an essential reference but you can uncheck if you know how to fix the unhanded/missing reference and want to reduce the size of the plugin. In the case of a master material you'd want to migrate the material itself as well as all texture assets that are used in the base (instance textures don't matter unless you want to migrate those instances too)
Then you want to go back to the plugin menu window where you made the plugin, go to your list of plugins and find yours. With your plugin selected there should be a package plugin button. This will pack everything into a folder inside the directory of your choice. You can select your unreal engine install directories' plug-in folder so your plug-in will be available in any project that uses that engine version. Usually UE_(engine version)/engine/plugins. Or you could pack into any folder of your choosing and copy it into any project you need it for (takes up more space than having in engine plugins because of duplicates but it's your choice.
Sorry, long response and not the greatest explanation but I'm pretty sure I covered everything. I'll check and edit when I can. This is what I do and it works well. Kinda annoying to set up but can save a lot of time and make things easier later so you don't have to migrate every time you need the same content in a different project
@@LucydDev
Thank you so much for your detailed and thorough explanation! I really appreciate the time and effort you took to share everything so clearly. As soon as I find the time to try it out, I’ll let you know how it goes!
When rotating normal map UVs, you also need to rotate your normal map vectors.
Example : normal map value of (x=1, y=0) vector is pointing right. If the UVs are rotated 90° CW it should now point down. However the value is still the same (1, 0), it needs to be rotated to be (0,1).
Great tutorial, well explained. I think the other things key to a "Master Materal' would be to have nanite displacement controls (for 5.3 onwards displacement is back) + alpha controls for masked materials. Would also be interesting to have a switch for transparent materials (not supported by nanite), so one could still use the same master material, but switch when you need a transparent material. Also material blending controls to remove tiling etc would be very useful. Keep up the good work
All features im planning to add yes!! The v1 actually has the opacity mask feature you’re mentioning.
@@pwnisher I'm about to buy the master material, will these updates you plan to add be free for people who already bought it?
@3TQHAJSHNQ i was about to ask the same question....but seems evn yours is not answered yet feom 2 months😮
@@ShomitSarkar 4 months lol
Another amazing video! Materials have been the scariest part about learning UE for me. Great job demystifying them!
Oh waddup Scouty!! So glad its helpful! I gotchu man!
Now this is the type of vids I love as someone who hasn't touched any real work with this stuff just enjoy the content made about it. No video has made me want to begin working with this stuff then these. I hope the vid does well I know I'm sharing it around so I can see a lot more of this content :D Love it keep it up :)
Thanks soooo so much for the support!! 🙏🏼
@@pwnisher Thank you ive been following your content since you started at corridor.
Hey, great tutorial and a good starting point. I won't suggest new features as you are likely gonna add many in the future, but I think it is worth mentioning that it is generally better to have your power (contrast) nodes before your multiply ones.
You can achieve the same results either way, but if you have modified the contrast, then the multiply will have a different impact (as the contrast turns linear changes into exponential changes) and it might be really finicky to get it right sometimes. On the other hand, if you swap them the multiply will always behave linearly and will be easier to control, as it is affecting the result of the power node.
Keep the great job! It's always nice to see your content
Super useful tip 🙏🏼
Great control! In no time, I got rid of all my old materials and recreated them from instances. It's amazing how quickly you can work this way.
Thank you so much. I've seen so many beginner unreal tutorials that tell you to use material instances, but none of them ever explained the performance benefits! I always thought it seemed like a lot of effort to go through just so you could see changes without clicking compile. Now I know better. Thanks Clint.
Yeah for sure! I try to break things down so we can all understand WHY were doing stuff. Thanks for watching and stopping by.
What is in this wideo about performance is not true. Yes- changing MI vs MM settings will be slower on MM because master is where the actual code is and it needs to recompile while saving, but MIs inherit the code so no recompiling. I was facepalming so hard my head hurt. Using MIs is a memory thing and a matter of convenience. Let say you have 2 assets, and you want them to use the same textures but different tiling. You DON'T want to use 2 different materials where the dif is only a tiling. UE doesn't know they are almost identical and it will keep both in memory. When using the same material with two different Mis, you will have just one code with parameters in memory. Its like building one slow blender for some gentle preparation and another very fast for liquefying something vs one blender with multiple speeds. Its faster in use and takes less space ;)
I fucking love you sir. I was digging the tutorial for the first three parts and then part four I was like "okay this is what I came here for" and it just got better and better as it went. I also love that by step six you were like "okay, they've done this enough times, let's see if they have truly learned what I've been teaching them".
I've been dabbling in UE5 on and off for a few months now and this video kept getting recommended, and I just kept putting it off until I truly needed to work with materials on a more serious level. But one of your lovely Corridor Crew fellas Jordan came out with a great video explaining how he goes about learning new things and I decided to take his advice of treating the first viewing of the tutorial as a more "leisure" watch. See what things you're GOING to learn, but don't worry about following along until the second viewing. This is how I approached this video, I watched the entire thing first so I understood where we were going, and just that alone gave me enough insight to where I could certainly figure out probably the first half of this video now just from memory and my current familiarity with materials. Rewatching is just going to remind me of all the keybinds and allow me to follow at a much more brisk pace.
So thanks to both you and Jordan for the amazing learning tips.
Thank you so much for your excellent and detailed tutorial! The way you explained everything was so engaging that the hour just flew by. You have a real talent for presenting information in such an enjoyable and clear way. I truly appreciate the effort you put into this!
Thanks
Bless, my friend! Thank you so so much!
One of the best tutorials I've ever encountered for Unreal! All killer, no filler! Like & Subscribe well deserved!
Thanks so much for the kind words 🙏🏼
I think it was brilliant to divide the video in "levels of complexity" like this, it makes it extremely easy to follow and super accessible for complete beginners. Hope you do more tutorials in this style!!
Hi there, just wanted to let you know (and thank you!) how these 45 minutes inspired me to move 60GB of StableDiffusion models worth of space to get 5.3 on my old 2060/32gb pc: "you'll never use a master material (...)" was the 1st most useful rule to learn about :D. This must be the BEST material related content for someone considering Unreal against the competition. I'm also looking for content on asset import and collision setup so I'm already hoping to find a suitable "deep dive" among your content. Keep up this awesome work of yours, I might even pay a visit to Patreon... :)
Hey Clint! Great work on this video, must have been a hell of an editing job...by the way killer thumbnail!
I love filmmaking and virtual production in Unreal Engine, it changed everything for me. Keep up the solid work, It's not easy but you're killing it.
Amazing Tutorial man! Feel so lucky to have seen you do it live at the event last time :) Thank you so much for being such an amzing creator and sharing you knowledge!
That was so much fun! Now lets see if I can pack this into 20 minutes!! xD
I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago and had to piece together parts from multiple vids to get what I wanted. This vid has it all in one! Thanks Clint!
So glad to hear! Thanks for stopping by!
exactly
This is a great walkthrough. By far the most easy to understand version of material breakdown I have seen. Nicely done.
Thanks Clint for this amazing tutorial! It makes life so much easier! So many things I still have to discover in UE and I am happy there are skilled artists all around to teach me more :) Keep up the good work!
Great tutorial Clint! Thanks.
I modified a couple of things to make it a little more accurate.
1) I changed the LERP for the Surface Imperfections to an Add. This doesn't change the material's intrinsic roughness, but adds the roughness. I just used a multiply on the Surface Imperfections to control how much I'm adding.
2) The Dirt should also affect the roughness, so I added a Static Switch that allows you to add the dirt to the roughness.
I also set my version up to use packed maps for AO, Roughness & Metallic.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeees to number 2!!!!! I need to do this! And yeah im learning about packed textures, so it'll be in the v4 (v3 is live if you wanna redownload it)
@@pwnisher I'm glad you like the suggestions. The thing about the 1st mod is that it won't affect the areas that don't have surface imperfections. The LERP will change the underlying roughness values as a whole.
@@BudMyricki am also set up my version up to use packed maps! Thanks for the tips here, i will try to do them
This video is essential to a new UE user. I was making materials left and right. Having this is going to be so useful
That was Awesome Pwnisher... I followed along till the end and created my first Master Material.... thanks A lot
Oh heck yeah!! Thanks for watching all the way through!
I cant believe i didn't pay for this super easy to understand and elaborated knowledge. Thank you again for an invaluable tutorial.
These kind of videos make Unreal seem very easy and approachable which really helps with getting the motivation and more drive into working in it. Thank you so much!
I'd probably describe this master material not with metaphors, but simply as a big material with all the functionality you could potentially want and material interfaces as a way to disable what you don't want and easily adjust what you need.
21:08 appending is adding one value to a new dimension of the vector. Appending one value to another makes for a vec2, appending one value to a vec2 makes a vec3, and so on.
I was literally searching for good UE tutorial to start finally learning and this video popped up ok no need for anymore sign. Thank you. Can I say I love you.
15:00 small workflow tip but great time saver - you can double click any of the lines in the material editor to insert a reroute node at cursor
This really makes you appreciate how user-friendly the Blender shading system is haha
awesome tutorial dude. I have been using unreal for years professionally, mainly focused on environment/lighting and I picked up a bunch of little tricks for the next time im dipping into materials!
Beautiful valuable tutorial for a 40 year old beginner like me, one thing i kind off missed in this, i you could add, is, an option to lock the UV scaling with a check box, where a slider can scale both UV together, or allow to scale U and V seperately, which you have already covered.
Also if you could add support for maps with opacity, for eg rusty perforated metal sheet, also custom texture with partial portions of emmisive
Such an amazing, in-depth, and simple to follow tutorial! These sorts of videos are exactly what beginners (and others!) need to get into Unreal, thanks a lot! :)
This is a most informative tutorial. Thank you so much for putting it together!
Awesome Awesome Awesome! I realized at 30:30 that priority level is separate for each group, so thank you for showing that. I would have mentioned that earlier if it was me, but at least I get it now. You rock man.
Also, for my MM I would add emissive toggle with intensity, color, maybe a mask for inner and outer radius. I would also add a way to make it look cell-shaded. I'm guessing you would use like an edge mask. And lastly, I would add the option to input a color pallete, mostly for Niagra effect purposes.
An absolute life saver Clint! Thank you soooo very much for sharing this! One cool feature would be to add directional dirt to, say, top of walls etc. I honestly have no idea whether this is possible or how one would go about doing this! Thank you again!
Oh it’s tooootally possible and i’ll have this updated by next week!
Still trying to get my head around the beast that is Unreal. Between you and William, I think I’ll get there! Thank you again!🙏👊
Started to get back into Unreal. Used to watch Corridor Crew when you where there. Thought I would check this out. Awesome and informative tutorial! I know someone who works over at Unreal, used to work with him. Good guy!
Amazing! This just might be the best materials video out there. Top notch. Thank you!!!
Ayo! No way, i stumbled on this video since im going through Unreal courses qnd found out you're one of the judges for the 3D renders! I participated in Multiverse Vistas for music, but just thought it was uncanny the way the algorithm worked (Honkai, Unreal Tutorials, etc.)
Anyhow, thank you for this video. I do very much find your way of explaining this to be a very focused and understandable way to work with Materials. Though others have explained it fairly well (UnrealSensei with his MasterClass) I find just stimbling on this out of curiosity to tefresh on this to be pretty damn good! Wonderful work on this and you got a new sub~
Damnnn judge for the Star Rail competition? That's awesome. Can't wait.
Fantastic tutorial by the way, learned a lot.
Very helpful really
I learned a lot of tip and tricks from this tutorial
Just i want you to add some small details :
• Global UV for all and option for each channel to control UV if we need
• Give me access for Global UV scale uniform for X&Y beside X only or Y only for some purpos no need to use x only or y only
• what about mask opacity, cloth, and big important thing GLASS & Curtain pass light with shadow 🧐 we need to learn all of this
Specially curtains realistic passing light with/without raytracing shadow active
• Displacement !! On/off option
• AO I know this option to work in UE5 must turnoff Allow static light in settings
But it's important to add it in Master material we need it with any hidden feature if it need
That's what i remember for now
Finally thanks for your effort really I appreciate it
One of the best tutorials I’ve watched on this topic. Great job! I’ve always struggled with understand how materials work with all these different channels. Trying to reverse engineer when I acquire an asset… As a result still staying in the safety of C4D standard renderer then trying to fudge what I need since learning Octane or RS or Arnold always felt like a commitment. And what if I chose the wrong one? :)
Not only has this given me a true understanding, it’s confirmed that going the UE route tops any of the other render engines. Real-time is only gonna get more powerful.. Just purchased, more-so to as a thank you for creating and sharing your workflow than anything else.. thanks again @ keep it up!
Excellent Tutorial! Very clear and easy to understand! Thanks again Pwnisher!
Im glad! Thanks for watching! 🙏🏼
I find many tutorials here follow a pattern for engagement (make this level or create this latest trend). I respect the hustle and understand the Algo but I find them over polished and often wasting time without teaching me anything more than the ability to Copy Paste.
Your content was refreshing, a respectful amount of editing but not overkill to the end user and also diving into WHY we should do things, WHAT they do before the HOW to do it.
Not enough people uploading tutorials cover the WHY or WHAT and it's really appreciated.
Unreal Engine is overwhelming to someone new and learning the basics like how to create a basic level are often attempted before learning what makes a level. I really hope you continue to upload content like this.
As for a metaphor on Materials.
You can think of a Material like the blueprint of a house, It contains the detailed plans, colours and structure to define how the house will look.
Once you have a blueprint you can build as many houses as you like, often people will want to change things like the wallpaper so each house is unique. That variation is known as an instance and it's much cheaper in resources to change some wallpaper than it would be to build another house from scratch just to change the colour.
Yoooo I really appreciate the kind words! Yeah to me its like, if I just start throwing technical info at you, do this then that than that, its the same as be lead blindfolded, not knowing where your going. I guess for me personally i like to know what and why I’m doing something before I do it. It lets me get more excited about it as I’m doing it.
Anyway, yeah i really appreciate the comment and am glad you liked the video. I just dropped one on procedural environments in UE if you’re tryna go down that road.
@@pwnisher 100% I'll check that out. Just subscribed and also purchased the Material asset on UE, even though I built it with you I wanted to show support.
If you ever wanted to do a series educating an absolute noob just holla :)
Thank you, Clint! You are a gentleman and a scholar!
Words cannot express how helpful this is!
Awesome work loved every minute of it. Scary to fully commit to unreal but with Tutorials like that it gets easier and easier. Maybe next up a Master-Landscape Material?
oh man i dont even know what a master landscape is! But it sounds cool cause I love environments
@@pwnisher Hahahah yeah its so cool it adapts automatically depending how steep an area is. So for example if a mountain has a grass material the steeper areas will have a stone material. And you can do alot more for example height base textures to create snow at a certain height!
@@faebetutorials That's so awesome! I love that!
Such amazing explanations of materials! I can’t wait to bring these ideas into my games in Unity as well!
This is the upmost best tutorial for unreal engine material part. I learned it, loved it and enjoyed it Sir👍
Yaaaaaaaaaay! So glad to hear!!!
you anwsered so many questions i had about UE5 in just the first ten minutes alone. you are amazing
I am learning Unreal Engine and stumbled across this tutorial - IT IS FANTASTIC!! Thanks for sharing this!
Well somehow it all worked, until I tried to use it. Must have messed up something basic. Wouldn't import into new project and said Unknown Extension uasset
This is so great, would love a part 2 with just things you learned since then and improvements based on feedback and tips.
Great tut. similar to my master material. 2 other things I'd add is a toggle to switch between ARM maps and specific maps, and a basic wind in the WPO to be used on foliage
This is a great intro to Materials in UE Clint. Thank you!
What led me to this channel was watching the Unreal Engine tutorials by Bad Decision Studios.. Awesome content, and yes , i’m watching them thru!
HECK YEAHHHH thank you so much for making this video. I’ve been trying to go down this road and following your videos are so much more helpful than the patchwork of tutorials I’ve been looking at ha
YES! So glad it’s helpful to you!!
I Loved this complete walkthrough of how simple vs complex a material can develop. Watched in full! One-stop-shop with you videos haha.
I'm curious how UE will continue to develop the experimental Substrate material work flow. That might be another can of worms to unpack though a lot of the concepts from what was shown would apply!
Thanks for this Clint!
Im soooo glad you feel that way about my videos! That's always my goal, one-stop-shop! You said it perfectly =] And yeah! Substrate just looked weird and confusing, and I probably wont use it until they force it on us, or until Winbush puts out a video thats called like "Youve been Sleepin on Substrate" and makes me think otherwise.
This was anvil-heavy
Firing Unreal for the first time this week, so this is super useful
Much. Thanks
Amazing! This is super helpful thanks Clint, as always bringing the power to the people!
Nice! Pretty much all of this is transferrable to the Unity shader graph system as well. Great Video!
So excited about this tutorial.. cant wait to get on my computer and try this out
For organization: Named Reroute nodes help a lot, as it lets you have disconnected structures that are linked through separate nodes. So your common UVs can go into a node named "Common UVs" and then you can add an output of that reroute node everywhere you need it without wires going everywhere.
You can use multiply instead of devide for UV tiling. This way you can use hole numbers like 3.0, instead of 0.3. It achives the same results as the tiling made in a 3d software
The solution I was looking for.
Thanks man!
Continue to be so impressed with your knowledge share! You are a master resource on master materials (and so many other topics)! 👏👏👏
Thanks so much!! I just love diving in deep and helpin other artists like myself understand this stuff
Thanks for this. I was up until 1 am building and tweaking this. I've floated from Blender to CD4, back to Blender and now Unreal Engine. Blender / UE seem to be a great combo for me.
Normal control can also be:
lerp(float3(0, 0, 1), Normal, NormalStrength).
Works both ways - for lowering and increasing). That’s because your Normal map is in tangent space and float3(0, 0, 1) is a flat normal in tangent space.
This Video came just at the perfect moment thanks clint!!!!
Glad to hear it =]
Increíble, la mejor explicación de materiales y texturas que hay en todo UA-cam, DE LEJOS. Impresionante.
I LOVED EVERY SINGLE MINUTE IN THIS THANK-YOU SIR
I don't know if you're going to read this... but man that's some great work really!...keep going please!
Thanks a ton 🙏🏼
Best unreal tutorial I've watched so far.
Keep the good job, you're a treat 😘
Unbelievable how you explain such complexity into understanding. Thank you!!!
Dude thank you a lot!!!! May the unreal force be with you!!!
I followed this video step by step, learned lots of skills, appreciate for sharing. Thanks again!
Question about asphalt texture. If you look at dry asphalt in the dark, but on an avenue where there is a lot of lighting from different sides, you will notice the following effect: The asphalt itself is dry - dark, but since it contains patches of small, highly reflective grains, you can notice small “flares” “When you turn your head sharply - that is, it’s like a flickering of small dots.
If you simulate this by making points with a strong reflection on the texture, you will not achieve such an effect. It is necessary to achieve an effect when the slightest change in the vector from which the observation is being made - a sharp change occurs and different points on the texture light up. There should be obvious flickering when you move or rotate the camera.
Using a master material directly does not add extra draw calls in itself; however, using material instances derived from a master material can be more efficient for modifying properties without additional overhead. Just wanted to throw this in here for clarity.
Awesome video, and brought a lot of answers to questions I've asked myself for quite some time!
Wishlist: Would love to see a different way to use Surface Imperfections, as an overlay rather than a linear blend, how you would add some scratches on a polished surface by adding (screening) it on top of the base roughness map. Always struggled to do this in an effective way!
Great stuff! for the UV projection part I would add a Local/World Switch to get the additional option to enable projection of textures in world space.
With Absolute World Position is an alternative to the TexCoord Input.
Brilliant! Ive been fumbling my way through UE for sometime. Can now see where im doing my textures wrong. The only thing that is difficult coming from other software, is learning how to create these materials using specific nodes. Nothing is very intuative in unreal. For example, you dont know which nodes to use to create say a contrast. Youve shown it here, but i would never have thought to look for those specific nodes. Thats where the problem comes in.
Why didnt unreal just create an albedo, spec, contrast, normal etc node to plugin? Why make it so complicated?
I have to keep googling to just find out how and what nodes to use most of the time.
This video is a life saver on explaining what to do and why. 👍
I would suggest add something for emmisive, detail normals(for large objects), opacity option, and an option for objects that do not have any UV's, so an WorldAligned option. Oh and an option to use packed textures (quixel and SubPainter use that a lot)
Some bump offset or parrallax occlusion mapping would be nice
Yeeeeees!!!! World aligned is what ive been looking for then!! I hate UVs and am glad i have an avenue to dive down now. Thanks mdzine
I wouldn't necessarily add the opacity option, rather create a second master material specificly for translucent materials. The reason is, if you want to use opacity at all, you need to set your Shading Model to 'Translucent' for the whole material (and all instances), which is less performant than the default 'Opaque' option.
@@pwnisher It's pretty common to have seperate master materials for use cases anywho. So having one master material specifically for baked texures. One specifically for tiling textures, one for world aligned. At least from my experience in games companies. Obviously when it's personal projects it's all up to the individual how they want it setup. However in games companies having a single master material with 20 artists working in the same project, can be problematic when you want to change 1 specific thing in the 1 master material that controls literally everything. Whereas if you have like 5 master materials the weight of changing one thing isn't as drastic.
@@sebastiankraus109 You actually don't. I'm not sure if it was a recent change to unreal. But there is a drop down menu in instances where you can swap the shading model to a seperate one. So you can setup the translucent stuff in your master but keep it still set to opaque. Then in your instance just swap over to that specific shading model in just that instance.
I do think having seperate masters is the way to go though for just management in general. Over complicated master materials can make it hard to find specific things and that can be even worse when working in a large team.
Great clean straight to the point. Thanks.
Man i hated textures and materials. But you made this so clear and understandable. Also those shortcuts man i love it! Handy F dandy!
You just helped me getting over the anxiety of materials.
Gotchu my friend :)
so well done bro great work
One of the best videos I've seen on the subject
15:02 you can also double click a wire to insert a reroute node.
first six minutes already learning new things, thank you!
Great tutorial took AGES to follow along and complete it but i only got unreal yesterday.
one note You forgot to Blend Dirt in the same way you blended the imperfections so is texture or dirt. but from what you taught me earlier i was still able to add that functionality, :)
Thank you for taking the time to make this tutorial you got my like and sub
Thanks a ton for watching and building!! Mad respect! And thanks for the sub, welcome :)
@@pwnisher bro thanks for teaching me how
Great tutorial! Thanks. This answered a lot of questions I had on mixing textures and imperfections
Thank you! i'm saving this on my important playlist. 🙌🏿🙌🏿
i just think of nodes in unreal like a machine in satisfactory, the factory metaphore is pretty spot on
so excited 👍🏼
Wow, I'm amazed that Unreal doesn't have these types of controls built into Unreal Engine. Learned a lot of new nodes. I use blender and it's interesting to see similar nodes. Thanks so much for this.
awesome tutorial. brilliant! i cant seem to find an awesome glass texture that reacts to lighting properly. A master glass would be awesome. great work!