Week 11 – Day 3 – “Materials and Material Instances”

Today we looked at materials a bit deeper. Specifically, we created a realistic glass material, using the material editor. We then exposed some of the variables, so as to create instance materials, and allow the creator to play with predetermined attributes. This is particularly useful for creating slight variations of the same material in your scene.

Here are the steps we went through to make the material in Unreal Engine 4:

1. We set the blend mode to Translucent. (regular opacity is translucent, ‘cutout’ transparency is opacity mask)
2. We then added a Vector 3 parameter node for the base colour. Used parametrised it so that it would become public, and editable in the instance material editor.
3. We then added specularity, metalness etc in the same way.
4. We locked the Max and Min values in the editor, so that the instance could only be changed within certain limits.
5. We then added a Fresnel node to the refraction to give a more accurate refraction.
6. We needed to include a lerp node to make this information public and editable.
7. Finally we added a Normal map to give an interesting surface.
8. Change the material translucency to “Surface Translucency Volume” in the option box.

 

Then, the servers in college were down so work was impossible.

Summary: We created a glass texture in Unreal Engine 4, and learned about instancing materials. Also, the servers went down, so project work was difficult.