Creating a Master Material for your scene in UDK

Ryan Smith · Jul 2010

Hey Guys,

I was feeling productive today so i thought i'd walk you through my workflow of creating a master material for the new scene i'm working on. This is a 45 minute tutorial shot in HD.

ENJOI!

Part 1 - [ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFDMFDOu474[/ame]

Part 2 - [ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmE-8WeUupM[/ame]

Part 3 - [ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B5EN16trtI[/ame]

Part 4 - [ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctf4ApAeLv8[/ame]

Part 5 - [ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueGc6BdDwsk[/ame]

Sean VanGorder · Jul 2010

Awesome stuff. I'm always looking to learn more about creating shaders. I'll be checking this out when I get time for sure.

cholden · Jul 2010

ooh, you dirty boy! Now that's the in-depth material editor video the people need to see.

haiddasalami · Jul 2010

This is a 45 minute tutorial shot in HD

SHIT SON!

Virtuosic you planning on doing any cascade tutorials?

fearian · Jul 2010

ha, I've been using the material editor for the first time today and I've been devouring tutorials - the first thing I did was make a generic mat to slap on all my untextured props. It s not that great, so I think I'll give this tut a go as soon as I'm done eating!
Thanks!

JasonLavoie · Jul 2010

eeeeeeeeeee ryan you so helpful!

fearian · Jul 2010

Tutorials great so far, nicely paced, and I feel like I'm picking up a a ton. I'm worried its a bit much - I set up a rim light fir the first time in UDK but I couldnt do it again without referencing the tut - I don't understand the material nodes that well yet.

One thing that bugged me was at a transition in part 2 - you set up a switch on the emissive map before hand, and it had been deleted afterwards. I was skipping around the video trying to find out where it went or if I needed it :S

(oh yeah, for thriller movie tension, play the Inception soundtrack in the background, and find yourself racing against Ryan's voice trying to follow along without pausing the video ;P DUUUUUUUUNNNN!! DUUUUUUUNNN!!)

Ryan Smith · Jul 2010

ah shit, sorry. Nice critique though, i'll have to remember to go much slower next time ><.

The emissive static switch param that disappears around the 2 minute mark in part 2 of 5 is not important. you can proceed without it.

planaria · Jul 2010

great tutorial for master material creation ! also you have a nice voice, bob ross would be proud.

Autocon · Jul 2010

Great tutorial Ryan. Was always hesitant to create master materials that effected a large variety of props due to the fact I had no clue about the switch parameter.

Thanks for the share

fearian · Jul 2010

Virtuosic wrote: »

The emissive static switch param that disappears around the 2 minute mark in part 2 of 5 is not important. you can proceed without it.

The speeds actually fine. If I knew my way around the mat editor better I could probably follow along by your voice alone. (I was alt tabbing a bunch).

I've nearly finished but I ran into a problem with setting up the height map. Once I plugged it in to everything the texture coordinates was plugged into, I got error after error.

I can only imagine some setting is different in mine, but I can't think what.

Lamont · Jul 2010

That section you cropped isn't the issue. It's further down the line. Show what you have.

mkandersson · Jul 2010

Great Im bookmarking this! Will buy your other tutorial on vertex paint as soon as I get some money :P Thanks for sharing

Ryan Smith · Jul 2010

Actually the problem is because your plugging the 24 bit Black Node into the height input of the BumpOffset node. You want to use one of the colored 8 bit channels. I usually just use red.

fearian · Jul 2010

durrr

thanks!

Kuki · Jul 2010

Great tutorial, thanks

to JasonLavoie : Hey Jason, your Avatar really gives me nightmares :poly136:

SHEPEIRO · Jul 2010

nice cheers

JasonLavoie · Jul 2010

Haha Kuki you should check out the cartoon :P so good (done by a polycounter).

divi · Jul 2010

neat one

you can reduce the instructions count by using the inverted dot product of a camera vector and an up vector instead of the fresnel. use a power node on that and make the exponent a parameter. same effect, just cheaper and with access to the exponent of the fresnel in the instance.

Ryan Smith · Jul 2010

Ah thanks for the tip divi

Note that instead of using the Up Vector, you should use your normal map if you want the rim light to be effected by your object's normal map.

Zazerzs · Jul 2010

Thank you. That was helpful.

SStrickland · Jul 2010

Thanks a ton. The tutorial was a blast to go through. I learned a lot.

Are you planning on throwing your next tutorials on 3dMotive like your Advanced Mesh Paint tut?

breakneck · Jul 2010

haven't watch the videos yet, but thanks for the effort!!!

Ryan Smith · Aug 2010

Strickland - I am planning a Cascade tutorial for UDK that will be another 3D Motive DVD if the pitch gets accepted, however i'm not entirely sure what the DVD will encompass just yet.

After that i'll probably do an advanced materials DVD that will cover my workflow and design methods for making materials look as realistic as possible.

Jesse Moody · Aug 2010

Ahhh nice Ryan... I have tried to show people in the past the benefits of master materials and the use of submasters and how quickly you can create variants from those and quickly make changes in your scenes..

Nice stuff..

mathes · Aug 2010

Slick work Ryan.

gauss · Aug 2010

Hey Ryan if you can believe this, I came to this thread from outside the forum--my own damn fault for not keeping up with the threads in this subforum. I browsed the tutorial earlier and its merits are beyond self-evident, going to follow through in actually constructing the master material right now.

Thanks for helping people understand the nuts and bolts of just how powerfully their workflow can be changed by taking advantage of how the engine works.

Ryan Smith · Aug 2010

Jesse - Thanks man, I try to tell everyone who uses UDK that utilizing the material instancing is the proper way to do things. It's just setting it up right that's the tricky part. Hopefully this little tut is enough to get people started down that path.

Gauss - Thanks for the kind words. If you have any problems or questions feel free to shoot me a PM or respond on this forum. I'd be happy to help. Another great shader artist who can help you out is Divi. He's got more knowledge than I do about materials at this point.

Mathes - Thanks man, we both know that the FX stuff you're doing at DE blows my shader work out of the water :P

Bal · Aug 2010

Great tutorial, thanks for sharing!
Hadn't gotten around to using master materials yet, now I have to replace all my mats in the scene I'm working on.

Out of curiosity, what is Fresnel doing more than the inverted DotProduct to explain the extra instructions?

EDIT: Oh and also, how about opacity? Is it possible to set up something to toggle opacity on and off with this same master material (don't really see how), or would it be necessary to build a new one specifically for materials using opacity?

Ryan Smith · Aug 2010

Bal,

The Fresnel node is just the inverted dot product of the camera vector and surface normal, which is then sent to a power node (which explains the adjustable parameter of "Power" in the Fresnel node. To give it more control, you could add to this instruction count by multiplying it by an adjustable parameter, then add a bias parameter that you add to the end of the instruction,

And Yes, ASFAI you need to add a new master material for your transluscent materials.

Jesse Moody · Aug 2010

Virtuosic wrote: »

And Yes, ASFAI you need to add a new master material for your transluscent materials.

Yeah I am pretty sure this is still the case. Same for double sided versions, ones with opacity or translucency and a few other options as well.

Easy enough to do though. Just duplicate the final master you made and then set the options for each one that you want set.

Just starts to suck when you are making a ton of changes over and over and you have to re-create these varients.

Nielsen · Oct 2010

One thing I always like is to have some control over the detailnormal strength.
This would be the setup I'd use, there doesn't appear to be any change in instruction count compared to the original nor the appearance of the normals on the mesh, so I'm wondering whether all that appending is necessary.

Is this okay?

antonyj · Feb 2011

Hi Ryan.

Can't thank you enough for this tutorial. It's helped tenfold with understanding this portion of UDK. Really really loved the advanced mesh paint tutorial you have over at 3DMotive too, literally blew my mind!

Thanks a bunch once again.

Ok, ass-kissing over. But seriously, keep 'em coming!

-Ant

Legend286 · Feb 2011

Hboybowen wrote: »

doesnt youtube support 45 minute long videos now?

Up to 5 hours, maybe more.

Oiban · Aug 2011

Awesome tutorial, thank you very very much!

ikblue · Feb 2012

Very nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing

Ovada · Feb 2012

Andddddddd.... Bookmarked! Thank you!

FractaL · Dec 2012

Thanks for the tutorial Ryan! This is awesome!!!

Artaekos_inactive · Nov 2013

I've been experimenting with this material setup, but I can't figure out how to make it display grass properly that i've created with SpeedTree. My diffuse map has the necessary alpha channel, but this material setup has greyed out Opacity in the material editor. Does anyone know how I should go about setting up/adding alpha masking functionality to this material setup for my grass?

Creating a Master Material for your scene in UDK

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