UDK Materials, wanting to go beyond the basics
Hi there,
I'm gonna need to start thinking about textures for my current environment and I think I really need to brush up on my material knowledge in UDK.
I've got an ok grasp of how to set up materials, I'm comfortable with techniques for adding texture blends, masks, parralax stuff, reflections, tiled bits and pieces, as well as setting up parameters and matInstances but more often than not, if I import an asset, my shader setup is often simply the texture maps plugged into their respective channels.
I've never really figured out where to go from there, but I'll see some materials others have used in Unreal Engine and there'll be stacks of nodes all over the place. And mine only ever look like that if I'm incorporating blends / masks etc.
I've explained this badly I think but what I'm trying to say is aside from all the nodes which I'd use for adding blends/masks and such, what kinda things should I be doing to the main textures / channels simply to make them look better?
I'm gonna need to start thinking about textures for my current environment and I think I really need to brush up on my material knowledge in UDK.
I've got an ok grasp of how to set up materials, I'm comfortable with techniques for adding texture blends, masks, parralax stuff, reflections, tiled bits and pieces, as well as setting up parameters and matInstances but more often than not, if I import an asset, my shader setup is often simply the texture maps plugged into their respective channels.
I've never really figured out where to go from there, but I'll see some materials others have used in Unreal Engine and there'll be stacks of nodes all over the place. And mine only ever look like that if I'm incorporating blends / masks etc.
I've explained this badly I think but what I'm trying to say is aside from all the nodes which I'd use for adding blends/masks and such, what kinda things should I be doing to the main textures / channels simply to make them look better?
Replies
Gnomon UDK materials
You must inform me of this....this treasure of knowledge.
Haiddasalami: lol, it all comes from Eat3Ds UDK Materials Intro, which is amazing.
I've been planning on getting that...o check out my post. I ordered those HLSL shaders and if I find that it gives me actual knowledge that i can port over, Ill message you. Also check out ShaderFX....looks a lot like UDK material editor. I would be doing this at work but a client wants me to change all of the stuff we have been working on :poly127:
Yeah I definitely recommend the Eat3D training. There's a lot of great info on setting up materials that utilize blended normals, and tiling additions to the diffuse etc to break up big tiling textures.
I remember when I was brand new to Unreal and looking thru all the pre made materials, I was quite intimidated by the sheer amount of expressions. Looking at them now, I have a much easier time breaking them down in my mind and figuring out what does what.
Now with that said, there are nodes and operations in there that are a little more complicated, and figuring out how to create effects like animated textures, and reflections will take a little bit more time and experience to get comfortable with.
But again if you take the time to investigate some Epic created materials you'll see what I mean; in which they'll use lots of multiplies, lerps, adds, subtracts, clamps, divides, and powers....all expressions that basically allow you to edit your texture that could easily have been done within photoshop.
So to conclude; seeing an overly complicated material neither implies its better than less complicated ones, it might just simply mean that the artist chose to do a lot of their texturing within the material editor than in an external ap
Edit:
I would also like to say that why I think these materials often tend to become so complicated is due largely to the fact that doing your texturing in unreal DOES save you from having to re import your texture and wait around for the updates to apply.
Yeah I was just taking a look at some of the included materials in UDK and it was the first time I'd looked at them since learning more about them. I noticed exactly as you said, they're somewhat less intimidating when you break them down.
I did indeed notice that a lot of the nodes are simply blends of things like dirt masks and grunge overlays presumably to break up tiling but there are one or two where it looked like they coulda done the same thing in Photoshop.
I guess that's to allow for a few varieties of similar textures without having to import separate physical maps.
Thanks again.
There are more advanced topics you can learn though. Proceduraly created gradients, think about using texturecoordinates to create gradients or masks in your material. I put some of these in the material templates package. Consider learning more about lighting and materials and how to use the light vector and what the dot product node does.
Things like, everyone uses fresnel but that's not always the correct way the material would behave, try creating a material where fresnel only shows up when the light is behind the object.
Consider learning to store functions inside of textures. A phong highlight is pretty common and boring, but you could use it to drive a 1d look up texture that has an interesting or colored falloff.
Try mapping diffuse maps in worldspace, this is useful for tiling rain or rock that blends over all meshes.
Hope this gives you some ideas of areas to explore.
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And yes Adam that probably might be a good place to learn some more, thanks for that. Admittedly I should've posted this over in that forum, apologies