Custom Sprite Material in Unreal Engine 5 - Paper 2D Basics

creating a custom Sprite material instead of just using the ones that come with paper 2D by default allows you to take your 2D and 2D 3D hybrid games to the next level some examples of what you can do with a custom material can be seen in my Sprite flash tutorial where we make the characters Sprite flash when taking damage or my video about using normal maps and creating Edge lighting for your Sprite however there are still many more use cases for making a custom material such as recolors outlines and so on by the way I finished creating all 10 episodes of the paper 2D basic series and you can get instant access to all of them right now on patreon through the six dollar tier of course everybody on YouTube will get access to these videos over the next couple of months but joining the patreon is a great way to support the channel and will give you a head start with your 2D game development with the 12 tier you can also get early access to all my other videos and you'll get your hands on the paper 2D cheat which has many useful resources about making 2D games and Unreal Engine that will save you a lot of time by default the Sprite material is set to masked unlit Sprite material which is great for 2D only games when making 2D 3D hybrids though you will most likely want to use the built-in masked lit Sprite material to allow receiving of Shadows and lights a custom material can be used for both lit and unlit materials and will work either way the first step is locating the default Sprite material the easiest way of doing this is to check the details of one of your Sprites or flip books and then look for the material settings click on the folder icon to open the material in the content browser here you can now see all the materials that come with paper 2D now we want to select both the default lit Sprite material and default Sprite material then drag them somewhere into your content folder I prepared a subfolder called materials here make sure to select copy here not move here since that will remove the materials for all of your projects and break things now we can rename the materials to M underscore custom lit Sprite and M underscore custom unlit Sprite if you open these up you can see that there are a few differences the lit material has a roughness and metallic value you can adjust it also comes with support for normal Maps the shading model is set to default lit the unlit Sprite is a lot simpler and is missing some of the notes the lit material has here the shading model is set to unlit let's now create a material instance for each of these instance materials will allow us to easily make changes to them without triggering shade recompilation and should always be used right click your custom with Sprite and create material instance for the name delete the underscore in suffix and just call it Mi underscore custom let's Sprite then do the same thing for the unlit Sprite material on our Sprites we can now select either of these material instances we can also adjust the project settings so that all new Sprites use these materials by default here you can now select the lit default mask material and set it to our custom Mi underscore custom lit Sprite material for the unlit default math material we can select our custom Mi underscore custom Outlets bright material as you can see there are also translucent and opaque materials here which you could replace with a custom version if the need arises when you create or extract new Sprites they will now automatically have the material you set up applied to them however this does not apply to flipbooks and you'll have to set it manually this should then carry over to when you use the flipbook within a blueprint and now that all of the connections between your materials material instances and Sprites are set up correctly you can proceed to change whatever you need to within your materials and it will be applied to your Sprites as always thanks to my patrons for making this tutorial series possible foreign [Music]

Channel: Cobra Code

Views: 8,654

Keywords: game development, unreal engine, gamedev, ue4, ue5, game dev, unreal engine 5, paper 2d, paperZD, unreal engine paper 2d, unreal engine 5 paper 2d, unreal engine 5 paperzd, unreal engine 2d game, paper 2d basics, unreal engine sprite, unreal engine sprite material, unlit vs lit, unlit vs lit sprite, unreal engine sprites

Id: 2rB8LpxI9Ww

Length: 3min 44sec (224 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023