How to create basic VFX materials in Unreal Engine Part 2

hey and welcome to the second tutorial of this beginner material series and on the first one we made the the opaque core and now we are going to work on the reflection sphere and you can just barely see it here but you can click it on your own liking right this is going to be a rather more simple material compared to the first that we made but it still has some things for you to learn right so let's just get right into it let's just create it material and perfection and we enter it and we wanted this to be additive and also a lit we do not want it to be two-sided and the first thing that we want to do is hold t and left-click to bring this texture sample and then we're gonna go over here let's click it and type quad we're gonna use uh epic texture this is this is a cube map it's gonna work perfectly for our reflection and if you don't see it you need to go here and be options and show indian content right so just click it and there we go we're using it and we need a note to um to show that this texture is being reflective right so we can just type here reflection vector okay and i don't think we can preview anything so far yeah it's not going to show for now um so let's do the basics right first we want to to finish this emissive so we have these um we'll make a particle color remember so we can modify it on the on either niagara cascade or whatever and we want to multiply these two so here we can multiply these two but perhaps it is better to have some kind of variable to modified on a material instance so maybe let's just go over here and hold s let's name this extra power and let's set a default of two maybe or you know one and let's just click apply so next thing that we want to do is just as we did on the on the first material we want this texture to to go around our cube right so we need a fresnel let's create it so right click press no and we need to multiply it again so we're here and over here let's see if we can see any results so far yeah you can already see how this is going right it is so far very basic and [Music] i'm not quite happy with it yet so we need to do a couple of modifications on this all right so the [Music] kind of complex part starts complex if you don't know if you're completely a beginner right which is the meaning for the tutorial so let's go over it slowly the first note is a pixel normal work position so what this does is that uh it uh it outputs the data of a vector depending on the direction that the normals are facing in the world and i know that it is a little complex to understand it so i i prepared something over here yeah it's just test so we have this pixel normal set up here on the base color and you can see the sphere right so depending on the direction that the uh let's say okay the direction of the normals are facing it's going to have a different color so if we output a texture here as a normal well if you put if we hook a normal here you can see depending on the direction or maybe you can see it over here yeah so depending on the direction is the color that the that the texture has right all thanks to this node here so can i explain something over here no i i think it's pretty so again uh depending on the direction of the normal is where the [Music] is what the colors are going to be right all thanks to this this note here so if we go back to our reflection for our material i want um i don't want the whole material to be visible let's say maybe i just want the top part to show or yeah maybe we just want the top part so what we can do about that is we can move we can have a dot product between this and a normal tree vector so we hold three and left click and we bring one of these and this is going to represent all of the directions right red green and blue represent x y and z so let's just put one on on the c so maybe we just want to fade from top to bottom and we're gonna be able to test this over here so don't worry so we want a dot product between these two because these two are vectors right oh that that that's divided so dot product all right if we hook these two up maybe if we preview it you can see it right that uh depending on the direction that we put here is what what happens here so if we put to zero here but one here you can see it changing so we want our gradient to be exactly on the v from here to here but um this line is way too way too thick the this gradient this is not soft at all right so let's try hooking it up and see if we can preview it like this right so you can see only this top half right i don't think you can see my mouse but you can only see the top half of the sphere and perhaps you want that right but for the example we don't really want this big of a of a difference and this is happening because the dot product what it's doing is it doesn't explain it here but it's taking values between point one and one right and we do not want that minus point i'm sorry again it takes values between minus one and one right here is everything i said it it's just thing minus one and one so we don't really want that minus one right uh because it's creating this big difference so what we want to do or drag here is this let's send up now constant bias so what this note does is that it normalizes everything from zero to plus right it is so this one it's going to reset it to zero and if we hook it over here let's see now you can see the fade on bottom right and we can obviously tweak this and maybe make it more prominent but it is up to you at the end right it is completely up to you so we can see that it is working uh i think these three are well explained uh if it is if it's not please let me know um maybe you understand it quickly but uh me and me on my case it took me long maybe i'm slow learner i don't know but it didn't work for me so let me know and we need to multiply this right so we go over here we multiply these two we can stop reviewing this we multiply these two and we forgot two things here so first we need to hook this particle color right so since we are here we are doing the opacity here and it is ending up over here let's just do another multiply here with this sorry um see like this yeah if you double left click the line you can just customize this right so it looks a little bit more ordered so it's not annoying to look at and it is at the end up to you so this is let me see oh of course we need a depth depth fade for the opacity and this is this is looking fine perhaps we can add a little bit more power here yeah this is nice if you want to put another cube map you can do it for sure but i think we covered everything here record everything so again this is a really quick really fast [Music] reflection material on the next lesson what we're gonna do is well we have two options and i'm not sure yet we either just do the wispy material um this one you know the the material going around here on the core uh or we do the meshes although the mesh is really fast we'll probably do them both so yeah on the next one we do the meshes because although they're fairly easy if you're new you don't really know why things are the way they are right so i have one mesh that it is just a normal sphere and the other one is uh it's the same sphere but with flip normals and i'll explain to you exactly why that is in case you can see in case you can't see my cursor i'm just talking about the right side of the static mesh so you can see exactly why that is so yeah we do the material already for the flowy wispy and we do the meshes i hope that you learned if there is something that is not clear please let me know and we can go through it i think i said that like five times so have a have a great one and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 15,617

Keywords: niagara ue4, vfx beginner tutorial, vfx tutorial ue4, vfx unreal beginner, vfx ue4 tutorial, how to vfx in unreal, ue4 tutorial, ue4 marketplace, unreal tutorial, unreal engine 4, unreal tutorial vfx, unreal engine 5, unreal marketplace, unreal tutorial character, unreal vfx tutorial beginner, create magic in ue4, ue4, how to create a game, how to create a rpg game, how to create a rpg game in unreal, how to become a game developer, game development coaching, unfgames

Id: o5igej-oSSE

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021