How to create basic VFX materials in Unreal Engine Part 3

hey welcome to the third part of the tutorial of the um beginners vfx material series and here we're going to make this wispy effect and also the mesh um so this is fairly simple we just have one one texture and we are distorting its uvs we are also powering them see so you can control the intensity of them it is fairly simple for this one i'm using this kind of noise texture i like the holes it has i like the highlights you can use any noise texture from distorted content or maybe one that you made or if you want me to make a tutorial on textures too that can work but let me know so let's start so material um and we going we want this to be additive oops yeah we want this to be unlit and also we want it to be two-sided all right so the first thing is we want to hook our noise right so hold t left-click and you bring it up or you can bring it up on any way that you want you hook it on emissive and you can see it is already there right you can say that these holes are not transparent or totally transparent but we can control it with a with a power node so for now it is fine this is nice and we want to hold b and left click p of panner and we're going to hook it what this node does is it just gives a it um pans the uvs in in in certain direction right so if we pan it on x goes like this if you go minus right so let's just do 0.4 we can do whatever right it's just a preview for now but let's do it on why okay and now the other note that we want is this one it is vector to radial just type vector to radial value or just vector the radial and you want to hook its radial coordinates to the planar coordinates and what this does is well you can already see right it's just making the uvs of this texture be radial so um everything that you hook on this uv channel is it's obvious right just you're use modifying the uvs of this of this texture okay um so let's just make it simple let's clone this so control we can control sequencer v and we want to make a simple distortion so for the second one i'm thinking let's add them both like i want this i want them to have different effects like this texture on top it can remain like this with this radial going in and maybe the other can can have a a different kind of distortion let's just go on through it so i want to duplicate these two because i'm going to use these two textures to distort this one if you just hook this one for example or here and let's preview it with uh over here um start reviewing node okay so wait okay i'm i'm just doing it hold on just wanna quickly show you an example let's do it like this all right i think it was just failing because i was adding all three channels maybe i just needed one yeah that was it i just need one channel it's still better okay so you can see that uh from this texture the uvs are getting like well distorted right if you want to see what is really happening we hook a banner put it here and we let's just make it move it slow so you can see how this texture is being panned across the uvs of this one and you can like get a nice distortion on it right so we're trying to do that on a more delicate than a more visually pleasing pleasing way because this is awful right it is just so stale all right so what we want to do and we just want unhook this you wanna erase this um maybe let me think um maybe this direction is fine maybe we also put point one here okay we want another banner for the bottom one too let's just make it pan on a different side so yeah there are different and one thing that is important when you're panning textures you don't want them to be whole whole numbers because there's going to be one instance where they will match right so um maybe add a three here four here and over here maybe a five and maybe a two although yeah they will never match this way so now we as we're showing you earlier well as i was showing you earlier we don't want this effect so um so rough on our material so maybe you just want to multiply it so hold m left click let's let's lessen the intensity so maybe point one just barely visible let's hook it and see yeah like uh i guess we can't see it really right now we just need to wait a little bit but we also multiply this one by point one or actually maybe this one on minus point one it will make more sense after and we want to add them both directly to each of these and you can sort of see how it is distorting now but it is still matching you see some sometimes eventually just wait for it well there is some point when these are matching maybe this is not enough 83 perhaps perhaps it is better this way perhaps it is better this way so it's all right we have we have this one over here it it kind of looks like a water reflection over here um all right ah yeah okay i think i know what's going on so we want if we let's say combine these two maybe we add them and let's see what's going on we stop reviewing this if we add them and we preview it you can see how the effects aren't really adding up like one is going overall on the you can visualize it too clearly or here so let's say this is just for showing okay yeah amaze there you can see how this node over here is just spanning everywhere while the top one is um distorting in a radial way right so we want to also multiply this one or add it right so we go through here we also add it here and and that's exactly how it should look so if you're wondering what the hell happened uh again we're just hooking this one normally right and we're combining these two but the top one has this radial this radial distortion right and when we add these two together they're not matching right even if maybe if we do multiply it's going to show even clearer let's see yeah actually you can see it better if i if we multiply it so as you can see even if it's faint how the background uh distortion is just going everywhere and maybe that is what you want right maybe that is what you want and that is fine but my intention with this was just using two different kinds of distortion and both of them being really evident right so what's going on here is this top one is being distorted by this radial value but the bottom one isn't and that is why they are not they are not matching okay and i'm pretty sure i explained it on the on the first tutorial but maybe if i didn't i'm going to say it again so there is a difference between multiply and add right add you're just adding for example two systems together right and they're both gonna show like this they're both showing they're not combined they're just both on top of each other and they're showing right and multiply it just multiplies each value and creates something out of it right so sometimes you want to multiply and sometimes you want to add in this case i'm not looking to multiply these two i'm looking to add them together because i want them both right and also over here with this add i'm not trying to multiply this with this because it's not it's not going to work we want to add both of these right add both together maybe it makes more sense as you go right um so let's just hook this over here and this is not looking bad yeah but definitely it isn't that because we want both of these effects combined right so we erase this one and this was just preview so we erase it too all right so we have again our effect and well our next step should be just starting to modify ahead of the of the texture we are we are done with the distortion and just in case it isn't really clear we are panning this texture we are modifying it right on on the uvs of the texture we are making them radial so they form like this because if this wasn't present it's just going either up bottom or left or right right and this vector is is only going to work or is only going to look nice if the texture is tiled right so yeah we add it here too and this is looking nice okay so let's uh separate it a little bit let's go over here or actually we don't want to hook this just yet i don't yeah we don't want to multiply just yet even okay so we're going to modify each texture individually first what we want to do now is we want to multiply this one or actually we can do color after we want to control this like oh we actually don't all right okay i already made that my mind don't worry so for this example let's just hold tree and left click vector3 constant and let's hook it here i'm going to show you uh with the vector3 and also with the particle color so let's pick a color maybe this helps us visualize it a little bit better maybe this one is is yellow but here uh right one thing that maybe i should explain is that if the value of your color is one or less than one it's going to be a plain color right but if it if it is past one or was it past two yeah it if it is if it is past one it's going to be emissive right it is going to be a bright color so i go 3 and you can see it over here on the preview let's do it yellow and let's see how how that looks so we multiply these two so we can control the color right and we multiply again or here or no we are going to put a power node here so you left click answer right click power set p no that's spanner yeah it's just power so you hook it up and we want a scalar parameter so hold s left click and let's say that power okay we can kind of preview it over here so this is already hooked and we click apply we want to go where our material is so right click material instance and double click it just so you can preview it right and maybe put one maybe put two and you can see how the whites are more white and the blacks are right so a tree it makes it completely transparent or nearly but we may not want this so this is just the tests right so we erase it we can make these maybe two so this is usually fine okay nice so we leave this here and now we're gonna do the same for the bottom one so we multiply it again and in case it it wasn't clear enough uh you're multiplying this because you want to combine these two notes right if you use add them and let's say this is a red if you just add them you're adding color on top of the of the texture right so it is not working the same way i don't really want this color though with this we will modify it as we go through anyway alright so again we [Music] bring out the power and we hook it let's just make it right here and also scalar and this one is going to be power okay let's do this here let's put a two over here and now i i i think now we can actually add them together to the emissive this is looking sorta similar to what we want to get although the top one is just way too overpowering maybe we just go over here yeah that was way too much um you just wanted red yeah maybe you just want this red so different shades you can't really tell the difference between them but for now that's gonna have to do for now that that's gonna have to do uh we can make a difference between um uh powers between each other let's see four for one and perhaps a little bit leaning towards here right here it's still not changing and it's making me question myself why hmm let's work itself together so we can see that okay maybe the the power was way too much maybe we need a three on both it seems that the bottom one was way too faint and the top was just overpowering it let's see around here yeah i can see some highlights of uh of this one the main is this one though and we can tweak it afterwards uh quite honestly this both of these is not what we're going to use at the end but for now it will have to do now we need to create the opacity and for this one we have two options we either combine these these some of these top notes with a vector with a radial gradient for the opacity or we just do the radial let's try the radial for now so right click radial gradient it's this one this one just creates uh this circled shape for our opacity and maybe this is what we want right but um we don't want this to be just entirely like this we want two scalar parameters one for radius and we hook it on radius and the other one on density we have it here so we can modify it later and uh we will have to tweak it on the on the instance so we can see where it does or or or how it does we hook it here and now we need the depth fade did i explain about this so this one makes uh this one makes that whenever you interject something with your material or with whatever object that has this material you're going to create a soft blend which as a soft like um gradient between them i can show you in a little bit so we hook this up and nothing is going to show because our radius is zero maybe it can be 0.7 oh no density either so density is one okay so it's too squared you can see the edges maybe 0.5 yep 0.5 is looking better density needs to be higher though or is it lower let's see yeah higher is it 10 we should be changing this on the material instance is taking too long but you can see where it is going right now so let's save and let's test that that um that depth fades so you can really see what it does so let's see mesh okay whatever mesh let's say this one oh we don't have uh okay oh it's gonna have to be on one of my test maps it's fine though i guess we save it okay so um where was it i lost it okay spelker all right let's assign this material to this spell core or here okay it's way too soft we need to make it a way brighter so right click material instance open it up oh we already had one okay erase this one then okay so on here let's make it uh way brighter so maybe 30. now that's the top that is fine maybe even pushing it a little bit too much one one it looks awful it does not matter okay now we need to apply it so browse and we apply it here now you can see that whenever it is reaching to uh whenever it is crossing other geometry it is fading out right and if we didn't have this node um or here if we didn't have it the cross looks like this right it's really sharp well that that makes it clear all right uh we go back to it and of course you can also modify how much uh well you can modify the values here right okay um i can see that the power took uh to the transparent areas pretty well i think this is fine but if you bring this material to a particle system it's not going to you're not going to be able to modify either his color or its color or its its opacity because you don't have any node in here that is communicating with the particle so we don't need this and we don't need this but it was just for the sake of showing you um so right click optical vertical color let's just drag it over here we need to erase this let me just go straight through here and we're resisting straight here erase both of these and we have this particle color that we need to add at the end so i multiply between this and this hook it on the emissive right you're multiplying your whole system uh with a particle color so this particle color is changing and you also need to multiply the opacity right so this is all all of the opacity we hook it over here and we multiply this over here okay so this should be enough for our particle system all right now let's make some meshes let's go to 3ds max or maybe you have maya all right and this part is really simple but um at the end well at the start when i when i started learning i i just couldn't get it right um like i didn't really understand why uh why some use will have to be flipped or whatever but we're gonna go through it now so just create any sphere all right and um and this is it right click convert it to the little poly these sizes are fine uh the more uh geometry you have the more um the more smooth it is it's going to look but that is up to you at the end although you know what let's make it smoother yeah more segments okay it does not matter so right click it'll pulley there's one thing about exporting meshes if you know it awesome if you don't then this is useful for you so if you want to export it and you support it like this this mesh is not centered as you can see here on the bottom although can you see my my mouse movements i don't think you can damn okay so here on the bottom you can see x y and z right below my my square selection for the next video i'll i'll allow the cursor so this mesh isn't centered so whenever you export it the pivot is going to be off from the center you always need to export it on zero zero zero okay and i'm pretty sure that we can look at this example later on but this this sphere is good enough so what we want to do now is duplicate it like this uh the name is is fine just click copy and you also want to center it okay so um how do i illustrate this example better maybe we just export it like this okay we're gonna leave the second one unattended we just click on the first one and we export it okay hold on okay so i'm just gonna save it export just try to be tidy with your um with your exports i'm learning i'm having a hard time but i'm learning so uh of um uh let's say spell por it's the same name that they had before but maybe spell core okay you just click on okay you go back to unreal and you should have another file right just for meshes or whatever so import let me go on where is it quick okay tutorial spell card and you just want to import it this is fine it does not matter and we can actually we can actually ah this doesn't matter um let's uh create a new librindo we are going to start uh putting all of our meshes together here this is the big big part so right click blueprint class just select actor and let's say bp and you enter it all right and here we're gonna put all of our elements so first we want to put add component or actually we can just swap it so first this spell core over here okay and i don't want this spell chord to be a child of this default scene root so you can just drag it or well actually that works too okay that's great um so now this one we need to um add the the materials here so let's start with let's say let's start with the core with instance and we put it over here and we are using a blueprint so we don't have to just like for example go into the world and set one after other after or you need to use it on a blueprint right so it is more ordered so it can be called by other blueprints or it's just the way it should be done right um so yeah we have the first one and let's rename it let's say this is named core okay everything is fine about the score we need to add another one more so let's just duplicate it we don't want it to be a child remember that so we just wait so we wait wait wait wait wait okay let's not do it this way then we go back to here why is it allowing me to to move it though okay i think i did something terribly wrong let's roll back with ctrl c okay so this default scene route needs to be there this one is fine so we have this welcome dispel core here and let's uh let's add the core instance to here and now when we duplicate it uh-huh okay that's how it's gonna that's how it should be all right so core this is the core this one is going to be the reflection and let's hook the reflection up it's here for a second i lost it and i was like where is it okay so this is ready reflection and there is one thing that you can see from the start over here you can't see the reflection at all and once we hook the wisp it's going to be more evident so let's right click again and duplicate and this one is going to be wisp and we want to hook our is this the good whisperings no this is the the exaggerated one so we want two and here to and here how was it is it three three okay two three three three all right semi-transparent we want to put it here now this is the real one all right and you can tell nothing is showing and all you can see is the the core right so if we go to core scroll down a little bit here here you see visible if we unhook it you can see that everything is underneath it right and it makes sense right because this is an opaque material like nothing goes through it so maybe let's say put a 0.9 here you can see that it is smaller and now the the wisp is showing right but it's still not looking sorry it is not looking that nice so that is why you need an inverted uh a sphere with inverted normals right i'm going to show you right now so let's put everything to size now and we go back to 3ds max let's hide the first sphere and let's show the second one so the normals are normal here right you can see them on on the outside and you cannot see from the inside right you can just see the outside so if you on modifier we type normal you can just click flip normals now what this does is that you can only see what is going on inside right so we right click and we make an editable poly so there is a thing with this if you if your material has two-sided it is not going to matter if you have a flipped normal sphere or not because it's going to show on both sides right on the outside and on the inside so um now that the explanation is over everything is on zero let's export it this is the flipped sphere export selected this is m spell for flipped co2 if we press ok we go back here and over here import this flipped and you can already tell on the thumbnail how the difference is right this is the normal right it is you can see the normals normal right and the second one you can only see the inside and exactly this is what we want for the opaque core i'm going to show you so we click it this is which we should be erasing this okay we go on core and we go over here and let's put this we spawn not visible so it doesn't bother us now you can see we can see the inside of the core and not the outside and that is really useful right we can see the reflection we can make it more intensively so desire i'm not really liking the the chord though i'm not really liking it so let's modify it if you have two monitors this is oh no if you have two monitors then this is way easier all right we need to modify it make it a little bit more interesting so intensity we do not want to touch the intensity oh three nope wait did it break what happened oh we unchecked the personal exponent so 0.2 that looks a little bit more more valuable 8.5 0.4.5 0.5 maybe and the fresnel um okay this is i like this this is better let's save this and uh i think the reflection is fine let's uh check the whisper then let's make it visible um all right right so since i'm showing you this on uh on a blueprint we do need these set colors all right well we need to redo it um the way we are the reason why we are doing it it's because um this is just a blueprint right um if if this material and this sphere were inside the particle system then we could control the colors right but since this is just a blueprint we cannot control it if we just created a um an effect on cascade or nera and we drag the mesh drag the material and drag and drag a color over live node we can modify it right but again this is just a blueprint so we cannot modify it here and this white thing is really bothering me click on the blueprint core over here and type um house name keyboard there we go sir thanks lord it's gone we need to give the color back to this wisp so again we need to multiply this here here and here and the same for this one multiply and we hook this here and we do it here so to make it easier for us let's just right click parameter this is top color right click parameter this is what color all right let's modify it on the on the instance which makes it way easier so this is way too strong right it it had to be a one so we select that for this one can we maybe go over here let's just test things for now okay so you can see how it is kind of working and actually since the core is opaque and our whispies is um berry or oh it's um has its its opacity reduced you can kind of see it through it right maybe we need to increase the colors maybe you like this i know but um let's just increase it let's make it uh more emissive then let's try a tree sometimes it bugs so let's try that yeah that is looking faster for sure i mean way more intense perhaps a little bit too much perhaps way too much so 1.3 yeah okay and over here oh or here it is one okay it's nice i'm lagging it okay maybe we can do a couple extra tweaks so the colors are more intense but i think it is good enough for now so if we make a quick recap to end this this third tutorial we made twist material we grabbed a texture a noise we banned it we banned it series through a vector radial which makes them radial we learned how to distort the uvs right and the way that you distort them is just adding some some movement with some texture and hooking it on the uvs we control the color we control the power we add them together and everything's great um yeah uh that is with the wisp and with the meshes what we learned was about uh the oh there's one more thing that i that i want to show you okay so it is about uh it is about the [Music] where is it the two-sided thing so let's uh this over here okay um actually all right so let's uncheck this and put apply okay i don't think you can on the very clear parts you can see that this texture is not panning along those flip normals right and this is because of the two-sided that is unchecked now so the texture is only showing on the outside right if you check it it goes both ways and you can kind of sometimes see it double right so so yeah that was something smaller that i forgot and uh that is why also the the core cannot have double-sided because let's use it for the sake of argument right so it is completely clear if the core has double-sided it's going to be as if it has normals on the inside and the outside and you can't see anything again so just side note right just two sides can work for you or can work against you of course and uh i think that's all for this lesson on the next one we are going to make some vfx around it and we are going to make some tweaks because i think that the the core could be could be doing more uh could be doing more things right now it is looking like a little bit plain yeah maybe we can we can do more modifies there right maybe increase this too that is really looking better you can modify the color a little bit too we can make many things whatever but i hope that you learned and if you have any questions or any recommendations maybe i'm going too fast or maybe i missed one of the notes that i didn't really explain please let me know alright and i'll see you on the next one thank you for watching

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 17,193

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: dEQDE_nN_fY

Length: 47min 43sec (2863 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021