Overview of common material types (Unreal Engine)

foreign here we go let's go while we're happy yeah there we go hey Dan hey Chris on to the next one I'm excited about this as well what are we what are we showing me what are we showing me what are you showing me we are covering materials uh at least from a what I think mograph people will care about we're going to do a high level at different materials that unreal offers and some pros and cons yeah some of this some of these things have been the um the the hurdle I can't get over with unreal so I'm excited to find out more as this keeps getting better with Lumen I know and uh yeah so before we get going do all the uh Social Media stuff for us like subscribe hit that Bell whatever the kids are saying I don't know it helps yes thank you yes amen cheers to that uh and then check out our patreon in the description below or exploring that and expanding that out as we get going so Dan take it away all right let's dig in so first example you see is our Shameless plug uh no I'm just kidding so what we're going to cover today is a bunch of materials of at least the ones that I use a few that I don't but I can see some Pro uh some possibilities too and there's a lot of other ones that really dig into I haven't found a need especially people that care more about kind of like high-end rendering and using Unreal as a render engine and sequencer or you know just I guess more physically accurate stuff these are the ones that we're going to cover so um this is our custom material I'll come back to this one at the end just to Showcase you guys but uh we've been kind of doing some Exploration with pattern work uh and then mixing physically based materials um into some of these to get some fun effects and we've been using this in our work I've enjoyed using these immensely uh so we'll kind of come back to it later which leads us into the next one so this one isn't necessarily A Shader type but it is a good note of anyone who's interested is the Mega scans Library so anyone who is ever interested you can open it up in here and mega scans you have access to the bridge um and as long as you're doing work inside unreal and you're using your epic games account this stuff is all free which is very helpful it's built in the browser it's super easy to use I love using this stuff and that's kind of some of the inspiration we had if you have access to these mixing some of these in Artful ways it just makes a lot of fun for art Direction and it gives you a lot of Polish and quality to your renders so I won't spend time digging through this material but it's just a good note to call out this is a resource that's available so good everything you just said too was free as long epic games account unreal all that that's not free well yeah but it's cheap the Jeep is good so yeah okay so we'll dig in so we have opaque plain vanilla good old opaque so um I have material instances set up with this I'm going to show you both the instance and the material and I'm going to do my best to frame this up well for you guys so I've got this guy set up the standard physically based material I don't have any Textures in here I'm not using any texture Maps but you could but it's metal uh specular which I probably should just delete to me I use specular is kind of like controlling the amount of reflection uh it's probably not physically based at that point I use it as a heck and then roughness uh an isotropy which is okay but if you want to get some stretching of your metallic material it's there and a miss of color so this is the base material that I've got and the material instance that I'm using here so just a quick demo so you can see what this is you can see if I set this to one we've got this set to metal I crank this guy up I've got this set to a chrome I can kind of you know well three is over but it's all the same I set this down to zero we're now just into what would be more like a plastic uh very shiny very smooth let's see turn that guy off so you can kind of see how some of these work make a little darker so we can see it um roughness like I said just a basic material um when I would do stuff in redshift I would set up most materials like this pretty click uh pretty quick and pretty clean specular like I said this is kind of a reflection amount I don't think it falls into the PBR workflow but it's an option and I use it here and then of course one of my favorites make it glow so with Lumen oh it is shiny so the one thing I've liked since they've added Lumen is emissive materials will actually cast light out into your Global elimination when I start learning how to light stuff with octane I relied on this heavily I still enjoy this but um as you can see this kicks out light not every material does that so kick that back out and on to the next masked material and I probably I'll show you on this one where these actually fall so mask is a version of uh transparency translucency you can see with these ones they have translucency but it's only zero or one it's on or it's off you get a hard cut and you can control this so I found a number of ways when animating stuff this can be very useful but you don't get that blend so that's kind of the one downside to it um and you probably would ask why are all of these things built this way and really because unreal is a game engine a lot of these materials were built and optimized workflows to work in games at real-time frame rates but since they've added Lumen and Ray tracing we get all this better lighting so there's kind of just different effects and stuff we have to work with off of an older um you know built material so I'm going to show you guys where this is located since that's probably important we have the material domain it's a surface I'm not really digging into light functions deferred decals you can download decals off Mega scans and throw them on there but we're not going to really dig into much of these um today the blend mode is the big one so we just covered opaque this is mass translucent is next I've got additive modulate I don't remember if I did that one we'll see if that one's coming up and then Alpha hold out in some of these I don't ever use basically any of these four the top three of the ones that I use the most and then default lit I haven't really dealt much with cloth or clear coat or I have clear coat in here but some of these other ones unlit is great if I'm doing like interface work if I want something to just look like a Pantone color or a solid color and I don't want it to accept lighter shading unlead is helpful for that but I keep everything in default lit most of the time and then the last big one well there's two but two-sided is a big one so kind of elaborating on what this does because unreal historically would you want something to run in real time you need this to be optimized frame rate so your polygon normals on your object need to be facing out so any normals that the camera can see it will render when you turn this off it's only going to render one side of this so I reapply this um anything that they see in the back is now transparent and when you're working in Cinema 4D you can come up here you can go to filter no options back face calling and nothing's going to change here because all of my normals are looking pretty good um and you can check that by selecting all of them so you can see that they're orange and may not have back face coloring going on when I go through it's now translucent so this is how unreal renders is it's like back face culling it does this by default and if I turn this off now I can see the back sides of all of my normals uh why should I care you ask such a good teacher Dan no that was one that got me and got so many people coming into unreal it's like where did everything go oh my normals were backwards yeah that's a fun thing to figure out is like getting your normals accurate like I've processed so many things especially Vehicles you get crap models in their backwards and it's like oh man like it's an art form just processing normals so right now this system is only rendering what it can see um when I do two-sided and I apply this magically I can see the back and all this is now rendering which is great the downside with with this is if you're trying to be conscious about your frame rates it's rendering every polygon twice it's right in the front and the back with graphics cards getting as strong as they are it doesn't seem to matter as much to me but uh just kind of something worth covering that is kind of a big thing and that plays into transparency across the board are you moving forward I had a question about that one ask away uh what's going on because I think uh I don't think of materials uh as masked I guess so this is like interacting like a Boolean would or something in cinema yeah it's more like an alphabet so if you uh a lot of this stuff for whatever reason I think of more in terms of After Effects I think of this more as like a Luma matte yeah that's animating across but it's really it's like in texture space but yeah I mean it looks like a Boolean but it's not actually cutting or affecting any of the geometry it's all in like texture or material space so does that have depth and what's happening with where it's being cut like in a bull it would be there'd be no geometry there and you'd you'd see the like you just talked about the front and the back of the well yeah what's the answer uh so yeah so none of this geometry if I go to LIT uh check wireframe mode okay so you can see when I switch to this mode all the geometry is still there so a true Boolean is actually going to be cutting the geometry and kind of rebuilding it and doing it this is like I said it's more like an alpha matte or mask that you would use in After Effects to control your transparency if that makes sense yeah that's cool cool okay yeah so now I can like offset this in here and the nice thing is you can see is this actually does interact with the shadowing um I think because it's two-sided the lighting's affected with both but um some of these things are just you know you can have fun playing with them there's there's all sorts of fun things you can do with it all right on to the next one so translucency this is probably one of the biggest areas where unreal struggles when you compare this to an offline render like redshift or octane um because a lot of it before Ray tracing like you don't get refraction um caustics are still very experimental this is probably one of the biggest downsides that you're going to run into when you get into unreal is glass transparency if you rely on this heavily in your work this will probably be one of your biggest hurdles but um there are some good tutorials out there and some stuff that I will show you but with Ray tracing which I have an RTX card on my laptop and in my system so I can flick on Ray tracing so for an example post process volume in this scene I am rendering my Reflections in Lumen and my GI in Lumen if I'm doing stuff with like vehicles or cars or a lot of hard surface Reflections I set my Reflections almost always to Ray tracing they do a lot cleaner if I'm doing more natural environments and stuff like that Lumen does a pretty good job and it's pretty fast um let's see so the last thing in here is I've got translucency set to Ray tracing so if I set this to raster this historically is how a real-time engine is going to render transparency so it's trying to attempt to simulate volume but isn't really usable this is a raster effect but with Ray tracing I can go in and dial in some of the settings and like I said there's tutorials out there that'll tell you kind of what settings to use I will just simulate this quickly and this material so this is the material I've got I set up mine parameters so I have opacity into my opacity which makes sense ior into refraction so I'm using my index of refraction to control this and then base color and emissive color I made a note in here if you're doing renders in a sequencer this will be a little side note opacity is one thing that by default it renders after the depth buffer so you'll be rendering something with shallow depth of field it looks all nice and then everything that's transparent renders as um is hard so one thing I have to type in this dof for depth of field it starts by default as after so it renders the depth of field and then it renders this translucency afterwards so it's not getting calculated into the depth of field if you switch this to before magically everything falls in the way you want so if you're making a window or a vase or something like that and you want it to have shallow depth of field you've got to do that back into this if I set this down to one you can see this is kind of like your base translucency and since we have Ray tracing on I can go through and start modifying this and cranking this thing up more and more to get more refraction back down and I can also kind of scrub the opacity and whatnot so like I said it's not perfect it's not amazing but it's uh definitely making progress and as I'm seeing updates with the path Tracer coming I feel like glass is getting there closer and closer yeah I wonder one thing too with this being so thick if that's making it look like garbage it looks like a classic like marble block you put like stack for like the side of a shower you know yeah this would basically be the equivalent of yeah like a if this thing is a solid piece of glass yeah um but let's see parameter overrides if I took off two-sided another compile the Shader so that's not rendering the back um I've played with it some I don't have an example here but like if you made this model and then you offset like if you had a thin layer and another piece of glass on the other side I think it starts to get more accurate when this isn't just a solid chunk of geometry so if you made it thinner um it should render out better yeah so that's that additive why do we care about additive so this is not much to look at on its own um the one thing I found that this is useful is if you start getting into wanting to do rendering and simulation for like augmented reality work if you're doing work on the hololens or something like that and you want to kind of simulate to some degree how this is going to work additive just adds on top of what it sees behind it so I have my opacity and my two colors I don't really use this one ever I could see some uses of it and you can see how this color adds like you know like Dodge wood and Photoshop it kind of adds on top of it so if you wanted to do work like that where you don't have Shadows and Light is additive like I said like a AR headsetter Mr headset or whatever um this could have some uses but in a most day-to-day I don't really use this at all Alpha composite I don't use this one either but I went through and added it in here just to show like here's something else that is potentially useful it's a little more flat it doesn't look great but if you want something to look look like a screen bending light it's not doing anything I from what I can tell it's pretty efficient it's just something you can throw in your toolbox but you know yippee unlit this one does not sound like it would be that useful but if you ever just want something to be a solid color so if you notice right now the sunlight the scene like you can see there's specular light Reflections on all of these unlit is exactly what it sounds like it doesn't accept light so if you want a material that is a complete blackout it's you don't it's just like a void like I'll do things to just omit for shadows and stuff like that that can be very helpful um I'm going to dig into this and I'm pretty sure this has the ability to cast light so it makes light yeah so this can affect the GI but it doesn't accept anything outside of it and it sounds like this would be something that's useless but I find that this is useful a lot of the times if you ever get into like you know UI ux stuff like interface design or more like graphic stuff that you want to appear more flat this is constantly useful I use this a ton when I want something to not have depth um which seems counterintuitive because that's kind of the whole point of the system but they mix together that's great so last and not least I haven't dealt with this one a lot but clear coat I figured was worth mentioning it's as you can see basically a PBR Shader so I threw in concrete but like the other concrete bear with me so this guy has its own roughness material and you can crank up the reflections on this and make it shiny but the normal map is going to be mixing in with us so you're going to get more of like a rough surface and stuff like that so in the event I wanted to do like polished Concrete in a warehouse that has a smooth coat or you want to make your own car paint material where you have kind of like roughness and Reflections under the surface but then a you know Place donut gloss over the top of it that's where this one comes into uh play so it's basically exactly what you would think it I don't use it a lot um especially with the mega scan stuff a lot of this stuff is kind of covered but it is something that you can play with and you know I can see where there's some uses for it and really the last one on this list that we started with is just kind of showing you a little bit more of how this guy is built and how we use some of these stuff to mix in materials so this guy we've got our tileable Textures in here and then we've got PBR materials kind of piping into all of this that we can control and modify and do you know kind of whatever playing with this stuff so we got a whole library of these if you're interested and it's something you think would be helpful we've got this fabric leather and steel or gold that we're mixing in but I have a lot of fun of these doing with stylized work so you know if you're interested uh we'll have links below you can kind of check out some of these in the epic game store if they plug in they play wow that was beautiful they have to write that one down mm-hmm uh uh yeah thanks Dan thanks for uh showing us all that um I know there's a lot to explore there I know there's actually some others that are going to come down the road as we're exploring um feel free to make comments below actually we highly encourage making comments below just to start a dialogue and ask and answer questions make things better like subscribe push things forward check out our patreon um also the the link to our custom material packs that we have up on unreal Marketplace um maybe if you hit us up we could even slip you a little a little sample or something I don't know that's on well if you didn't even talked about that but yeah anyway I'll probably Circle that back all right um no uh until next time thanks guys have a good one

Channel: Cart & Horse

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Id: kWwcM_3vvuw

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023