The Fresnel Node | 5-Minute Materials [UE4]

hello and welcome back to five minute materials the show where we demystify every node in the unreal engine material graph today we're going to be looking at the fresnel node so what is the fresnel uh it's very commonly mispronounced as fresnel if we just chuck this into the base and a missive color no matter what angle i look at this sphere it it has you know this sort of halo around it now if i was to go ahead and change this to a cube you'll see that it doesn't really have that outline around it um but if we look at this from an angle it's white and if we look at it dead on it's black so what is actually going on here if we look in paint and i grab my trusty old crayon and we take this sphere for example we're going to look at it in a two-dimensional view first if this is our camera over here so when the normal of the object is dead on with the camera it will return zero but this angle here will return one because it is at a right angle to the camera's normal down here also returns one and the back side would return well you never see the backside so nobody knows it remains a mystery to everyone on the earth so how can we use this to effect well a really common use for a fresnel is to use it in the alpha of a lerp not a curve linear interpolate we plug that into the alpha we go into the base color and we get like two colors and we just go ahead and we plug them into here you'll see that the edges around it are you know a cool different color this is kind of the effect that you'd see in dark souls with the phantoms and stuff they have a fresnel effect that is like red or depending on what kind of phantom they are so you can change what the sort of intensity of the effect is with the exponent value um if it's infinity then it will be all a all zero and as you bring it down to zero it will become all b or one this one another cool thing about this node is that it uses the pixel normal in its calculation so if we were to put a normal map in here you'll see that the effect is uh it's sort of the same but you've got these bumps in it which are acting you know in a specific way and as we turn it up and down you can see it's a lot more sort of broken up it's not smooth anymore and that's because it is returning the normal of each pixel of the normal map rather than the vertex normal which if you need to know about vertex normal i have a link to a video right here so another cool way to use fresnel node if we were to turn our material from opaque to translucent and then in the translucency section here we're going to click surface translucency volume and we're going to learn between 1 and 1.5 or actually no i think it's 1.52 for glass and our opacity is at zero we click save and you'll see that all of a sudden we have refraction you can see the edges of the the bowl makes it look like it's made of glass or you know water or anything like that and the cool thing about using this because we're using the fresnel we can plug something into the normal slot like our rock texture from before we have a very rough looking glass because the fresnel uses the the pixel normal rather than the vertex normal very cool effect very handy for you know making cool materials basically i use this a lot you could also plug the fresnel into the opacity so that the edges become colored or you know opaque which can make it look a bit more cloudy i guess very very neat effect another thing that you could use the fresnel for in this material that i use um you can see as i look at it from a shallow angle it's that sort of bright blue baby blue color that icy color but then as i look at it from above it goes dark blue and you can see all the effects underneath it you know we've got the the lost souls and the the stars underneath but as i go shallower and shallower they'll disappear so that's just using a fresnel that basically multiplies these effects by zero as it approaches this angle so you can't see them at all here and then as we look at it from this angle you can see it all looking very very spooky so it's useful for things like you can plug a fresnel into your water surface because water tends to be see-through from above but then as you look at it on the side it becomes you know you see its color and also the reflection of the sky and that kind of thing so you could plug the fresnel into the opacity of your water shader or something like that so that's about it for the fresnel node so to reiterate what the fresnel node does is it returns a value between zero and one based on the pixel normal of the object that the camera is viewing relative to the camera's angle so on a sphere the middle point will be zero because that's looking straight at the camera but this point up here will return one because it's facing 90 degrees away from the camera so i hope you found this educational and entertaining and as always i'd love if you could hit like and subscribe and if you've got any weird tricks that you use the fresnel node in please drop it in the comments below because i'd love to hear about it and i think everyone else would if you need any help with unreal related things join our discord full of lovely people and get your questions answered 24 7 all around the clock we've got people all around the world in there and if you really really enjoy what we do here on the channel don't be afraid to check out our patreon which i will link in the schneeble so with that we say goodbye bye thank you and goodbye [Music] you

Channel: PrismaticaDev

Views: 40,857

Keywords: ue4 fresnel, ue4 pearlescent, ue4 chameleon, ue4 glass, ue4 refraction, ue4 phantom, ue4 phantom shader, ue4 outline, ue4 shaders, ue4 materials, ue4 fresnel node, 5 minute materials, ue4 how to make dark souls phantom effect, ue4 water refraction, ue4 glass refraction, ue4 diamond material, ue4 glow, ue4 glow material, unreal engine, unreal engine 4, shaders, ue4 tutorial, ue4 beginner tutorial, ue4 beginner tutorial series, ue4 beginner material, ue4 metallic paint

Id: YCHelilKhzg

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021