Tutorial - How to create basic VFX materials in Unreal Engine

hello and welcome to this new series of tutorials what we're going to do is uh teach you about bfx materials for beginners right so we're going to go through every single step to see what makes materials work and i do this because when i was learning i will watch many tutorials and the materials that the instructors made were really complex and they were awesome they look incredible but i couldn't really understand why they worked even now on really complex materials i just can't understand why this or that happens right and i understand also that sometimes you just need to memorize certain combinations to make certain looks and that's good but it helps me more to really understand what's going on right instead of just memorizing so that's where that's what we're gonna try to make here we're gonna try to over explain or explain in detail what is going on for every single thing that we're doing and if i miss everything please let me know right and i'll just improve upon that so let's start right um we're gonna make this sphere and it is not uh it is not complex but it does teach us uh it does teach us a few useful tricks for later on materials so it is composed of four elements first it is an opaque core then second it is a reflection a reflective material the other one is a wispy kind material inside this core and last it is a bfx it's a bfx material going in circles around rotating you need a wispy wavy look so let's start let's go i created a new folder right click material and underscore core that's the name for this lessons material so hold on okay so as soon as we start with this at the left side we have our material properties and there are plenty you don't need to learn to learn them all at the same time or all in one go the most important thing that you need to learn that you're going to use often it is the blend mode and the shading model so the blend mode is it just determines how the materials color is blended with the background colors and this is going to be more clear for you as we go on so if you choose the blend mode again that determines the color how the color is blended with the background if you choose opaque your material won't let any kind of light go through it it is never going to be transparent if you choose translucent it is going to be transparent light can go through it and same as additive for vfx you're going to be using translucent and additive a lot and sometimes spec to this three mostly all right so the way the translucent and added and additive work is that they take black pixels uh and they uh and they make them transparent right so all of the pixels are still being rendered just render it just that the black pixels they're taking as this is transparent right and the difference between translucent and additive is that it's just that additive is cheaper so for this one for the core we needed to we needed to be opaque right we don't want light to go through it we do not want it to be transparent so we're just gonna leave it on opaque and then you have the shading model and again the shading model it determines how the inputs that you've created define the materials and color all right and again this is going to be made even more clear as you go through so for vfx you will mostly just use this too and lead and default leads default lead is going to interact with light with light sources and unlit does not so we just choose unlit and lead for this for this example okay so now also you have two-sided and this is also useful so according to these well it it is fairly straightforward right if you want your material to be seen from both angles from from both sides for example over here you have a previous for your material if you want to preview it as a sphere or as a plane let's just preview it as a plane if you turn it around you don't see it right so you just press decided yeah it is very simple but for this we do not want it to be two sided and it's going to be made even more clear to you as we go as we go on because we'll also need to create meshes and everything will be better explained there so first again we want to make a an opaque core that has some kind of uh of of fake glow to it all right so let's just hold three and place left and press left click this allows us to bring a vector3 constant we could use these to uh to sign directions on our material or just to put color and for now it is just color right so maybe something like this could be yeah then we need to press and hold m and left click this brings the multiply node and this allows us to combine two materials oh well no no this allows us to combine two nodes okay so let's just hook this up and i'm just moving it with my left click right and so just to test it if you hook it on emissive color you can see our color here showing on the left side preview window but let's say that you don't really want to come here and modify the intensity every single time all right so hold s and left click and you bring a constant parameter let's just name this color intensity okay and let's hook this up so this is a one parameter if you hold one on left click you're making the same but this one is a parameter on this one you can put the name and then you can hook it and then you can cook it on a on a material instance that i'll show you after so this one these two are the same just that if you right click this and just put convert the parameter you suddenly created the same right sometimes you just want to hold one and do this and just modify anything or more than the nodes you want to hold s and just type this right will all make sense once i show you how to make the material instance so next um next next let's make some kind of fresnel to it all right so we need some kind of uh how do you say the aura on the outside some kind of it's not halo right now i don't think so okay so just right click and type fresnel and if we hook this or actually you need to hook it to review it you can just right click and press enable real time preview oh no sorry start previewing node yeah you can see what fresnel does to our material right it is just straightforward it creates this sort of uh glow right so just again right click disable real time oh come on what am i doing real-time naval is fine we just need to stop ruining node there we go and we need to combine these two so just as we did before we hold m left click and then we have this multiplier and then we hook it over here right we're just combining these two elements and now we will want to have or actually i think this is a good time to show you why i choose this one to be a parameter because again i could have just hold one and left click and hook this and just put a value right so oh you can already see how the fresnel is working right but if i have this on zero we have no color because the color has been multiplied by zero so it's nothing right it's just black oh and just to show you remember that this material is opaque right so it this does render black if you put it on translucent since it's black wait what did i just screw myself over opacity there we go i got scared for a second because i did i contradict myself no okay so yeah if this is translucent um the translucent and the additive blend modes need a need and opacity right you could have a a crazy emissive color or maybe a texture here right that it's just i'll show you right now just something quick let me bring two textures here anything honestly okay so this okay this is uh okay it's sweater texture okay but what will that what will determine how the outline looks is the opacity right so if you hook this over here you can see that it is only rendering what is shown here right that's just a quick explanation so if you go back to opaque you see that opaque has no opacity right because it it can be transparent all right so back to what we were doing we just hooked this on with an emissive color and it is not showing anything because the color is being multiplied by zero so if i uh make this a parameter and i say color intensity i can just click on apply you see that it is black right we go back to our content browser and if you right click and select create material instance and go inside it you will see that now you can modify your parameter here color intensity you can just modify it on the fly and the reason that people do this is because materials are often very complex all right and you uh the more complex the the slower it gets to work on it so if you just want to modify your material you're just gonna have to go back to this parameter change it then click apply and you waste a lot of time right it is that and also because with these parameters you can just zoom on zoom on this to blueprint right so so yes that's why you need this kind of parameters it is good that you start uh getting used to them right again so you just can modify them like this it's really easy to do it that way but for now for now just to see what is happening on the editor right now let's just say that this has a default value of two no maybe one okay yeah one all right now we will want to control the fresnel attributes and we can do it over here right just clicking it and modifying over here but it is the same thing as the current intensity you're going to be wasting a lot of time entering and modifying it and you also cannot summon it so what do you do it is the same hold s bring this parameter this parameter is going to modify exponents so personal personal exponent and we hook it and now we and now we hook the the refraction parameter so again s personnel ref and we hook it there we go right now both are on zero and let's do zero here too this is everything we need for our peg material for the core just click apply and we go back to our instance we check this and current intensity let's say that it is one fine now we need to play around these two often with the exponent if you go higher than one it's gonna get tighter and tighter right we just want some kind of faint glow we don't want much really so maybe eight or seven works and for the fresnel reference you need to put really low values if you put one the fresnel just breaks right if you start going below one it's gonna get progressively better more than one it's just breaks it right because you might as well have nothing and just create a a a tighter uh color there so we need to go below zero so point one uh i'm sorry below zero below one maybe point zero one maybe like that works it needs to be something really faint yeah i'm liking this maybe this is looking nice this is looking nice we can of course continually find it right but for now i honestly feel like this intensity is just what we need it is just what we need so again just to summarize your material is opaque because you want it to be uh you don't want light to go through it you need to emulate uh some kind of a solid core you want it to be a lit because you don't want it emitting light then we set up one color and we multiply it by a variable and we did this because in this way we can just control it easier right because um well yeah i i think it is pretty clear now but um then we multiply this by a fresnel and what the fresnel does is it makes this uh oh well it's on zero so it won't really show here but you remember right it makes this this halo we put two parameters here too to be able to modify it on on the material instance and we multiply them together this is a really simple material for the core we click apply of course that we need to save and uh for the next uh lesson we are either going to make a transparent material which is it's not going to be really complex but you will learn about reflections and and other things and after that we'll just go to to the wispy effect right which is going to use uh uv distortion and and other things so this is it for now thank you for joining me i hope that you learned if you have any kind of a suggestion just let me know and that's it thank you so much

Channel: UNF Games

Views: 52,041

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: cPwcOPEX9C4

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021