Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial Part 8: Materials & Textures Advanced

by the end of this video you'll be able to achieve this fully textured spaceship hanger and guess what not only will you be able to apply metal materials to your walls you'll be able to generate new textures using external software bring them in as emissive bring them in as normals and you'll be able to mix multiple normal Maps together to create this awesome look so let's get started what is up beautiful people you are back here that means you want to finish the materials and textures and what we are going to do this chapter is we going to put the textures on the wall and make it as realistic as possible be ready we're going to finish up everything right with materials and this time around we're going to dive even deeper into materials because we're going to be using some external softwares to create some new normal maps and then we're going to teach you guys how you can mix normal maps to create highly detailed walls without actually having to model anything and also we're going to add some lights to the walls to make it more sci-fi P are we ready let's go let's do this the last chapter we created our floor removed the repetitiveness and now all we have left to do is take care of these walls throw that material on the wall far guess which material we're going to use I think we're going to use the metal burnished so we're going to go back to the starter content yes let's do that dud the starter content is freaking good it's good it's not repetitive easy to use and I love it okay so we're just going to use the metal burnish steel we already created a material instance if you guys remember earlier on but I'm just going to go ahead and delete delet it because I don't think you guys followed us and now we're going to do it again together so we have the metal burning steel let's open this guy up this is the actual material we want to use because it has all those holes and details which we think will be suitable for us I'm going to remove the MF tiling cuz that's the only thing we change right everything else should be the same if you go ahead and open up metal burnish steel so let's go Ahad and add the tiling in together because we want to control the tiling um or should we apply the material and see what it looks like first actually let's do that so hit apply this is basically until this point you don't have to follow anything because this is probably your material right now let's go ahead to metal burish steel drag it drop it onto our mesh boom boom Oh Darkness okay so couple of things first of all as far said Darkness because it's now metal and it's reacting to the light differently and so it's rarely visible right should we increase our lights Let's do let's double down on the lighting okay so we have these rectangular lights let's go ahead and just SE all of them right shift select I'm going to duplicate them by holding alt and then bringing it to the left and then bring it higher just just weird lighting but don't care I just want to see things duplicate it again and bring it all the way to the right and that way we can see it reflecting it's much easier now to see the details you can go ahead and just use these three bars show FPS just to see your FPS make sure you're not destroying your computer now another way you can fix this right if you don't want to increase this many lights in case your computer is dying you can just go to LIT right right here these are different modes that you can view your your scene with so you have unlit which removes all the light and just shows you the base color of your uh meshes there's wireframe and all that you can try all of them but what we're actually looking for going back to LIT is right here we're using game settings so which means the default exposure but if we uncheck this we can play with this slider to increase the exposure of our scene it will come in handy if you don't want to increase lights and you want to just go ahead and check things out so I want to go back to zero and then uh turn on game settings for us we can afford to increase the lights so we're going to do that let's do it now fire first problem actually a couple of problems what do you notice I can see two problems one is the sharp normals here yes which is really ugly right and here as well and our edges why they look like that so here right yes so these those stretch uh stretch textures yeah stretch marks so we got to fix the UVS right and we also have to fix the normals here remember the normals that helped us extrude these bad boys right here in the beginning the same normals right now are causing these problems so in blender for instance we have the sharp normals and then smooth shading this is the exact same thing we need to go ahead and select our spaceship go to the modeling tool and fix the normals so that they will be smooth and we can do that by going all the way down to attributes and then we're going to go to normals and then what we're looking for is down here so normals topology split normal method we're going to change this to face normal threshold which is going to by the way automatically fix this yeah automatically fix it but check this out so I'm going to bring this value down to zero so it's back again and I want you to look closer to the angles that we beveled as well look at the bevels right now it's very sharp y let's see what happens when we bring it to 60 and then take it all the way to 100 80 it actually doesn't reflect light properly so we don't want this value too high just make sure somewhere in the middle 60 fixes all of our issues right in the corners now this how we fix the edge okay to fix the edge that's another thing that we have to do so let's go ahead and click accept make sure that's saved to fix the edge we need to go ahead and fix the UVS now UV unwrapping that's the whole concept that we talked about when it comes to materials when you're wrapping textures around an object if it's a cube if it's a sphere it's fairly simple but let's say you have a spaceship with different sides you know different sides of polygons it's going to become really complex and that is probably the least favorite part for majority of 3D artists to deal with UV unwrapping cuz it's so freaking tough but softwares like blender Unreal Engine Maya all these different softwares they have their own methods to deal with UVS luckily Unreal Engine has an Auto UV feature that works 80% of the time if you have problems like this so far shall we give it a try yep okay so we're going to go to UVS right here create and edit UVS now there's many different ways you can edit your UVS we're going to go to the auto UV function which is going to basically show us a checkerboard to show us what the new UVS will look like so by default this is the one that we just used to test it but by default it's going to be on patch Builder this three different methods right three different ways to calculate the UVS we recommend messing around with all of them see what works for you but the goal is to not have these weird looking patterns absolutely they need to look like this this is your goal right so it's all straight and then that way you will have proper textures so right now patch Builder doesn't work you can play with all of these but we've already played it doesn't work for us you can go to UV Atlas and then that's going to change these uh as well it's going to load for you first I don't like this as well we played with the attributes they didn't work but when we went to X Atlas and boom played so we we just increase the Checker density to see what it would look like and this although not perfect worked for us right it's the cleanest one and the front parts are also fixed so fireart shall we give this a try let's go and see okay you can play with the max iterations by the way to get different results we tried it with 10 hit accept and look at what happens so this part that was stretched out it's fixed it's fixed and what else do we have to do fire these are I think they're too big so we have to change our tiling I agree with you okay so in order to change our tiling let's go and quickly save let's go out of the modeling tab let's go to selection mode and then let's create a material instance because clearly we need to control our tiling using the sliders we know that already create a material instance and then drag it drop it onto our mesh and then go to apparent material and in here the two textures that we really care about is our base color and normal map right so we're going to create a tiling click on any of these guys and then hook the results into the base color I'm just going to bring it down here and then hook it into our normal map and just like that if you hit apply we are going to be able to see the tiling appear inside our material instance cuz it comes in as a parameter right far what value should we get let's try a seven seven seven beautiful guys we tried this number before I just throw this number right now no come on why do you have to say that we knew we knew the number okay we knew the number so you guys can play with different numbers depending on what sort of look you want to have in your spaceship but I think for us seven looks really good yeah look at that I really like this I actually think F we can even go a bit higher with the value what do you say cuz the holes are yeah a little bit too noticeable maybe we can go higher like n or wait wait wait what is it yeah like 15 maybe let's try sure I just I just don't want the marks to be so visible let's try 50 and see how that goes what do you think yeah yeah I kind of like this we can always change them later on anyways still looks very naked our texture I agree I agree so I mean this is a very good base I mean let's look at the spaceship I'm going to hit G to disable all those light marks at the top I kind of like the look of it but it still looks empty like you said what do you think we can do we need to add lights we need to add lights and probably a little bit more detailing in the walls right so this is where we're going to turn to an external software called JS placement it's free it's free it's absolutely free developed by a guy we I forgot the name but we're going to put it somewhere here he's a genius he created this software which I'm going to load up right now so JS placement got to put the link in the description so you guys can download it yeah so unfortunately I believe he's discontinued his updates for the software but there the software is so great and it's been used by many 3D artists over time that there are web versions of it like you know how the old games are now available on the web on different websites you can stream them there's web versions there are downloads just try to figure out what would be the best way for you we'll leave some links in the description so you can check it out we now have the software downloaded and when you open J placement basically what it does it it creates textures for you and these textures are mostly used for sci-fi um theme sci-fi genres so there are a couple of different textures we're going to generate but the first one we're going to look at is JS placement. grid now if you open it up this is going to look the same by the way on the web we are just going to click this here to generate a displacement map and when we hit generate it's going to give us this texture right every time you click it it's just going to create a new version now you can go ahead and play with all these parameters to change the shapes and the generations but this is pretty good for us so we're going to use something like this now what are we going to actually use this for we're going to use it like a sticker on the wall absolutely and we're going to hook this into our emissive which is going to emit light we're also going to hook it into our normal map to create some extra details trust us this is going to look super sick just just wait okay so what you want to do right now is once the image that you like is gener it you want to go ahead and save it as a height map a height map is basically the the same photo that you're looking at a black and white which we can use for many different purposes you also want to go ahead and save the normal map right both of them and it's going to save it somewhere on your drive so let's go ahead and give it a try it's going to ask you to save it we already did it so we're not going to do it anymore same thing for the normal map save it and you're good to go so once it's done you can go ahead and close it for now we don't need it anymore and then what you want to do is go ahead and load it inside your content drawer so I'm going to go ahead to our materials I'll just create a new folder not to confuse things and I'm going to call this wall texture right and inside our wall texture we're going to find I need to this is where we're recording everything I'm going to go to JS placement we've already done this many many times as you can see and the one that I like the most that we created is original so if I open it up this is the generated height map and this is the generated normal map you can see the dots and they follow exactly the same patterns drag and drop both of them into the content drawer and we have them right here so we're not going to go ahead and create a new material we're just going to go ahead and add this to the current material that we have and in order to do that I'm going to go to our Mega scans sorry start a Content open up our materials you can go ahead and duplicate this material if you want I'm just going to work on this one because this is the last time we're going to be using this metal material and now fire hood are you ready for this let's do it okay let's go ahead and open up the content drawer right here let's go back to our wall textures let's bring in our height map first and also the normal map okay so bring the normal map down here we're not going to touch that yet we want to use the height map to generate emission so fire how can we do that connected to the emissive color but make sure multiply it to an RGB I like that why do we multiply it to an RGB because we want to control the light absolutely we want to control the color of the light absolutely okay so let's go ahead and do that so if you were to just hook this RGB directly to emissive color let's see what happens let's just apply this and's let's see what happens okay cool so we're getting all these marks on our wall but first of all the marks are huge right connect that MF tiling to the same thing absolutely we want to use the same MF tiling result I'm going to zoom in here and and if your window is not going to the right just you push the window and then hit UV okay and then hit apply let's see what happens oo now it looks good beautiful right automatically a little bit more SFI looks much better now okay so now that we have these fart how can I go ahead and control the color so multiplied by a RGB RG node which is three three I'm going to bring this here so you guys see clearly so three and left click this is our RGB node and I want to multiply it so M that's a shortcut let's go ahead and put this in here put this in here and then instead we're going to put this into the emissive color give it a light blue color light blue color like a real space sh okay light blue color all right cool now far let's convert this to a parameter so that we can actually control it in the material instance I think that'll be that'll be much easier as well so parameter and then emissive color boom so hit apply and the color will automatically change here we can go ahead and go closer to it so we can see the difference and then F let's try to just change it to different colors yes and see it work in real time yes so you said blue right okay so let's keep it blue now far I want to go ahead and also control the intensity because right now it's bright but not bright enough so multiply it by another value so we need to multiply this again into a a a variable right a value so let duplicate the multiply note right here and now just want to declutter some space I'm going to pull this all the way down and then I'll pull this down so they're not crisscrossing each other so you have the missive color now we will multiply this number again and we want to control it with a value now the shortcut was one right to bring in a value but farad can I just directly bring in a parameter yes how do I do that s s so the shortcut instead of right clicking this turning it into a parameter you have another shortcut which is s left click and that is already a one that was converted to a parameter right it's called a scaler so we just call this intensity of em emission intensity emissive intensity okay int and then we'll put this into here and then we'll hook this up into aive color apply it's zero so it's going to go away and then we'll come back here and now we have a missive intensity and then using the slider we can go ahead and increase the value and check this out now guys so much this is looking ugly because we haven't added something that we call postprocess volume that is going to come in a few chapters we usually add it in the very beginning of our scenes but it just didn't make sense to talk about that until we figure out everything about materials but you can add Bloom and glow with it which is going to automatically make it look magical right so we'll do that later but right now let's take the value back to one or or even two should be just fine okay and remember you can also change the color look at this like automatically wow darker more evil right this is like super duper cool I love it I love it okay light blue I agree with fart should be perfect for us right now I actually don't mind light green as well but greenish blue we can change it later so right now should we do with a normal math it's a very good question so we said all right we have all these details from the original material from the metal material and these lights are just randomly appearing like a paint but they also have a normal map why don't we mix these normal Maps together but far can we actually go ahead and use a multiply node no okay so we have to use something else yes we need to use the specific node that can mix two normals together and that works like a multiply node but it just has a different name yes right okay so what is that node called start typing blend angle corrected normals right yes okay so right click blend angle yes that's the one corrected normals okay so this is your multiply node for normal Maps if you Tred to use multiply node it wouldn't work so we're going to hook one of these guys here and then hook the other one into here boom and then we're going to bring this guy put it into the normal map now before we make this work I just want to show you guys one thing so here as you can see it comes with this comment tab for your normal map which is default there which is there by default from the epic games guys we can go and pull this to make sure the normal map is covering here so it's more organized if you want to comment out anything you just press down a note and then hit C it's going to bring in the same Tab and then you can delete it like that okay to stay organized I never do it but you can do it do it do the right thing okay now this is going to be a very minimal difference but hey we need to learn how to mix normal maps and also it will change the way the wall reflects light so let's go and hit apply and power are you ready yes 3 2 1 boom now wait wait wait that didn't work why oh oh you reiling you reiling baby we forgot okay all right all right bring it in bring it in bring it in it's not actually tiling the same okay all right now we're going to see it around here hit apply and boom yes the intensity is not that much though oh you want to change the intensity yes okay all right how do we do that guess what you cannot use multiply for normals too no we cannot use you cannot so you fireart doesn't like how like low intensity the normal map is right now he wants to change it f we cannot use a multiply node so for normal Maps the multiply node is different for intensity and also for mixing things together so what is the new node called that we need to know about start searching flatten normal flatten normal yes so I don't know why the naming but yeah flatten so it's basically saying how flat you want your normal to be it's like the opposite of the intensity like how high you want the intensity so you're telling me if I put this into the normal and then the flatness is a value you can use an S so an S if you want it to be a parameter absolutely or a one if you don't want it to be a parameter and then we call this normal intensity normal int and then it's at zero so hook this in right now put this up here into our normal map and hit apply and save and our normal Maps right now are basically at a value of zero let's go ahead to our instances and try to control this value where is it normal intensity and see what difference we'll see so right now it's at zero if we increase the value do you see the difference they coming out no no it's actually changing so do you know why so at zero you expect it to be no normals and then at one you expect it to be really intense but because it's called flatness it's the opposite it's the opposite exactly so at one it is absolutely flat so there is no normals and then at zero it's actually really big and then negative Z doesn't do anything so right now we were actually at maximum however I want to show you guys something if the opposite flatness the concept of it being an opposite is annoying you you can always go ahead and learn this trick which is a note called one minus so if you search for one minus a one minus basically inverses inverses it absolutely so I'm going to hook this value into a one minus to inverse the flatness so that it's it's the zero and one are going to be inverted so it makes more sense so we go back here now a value of zero for the normal is flat and then a value of one is not flat and then guess what we can go even higher n just keep it to one but you see now we can go even higher than one yeah because we use the one minus so one is perfectly fine right we just wanted to look for an excuse to teach you guys how you can combine normal maps and how you can control the intensity of normal Ms cuz maybe even one for you is too much you want to make it lower now farot let me tell you one more thing I think that our Maps our mesh and its materials is still naked as you refer to it do you want to still add more detail let's do it okay should we go back to the JS placement then let's go and try another thing hold on did you guys know you can speed up your workflow by using poly Cam's photogrametry instead of modeling and texturing yeah you just snap a couple of photos a voila plus your objects will automatically look photo realistic because they're actually real shout out to polyam for sponsoring this course and giving you guys 30% off the Pro Plan promo code and Link in the description okay so right now we have the lights and we have the normal Maps but I think we can bring in more detailing let's go back to our JS placement I already closed it so let's open it up again JS placement and this time around we're going to use one of the different algorithms right let's go to JS placement 2 all right now let's generate and automatically you can see we're given these sci-fi panels that's the look of it right again you can play with all these variables but we're not going to do that you can save the height map here but we we're not going to be using these as emissive materials so that's why for us this time around it's not important to use the hide map we just want the normal map cuz we just want the detailing added on top of the wall we've already generated it we've already generated this so we're not going to do it anymore close it once your image is generated just go ahead and check it out make sure it's cool I can see the panels the normal map is there so far what do we do now we just bring the normal map bring the normal map here all right and we're going to load up the material far you got to guide me through this so I'm going to find my parent material instance okay so what do we do now I've got my new normal material here don't tell me you want to mix the normals again want to mix the normals again repeat the whole process again okay so I'm going to increase the size of this uh commment section I'm just going to make sure this is it yes this is the image texture I'm looking for I'm going to go back to my material I'm going to drag and drop my new normal map make sure I save things because we got many things unsaved and now the intensity I don't care about so I'm going to pull this forward this is my intensity pull this forward I just want to go ahead and create a new multiply note so what do I do duplicate duplicate this bring it down connect this connect the yes to here as if this was one texture and then bring this as The New Normal map and then now just follow through with the exact same method so this what are you missing what are you missing UV Ty yes make sure you don't forget that right because you want it to be the same for everything okay good on you f that was good good on you lad good on you lad okay so we got three normals now mixed with two blend angle correct cored normals and then all going into a flatten normal plus a normal intensity controlling all of that hit apply and let's see the difference wow go you see that all the details now yes so all these changes no matter how small or how tiny they look they're going to have great impacts when you're making your cinematic at the end all these tiny imperfection and details it will make your scene much more realistic absolutely and you know why we added the lights later on when you have depth of field you'll see all the boka effects behind the Stormtroopers it's going to look absolutely amazing so guys thank you so much for staying through until the material section but far we're done with materials yes congratulations to you guys who made it all the way here make sure guys to subscribe because tomorrow we will be uploading a new series of tutorial to continue on our spaceship until tomorrow ciao

Channel: Bad Decisions Studio

Views: 19,059

Keywords: unrealengine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue, ue5, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Unreal engine for beginners

Id: ZHppYUsZLpA

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024