Unreal Engine 5 Substrate - Photoreal Snow Shader with Nanite Displacement and Glint

[Music] [Music] today I'll show you how to create a photorealistic snow material using substrate materials in Unreal Engine 5 let's start with a blank material first delete everything and place a substrate slab using meas scans Bridge I've downloaded a snow texture that looks great I'll select all the textures and drag them into the material editor next I'll hook up the albo texture by plugging it into the diffuse albo pin for the fzo node I'll use a substrate I to f0o function and connect to scaler parameter Snow's index of refraction is around 1.3 so we'll set it to that I'll use a constant roughness and set it to 0.9 finally I'll drag in the normal map to get a clear idea of how our material looks I prefer using the mat preview mesh that comes with the engine to preview my materials so I'll add it to the scene and apply my material it doesn't look like snow yet it resembles stucco or plaster we're missing key lighting features that make snow look realistic fresh snow scatters light before it's fully absorbed a property we can model using the SSS mean-free path pin I'll use a vector parameter for this pin and a scaler parameter for the mean-free path scale allowing adjustments the parameter color represents the color light shifts to as it passes through the snow I've chosen a light blue reminiscent of snow though it's been a while since I've seen any here in Texas notice how it softens the normal map giving a softer look snow is essentially Water Crystals which have microfacets that sparkle substrate models this with glints I'll set a glint density of 1.0 and for glint UVS I'll use a regular UV node multiplied by five to achieve the desired glint scale after compiling you should have a convincing snow material moving the sunlight highlights the specular glinting adjusting the roughness changes the glint Focus around the specular lobe to elevate this further I'll use nanite displacement testing on a basic editor plane ensure nanite is enabled for your mesh modify your Project's conso variables.in file to allow nanite displacement as it's an experimental feature in the material properties under the nanite section enable tessellation toess access the displacement pin the blue channel of the snow mask texture holds the displacement I'll use a remap value range node to adjust the displacement levels closer to the 0us one range this step is optional depending on your snow texture multiply the result by a master displacement amount parameter and pass it into a named reroute node called displacement then plug it into the displacement pin I'll set up a simple expression to scale the normal map intensity according to my displacement parameter I used a value of four matching the nanite settings magnitude this example may not be entirely accurate but serves its purpose after the Shader compiles fine-tune the remap parameters based on your displacement map I'll duplicate the plane to get a better preview look at that the subsurface scattering combined with the glint really sells it let's check it out in a darker environment with Point lights this looks fantastic epic is doing an excellent job with these new material features I can't wait for them to be production ready let me know in the comments what other types of materials you'd like to see thanks for watching

Channel: Overdraw XYZ

Views: 1,612

Keywords: Nanite, Unreal Engine 5, Substrate, Snow, Materials, Game Development, Megascans, Glint, Sub Surface Scattering, Mean Free Path, Overdraw, Nanite Displacement

Id: jDykD8HULTw

Length: 4min 55sec (295 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2024