Introduction to materials
- PBR workflow
- Base Colour
- Roughness
- Metallic
- AO
- Normal
- Height/Displacement
- UV Texturing/Unwrapping
- PBR master material & material instancing
UE5’s material system is like most DDCs which is a node-based system.
Common nodes:
- math nodes
- Constants
- Texture nodes
- Function/Parm
- Coordinates
In PBR, roughness is rough for a value of 1 and shiny is 0.
We created 4 basic materials:
- Master base
- Glass
- Chrome
- Emissive
IOR is index of refraction which is the angle at which light ray bends when entering surface.
Master and Instanced material. Instance materials build upon master master materials to increase performance.
However, often we need to plan and organise the materials.
MIs can be derived from master materials using parameters.
Mipmaps are like LODs for geometries, its the same texture but adapts resolution according to camera view.
Texture map formats:
In games, mutliple maps are stacked to different color channels.
Progress for Cabin in Woods
- Found some reference images for cabin in the woods for my UE5 project.
- Blocking layout for Cabin in the Woods, this is my blocking for my UE level
BLOCKING IMAGE HERE
REFERENCE IMAGES HERE
I will need to apply what I learnt about shaders and use it to apply some materials to my cabin as well as my lake will need some shaders as well.
Reflections
Material and Shading is a very important concept for CG artist to understand. I am glad Emily covered it in detail. She mainly went through the PBR (Physically based rendering) workflow. She also mentioned some tips and tricks to apply material and shaders in UE5. Hopefully I can apply what was taught to my cabin in woods project and make my scene more realistic. The nodes system in UE5 is familiar to other rendering softwares which mostly uses nodes system as well. So I did not struggle much with understanding the core concept of materials in UE5. The concept of material instancing however, is new, and I need some time to understand. I will need to look into it further. Also I will need to look into NPR(non physical rendering).