Unreal Engine 4: Master Material For Beginners

In this tutorial I cover the basics of setting up a scene for material testing, creating the most common elements of a master material, and key information in creating effective material instances out of our master material. This is the first mini series in a collection of UE4 Tutorials on material creation. 

With nearly 2 hours of content you will learn how to create your own master materials and instances in Unreal Engine 4 and acquire basic knowledge on principles of material creation within the Unreal Engine 4 material editor. 

Here is a video breakdown:

01: New Project and Scene Setup

How to start a new first person project

How to setup a basic lighting environment for material testing. Including light mass importance volumes, sphere reflection captures, directional lights, and skylights.

Basic navigations and hotkeys for the editor.

Saving files

Baking basic lighting.

Creating folders for clean navigation in engine.

Creating Basic Blank Master Material

How to Apply Materials using Material Elements

02: Albedo Base Setup

Setup Base Color Input

Static Switch Parameters

2D Texture Parameters

Organizing with groups, comments, and descriptions.

Material Instancing

Texture saturation and hue

03: Roughness/Metalness/Normal Base Setup

Roughness Values/Maps

Metal Values/Maps

Masks

Normal Map Paramter

Normal Intensity

Clamps

Basic Math

04:Emissive Base Setup

Emissive Base Color

Emissive Power

Emissive Masking

05: AO Base Setup

AO Engine Default Setup

AO Albedo Overlay

Linear Interpolate