{
  "file": "001 Basic materials.wav",
  "transcription": {
    "audio_file": "001%20Basic%20materials.wav",
    "text": "Alright guys, now let's go over materials so you can create beautiful looking textures and surfaces inside your Unreal Engine world. Now I'm going to just claim this with the fact that materials are a little bit complicated and kind of boring sometimes. So please bear with us. We're going to get to more fun, more exciting content in later tutorials. But right now we need to focus on this so you understand the basics of a really important aspect of Unreal Engine. So the first thing I'm going to do is create a new level that will help us illustrate materials and how to use them. So I'm going to go up here, hit New Level, and then I'm going to pick Time of Day. I mean, I think this is the best one to illustrate some of the material properties that we're going to be messing around with. All right, so as you can see, we're in this beautiful empty sky world where there's nothing for infinity. It's actually a little bit scary now that I think about it. Anyways, back to the tutorial. So I'm just going to delete this text. If I can actually select it, there we go. Delete. Come on, there we go. Wrong thing. Come on. There we go. Wrong thing. Come on. All right. So now let's change the material of one of the objects in this scene. Now let's start with this metal ball Unreal Engine logo deal thing. I don't have to call it. I don't think it has a name. Maybe it does. Let me know in the comments. I don't think UW has comments, but that's OK. So what I'm going to do to use an already existing material is open my content drawer, go to Starter Content right here, and then go to Materials and check out all these awesome materials that come with Unreal Engine by default. Now we've got some pretty cool ones here. I like this wood. And all I'm going to do is grab it from here and drag it directly in onto the object I'd like to place it on. Boom. There we go. I've got this nice wood texture on my material. Looks great. Now, of course, there's a lot more editing that can be done with the materials, and we can certainly make them a bit more custom. But before we do that, I'm actually just gonna save my world before it gets deleted. I mean, that would be sad, right? What would happen to this strange world where there's nothing except Sky and me and this wooden platform? Alright, so, I'm just going to name it MaterialStart. Then I'm going to show you how to make your own material. First thing you're going to go to add. Now before we do this actually, I'm gonna create a new folder with my content, with our content, not the starter content that Unreal gave us. It's really important to keep your file system organized, especially as your projects get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I'm gonna start early and create a new folder here, not inside Star content. So I'm actually just going to delete that and try again. Now let's go back here, close this, hit New Folder, we name it Caleb's Stuff. You name it whatever you like. Create a new material. I'll just type in m underscore my material. Name it whatever you like. And boom. Now if I double click on it, I'm now taken to this new window right here, which will allow me to edit my materials properties Now over here you have a preview viewport which will allow you to check out what your material looks like at any given time But this is where all the action is going to be happening. This is the material graph and it's the exact same editor format that you use for blueprints. It is essentially a graph of different nodes. For instance, the one default node that we already have is my material node. But if I actually go over here and add something different, it could be completely random, blend color burn, for instance, I'm going to be able to use the properties of this and connect them to properties in here to create a different type of material based on my needs and criteria. Now, of course, this doesn't make any sense just for example, but let's say I want to change the base color of this material. Now, in Unreal, the base color is actually defined by a vector node. I know that may seem a bit strange, right? Why would you use a vector to create a color? But if you think about it, a vector, which is just a combination of a few different numbers that make up some sort of representation of the world, is essentially a color because colors are made up of red, green, and blue values. So if I right click anywhere on the graph and type in constant three vector, I'm going to be able to pull out here a node that as you can see has three different numbers associated with it, which could be red, green, and blue. And then I'm going to double click on that node, which will bring up this color picker menu. So let's say I want, I don't know, purple. I love the color purple. All right, let's go for something here. Boom. Now you're going to notice that in the new area, it's still black. And that's because Unreal has a feature that allows you to combine the old material or the old color that you have with the new color that you have. Now, of course, I don't want any of the old color black. So I'm going to bring it all the way up to the new. I actually might change it a little bit. I like a little bit morey. It's a bit more blue. And then what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to drag this little dot, my left click, into base color. So once again, I'm going to drag from there with left click into base color. Now I could drag into any of these other ones, but I'm trying to create the base color, so this wouldn't work. And I can break pins easily with right clicking. And I set break link to whatever links there are, and I can select between multiple, if there are multiple links. But here we go. As you can see in the window, I now have a beautiful purple-colored ball. You can also see that by holding left-click on this window or viewport, I can circle around my object and look at it from different angles. Now if we save this material by using Ctrl S, or by heading Save over here. And then we go back to our other window. We should be able to use this material. Now, first of all, I want to be able to get back to this tab easily. So I'm going to grab the tab and move it up here just like a web browser, which will allow me to easily access both my material editor and my normal, unreal editor. So let's actually drag this material onto this metal Unreal Ball thingy. There we go. There we have it. A purple metal Unreal branding object. It's made by Unreal. Check out their logo. There are a whole lot of other ways to edit materials, but the two other main properties that you're going to want to use are roughness and metallic. Now, if we go back into the material editor, we can see that metallic and roughness are right there. Now, metallic is pretty self-explanatory. It essentially makes it look more like a metal, a bit more reflective, a, and we can change this by in a number between zero and one. Now, most of the time you're either going to be using zero or one. Zero being something that isn't metallic at all, like plastic or wood. And one being something that's pretty metallic. As you can see, it's now much more shiny. Looks like some sort of weird purple metal, unobtainium type of material. Very cool. So now let's say I want to edit roughness. I can simply grab, use Ctrl W to copy this constant, or of course I could use this menu or use the left click one trick. But I'm now going to drag this into roughness. Now, the way to think about roughness is essentially like polishing a material. Imagine you have some dishes and you polish them. Well, you're simultaneously gonna make them smoother, but you're also gonna make them shinier. And that's because those surfaces that you've just polished will actually sort of scatter less light as it reflects. So the more rough it is, the more light it will scatter and therefore the less shiny it is. So for instance, let's say I make this zero, make it very, very, very smooth. It is almost completely reflective. Now if I make it 1, once again, let's say 0.5 actually. There you go. You can see it's kind of a mixture of both. You can sort of see the outlines of the background, but it's in the middle. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that you have to use numbers between 0 and 1. And if I type in a number that's larger or smaller, for instance 15, it's not going to make it any rougher than one would. See, same thing. So they're kind of locked between zero and one. Also, another thing to note is that if I want to go back to the default, I can easily do that with one of these little back arrows. There you go, back to the default, which is zero. And now I have this cool shiny purplish material some sort of super rare metal that I'm sure is being fought over on some alien planet and I can now go back to my world and Oh, it isn't in my world and that's because I haven't actually saved it in here. It hasn't actually compiled. And now after it's done saving, it takes a while, it will be edited on my object. There you go. Now I have this pretty cool super reflective purple metal ball. Yay. I'm no longer alone in this lonely empty expanse of nothing. Thank you, you are my only friend. Anyways, now that we've gone over the basics of materials, we're going to go into a bit more depth on how to use textures to make your materials have more depth and more character. All right, see you in the next tutorial.",
    "language": "en",
    "duration": 843.99,
    "timestamp": "2025-11-26T13:43:54.875265"
  },
  "timestamp": "2025-11-26T13:43:54.880861",
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