[flow_default] Transcription: 003 Material parameters and texture size.json

transcriptions/003 Material parameters and texture size.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "003 Material parameters and texture size.wav",
+  "text": "Alright, we're back. Now, before I get into talking about how to parameterize your materials to change them on the fly, I want to give you some insight on how to actually change the size and scale of your textures. Especially materials and textures such as this wood need to be scaled depending on the type of object that you're creating. So, to do so, let me use the cobblestone textures from the starter pack as an example. Now first, we're gonna go to My Stuff, and we're actually gonna create a new material. Doesn't have to have cobblestone in it. We're gonna call this Caleb's Cobble. Then we're gonna open it up by double clicking. Now, most materials are made up of three different types of textures together. The first is just the color texture, right? Think of it as a 2D photo of what the material is supposed to look like. And if I drag this into the base color, you can see that it looks like cobblestone. However, if I save this, drag this into here, and then I drag it onto my floor. While it does look like cobblestone, you'll notice that it's very flat. It looks like I took a photo and just laid it over the material, which certainly doesn't give the level of realism that we're really looking for in Unreal Engine. Now that's why you have two other types of textures that you mix with your base color very often. One of them is the normal map. Now the normal map essentially maps where the engine should put shadows on your object to give it the appearance of being 3D. So I can actually pull this in here. And just FYI, if you ever see a texture that looks like this with these blue, red, and green, it's probably a normal map. I'm gonna drag it into the normal field. And now if you can see Texture just looks a little bit more 3d if I save Go back to here did it actually compile Yeah, I did all right Then I go back here. I can see that the texture is just slightly more 3D looking. In fact, I can even rotate to demonstrate the shadows. And if you look really closely at the shadows on those cobbles, you can see them changing with the light, giving it that 3D appearance, which we wouldn't have got without the normal map. Now I'm gonna go back to my Caleb's Cobble material. The other one, which we've already seen, is roughness. I'm gonna drag this in and I'm gonna add it to the roughness channel. So add just a slight bit more detail pebbles, to be honest. Now, let's say I wanted this to look a bit more like a cobblestone street in actuality. I would need to change the size. So I'm going to go to my cobblestone. So once I'm in my material of graph again, I can pull in a texture coordinate node right there. And I can also pull in a constant. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to multiply these two together. So I'm going to find multiply. This literally just multiplies A and B together. And I'm going to drag this in to the UV input of all my different texture. Now since it's zero, I'm going to add four. And boom, there we go. As you can can see I can now change the size of my cobble relative to my object by changing this number the smaller the number the bigger the texture is so let's go for one now let's see how that looks after I compile in my world and it looks exactly like I'm going to go back to Caleb's're going to go on to making it much easier for me to change the size in the first place. Now, as you noticed, I had to compile multiple times, and that is very time consuming. Now, the way to fix this is to use something called a Material Instance and parameters to make sure that instead of having to go to my Material and edit my parameters here, I can edit them outside in the Material Editor itself. Now, how am I going to do this? Well, I'm going to go to my stuff and I'm actually going to create something called a Material Instance. To do that, I'm going to right click on this and hit Create Material Instance. We can use the default name. Now, when I load it up, you're going to see that the Material Editor is no longer there. Instead, I have a menu over here which will allow me to edit the properties of this material. However, none of the properties that I'm looking for are here. There's no size, no roughness, no color. In fact, it's pretty simple and I don't really have much control. And that's because I didn't design my initial material to allow for the parameterization of the inputs. Now, how am I gonna do this? Well, it's really simple. I can go into my Caleb column material, right click on this constant, which changes the size of my object, and hit Convert to Parameter. And I can name the parameter whatever I like, so let's just do Size. Now, all of a sudden, I save, compile one last time, and I go to my Caleb's Cobble instance. You'll see that this global scalar parameter drop down now has a parameter for size. I can left click and change the size as I wish. Let's go to 10. Let's go to 2, 1.3 and boom. All of a sudden it's become significantly easier for me to change my material and edit it in my world. Now, to make sure that this material instance is what's represented, I simply have to go here and drag the material instance onto my object instead of the material itself. And now if I want to edit it again, just double click on it. Maybe make it a bit bigger. Save. And voila. It's edited in my world. I can parameterize any input to my material. This could be the color, like in this material. The roughness. Pretty much anything that I edit within this, I can edit through a parameter in a material instance. Now there's actually something called a master material, which I'm not going to go over in this video because of the bit out of the scope of a beginner tutorial. But briefly, a master material is a material that has all of its inputs parameterized. This is great for if you want to create a potentially any material in an easy and seamless way by editing options in an instance instead of editing a material in this material graph. This can also reduce compile time in big projects by quite a bit and make everything a little bit more abstracted so that if you change something to one material, it populates to all other materials in your class. However, don't worry about this right now. For now, just experiment with the materials and textures that you have available and try to find that perfect texture for your next digital world.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 691.31
+}