[UE4][Materials]How To's

keywords: UE4, Materials, How To’s

UE4 Materials How-To’s

How to manipulate texture repeat, uv on a material

Create a new material, with a Texture2D, or a Texture2D Parameter, difference being a paramater can be changed outside of the material editor!

There is an input UV on the Texture2D with UV on it. You can connect this with a TexCoord, but this texcoord is not a parameter, so can’t be changed outside of the material….

UV’s are values between 0 and 1. If it’s more than 1, it will repeat itself. So to make sure we can change it we need a so called Scalar Parameter. Give the scalar parameter a name to your liking, i.e. “UV Tiling”. Now multiply this value with TexCoord. Now Connect the multiply with the UV’s from the Texture2D node. Compile/Save.

Now in the Content Browser you need to make an instance. Because we can’t change a material directly, but we can change a material instance. Right click on the material and select “Create Instance”. Give it a cool name and put it on the object.

If you go into the material instance you will see your Scalar Parameter “UV Tiling”. You can change it by enabling it first with the toggle next. Change the value to see if it is actually tiling the way you want to.

Now you can change this parameter in Blueprint. Not really sure what the blueprint nodes are named exactly (currently not sitting behind my UE4 computer.). But if you look for material, or parameter you might find something you are looking for.

So remember: The object that you are changing should have the INSTANCE applied!

Side node: If you want different x and y tiling, you can append 2 Scalar Parameters together and multiply that with the TexCoord node.

Reference
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/17303/how-to-manipulate-texture-repeat-uv-on-a-material.html

How to set UV Coordinate offset of Texture and zoom in / out it

Can texture coordinate parameters be applied to material instances?
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/19412/can-texture-coordinate-parameters-be-applied-to-ma.html

How to make Outline material fade/hide with distance

Reference
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/470734/make-outline-material-fadehide-with-distance.html

Foliage Fade

Camera Depth Fade shadow fix for Foliage fade material
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTtPDBRyqBg

Dissolve Effect

Dissolve effects in UE4
http://martiancraft.com/blog/2015/02/disintegrating-baddies/

Planar Dissolve Effect - Material Tutorial - (Unreal Engine 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR3flKges_A

Stylized Fire VFX

Simon Trümpler: Sketch #20 WIP
https://realtimevfx.com/t/simon-trumpler-sketch-20-wip/7654

How to make a mesh transparent

Reference
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/157780/is-it-possible-to-make-a-mesh-transparent-without.html

How to make Occlusion Masking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6W7pLF2GwU

How to combine Normal Maps aka blend Normal Maps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYutgr9m3Fg

How to blend seams in normal map

Also make sure the Texture Sample node in your material has its “Sampler Type” set to “Normal”. Colors sampled straight from a texture range from 0 to 1, but normal maps need a conversion step to properly reconstruct the normal vector from the texture data (with a range of -1 to 1). If you import the texture as a normal map and use a normal sampler, it should all happen automatically for you in the material sampler node. If you imported it as a regular texture, sampled it in a material as a regular texture, and then switched the texture compression type to normal map, the material sampler might still be expecting a regular texture so it won’t know to automatically apply the normal vector conversion.

Reference
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/36176-normal-map-problem-seams-are-not-blending