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UdemyUnreal EnginePaid courseBeginner levelCertificate

Unlocking the Unreal Engine Material Editor (Udemy.com)

Learn how to combine textures, color data, and math to create your own custom AAA quality shaders

4.0
854 reviews

Created by: Timothy Trankle

Last updated November 2018

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What you will learn

  • Create practical materials based on real world uses for shaders within a game environment
  • Learn the techniques and design philosophy behind materials and shaders for AAA game development
  • Understand how to use color data in complex ways to create breathtaking effects for your materials

How it compares

Against the other 70 rated Udemy courses in Unreal Engine on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.0 out of 5higher than 7% of them
  • Reviews854#24 of 71 by number of reviews
  • Length2.4 hoursshorter than 94% of them
  • Last updatedNovember 2018earlier than 92% of them

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Course Description

Find out the tricks and techniques to create complex, high quality shader effects for your games!

This course will teach you how to create advanced materials and shaders using PRACTICAL REAL WORLD examples!

The power of materials in a game environment is often severely underestimated. Many complex effects like animated grass, parallax shading, light absorption, and more are achieved with only an object's material and not with any complicated scripts. Good materials and shaders are becoming an ever more important facet of a game's overall look and node based shader networks are the industry standard for creating them. The Unreal Engine material editor is one of the best on the market.


This course will teach you how to use this powerful tool


Being a good material artist is all about understanding how to manipulate textures using math operations and information from the 3d-world. There is a special design philosophy that surrounds node based shader networks and it requires a new way of thinking about color and value and how they all interact. This is not only true of the Unreal material editor, but of nearly ALL node based shader editors. Meaning that you can use the techniques taught in this course in many different software applications! By the end of this course, this design ethos will be second-nature to you.


Learn by DOING

This course is divided into several projects. Each is intended to teach you a new powerful technique for creating materials. For each material, we'll go step-by-step through each node, what it does, and why it's used. By the end, YOU will make a collection of high quality materials that you can build off of for your own games!


Downloadable project files to help you follow along

This course includes a .zip file which can be extracted into an Unreal project directory. Within the project, you'll find all of the textures, meshes, landscapes, and map files that are used with each lesson so you can follow along from any starting point! This directory even includes all of the exact materials that I made during the curriculum's production so you can dive in and see how they were made or even modify them to create something new.


This course will cover:

  • The fundamentals of the Unreal Engine material editor

  • The differences between textures and materials

  • How to use information about an object like its position, rotation, and proximity to other objects to affect the material

  • How to combine colors and values using simple math operations to have total control over the material's look

  • How to create your own custom material functions

Get a Certificate of Completion when you finish the course!

30-Day 100% money back guarantee means there's no reason to hesitate!

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Read More Beginner Beginner Level product length iconTime: 2.4h

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Instructor Details

Timothy Trankle

Hello, my name is Tim. The simplest way to put this is that I like making games. So much so that I've delved into every aspect of their creation from art and animation to programming and sound. If I had to narrow it down though, my biggest passions within this field are 3d modeling and FX animation.

I studied Digital Arts at Chapman University and I'm honored to have won the "Best Art" award from the IEEE GameSIG competition two years in a row. As a freelancer, I enjoy working on a wide variety of projects. From small indie teams to multi-million dollar foreign companies, I love it all and look forward to the challenges and experience that each has to offer. Most recently, I developed a VR experience to show off an AI program at a technology conference in South Korea. It was an amazing experience that helped me practice doing more abstract art styles as opposed to my usual realistic models and effects.

During the summers, I teach at a company called Digital Media Academy (DMA) where I teach topics like VFX, 3d modeling, and game development to high school students. The courses there are pretty fast paced because we have to compress about a college course's worth of curriculum into a one week bootcamp. Thankfully, this means that I now know how to compress and distill new ideas and techniques to their most crucial components so that YOU can learn them as fast as possible and get on the road to creating your own amazing games, models, and effects.

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Reviews

4.0

854 ratings on Udemy

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By Cassandra Worthington on 11/12/2024

I wish I could rate this better, but I felt like the instructor blew through things really fast without explaining what things did sufficiently. Additionally, when you look at the materials he provided, some of the values seemed to be different than when he was inputting them in the tutorial, and even following exactly along, sometimes I just couldn't get the same effect. Not sure what that was about. The audio and video were crisp and clear though

By Scott Ackerlund on 6/4/2024

While very detailed, sometimes following along exactly produces different results. For example, in the video - the instructor says to use a refraction of "1" but when comparing to the material that came with the course, he uses a much lower value. This happens several times throughout the course and every time I had to go back and re-watch parts looking for what I did "wrong."

By Chris Faylor on 10/10/2021

A lot of it went way too fast with little explanation and the explanation that was given seemed to assume that we were understanding what it all meant. It was too much of a "Simon says plug this into that and type this value for that" kind of game. I didn't learn so much as just follow exact instructions. I suppose I gained some familiarity with the nodes, so that's a positive. I can tell the instructor has knowledge of the subject, but just isn't the best at teaching it. There were also some areas where he changed values but didn't show that so the results were off until I realized later in the video that he must have changed something between an edit. That's frustrating. I also noticed that when some other students inquired about areas where they weren't getting the same results as he was (which I also didn't have the same results) the students questions remained unanswered. Overall, this course was only average. I suppose I can use the outputs of these lessons as reference later on, but I can't say I really learned much. I certainly am not capable of doing much on my own after this

By Gregory on 3/30/2021

Excellent course! Really well put together and easy to follow along. Everything in this course works still in version 4.26 which is great! I think Epic did some number changes between when this course was made and now as some of the values need to be adjusted slightly. Otherwise all the nodes and flows work flawlessly. You'll for sure learn from this course if you don't know much or anything about the material editor in UE.

By Darren Gresch on 12/21/2020

Feels like someone made some YouTube videos and decided to monetize them on Udemy. He glosses over concepts. Overall, just not well put together (especially compared to many other UE4 courses on Udemy).

By Kyle Burton on 11/7/2020

It's decent but the teacher has been omitting/not covering several steps at this point. Getting frustrating.

By Miguel on 11/7/2020

Me ha encantado el curso. Es corto, pero te proporciona un entendimiento avanzado del sistema de materiales.

By Lee on 10/5/2020

I want to learn more useful technique like x-ray,

By Barane Chan on 10/4/2020

Clear explanation and step by step!

By Anonymized User on 9/19/2020

Content is informative but the delivery is too fast for me. I'm a professional game developer with 20 years experience so I was surprised how often I was having to pause and rewind.

By Kyle Hamm on 9/17/2020

Easy to follow. Well paced and explained!

By Debashish Mukherjee on 9/13/2020

Doesnt respond.

Showing 12 of 107 reviews

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Overall Score : 80 / 100

Unlocking the Unreal Engine Material Editor
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  • Video Duration: icon 2.4h
  • Price: $12.99
  • Provider: icon Udemy
  • Updated: icon November 2018
  • Level: Beginner Beginner
  • Language: icon English
  • Certificate: icon Yes
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