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

Created by: Timothy Trankle

Produced in 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

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Quality Score

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Overall Score : 88 / 100

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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 toolBeing 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 DOINGThis 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 alongThis 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 editorThe differences between textures and materialsHow to use information about an object like its position, rotation, and proximity to other objects to affect the materialHow to combine colors and values using simple math operations to have total control over the material's lookHow to create your own custom material functionsGet 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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Who this course is for:
Anyone who wants to learn about material creation in Unreal Engine 4, no matter their experience levelPeople who want to learn tips and techniques for creating more advanced materials that can achieve a myriad of visual effectsPeople who want to learn how to use node based shader networks both in Unreal and in other software like Unity, Blender, and Maya

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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 Ihad 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

4.4

101 total reviews

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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.

By Will Hannon on 8/22/2020

So far so good. I was worried that the course would be dry and boring, but it is very interesting so far, and the Instructor is clear and direct!

By Galin Hristov Todorov on 8/21/2020

I want to preface all of the following information by saying that this tutorial is informative, but that is as far as it goes.
I am giving it a 1 star, because I was looking for a tutorial that will help me understand what materials are and what can be done with them, instead i got a tutorial on what materials in most cases are and a presentation on how when you know materials everything is easy.
Basically the lecturer treats the audience as himself. He doesn't explain what goes where, what does what in detail when working with a certain variable, blueprint, node or whatever. The whole course is like a semi-cooked pasta with a walmart sauce. It looks like food, it should be food but somehow it is neither pasta nor sauce.
He explains 80% of the things he does. On 22nd video about Tri-planar mapping, he jumps from one texture to another with 3 functions without even explaining if he is giving it as an example or if this is the final state of the node he used. You start with a VertexNormalWS and you know that this will be used to "fix" the material, but suddenly you have power,abs, mask without even knowing that this will continue in the tutorial, while he prefaces it like it's just an example.
So to give an example of this:
You watch gordon ramsey cooking, and he shows you that you will cook pasta. He says that a pasta can be boiled in water with salt, but you can also put in some octopus in the water and then drops the octopus in the water with the pasta. So you naturally think "hmm he shows how a pasta can be cooked, not how right now we will cook it, i came here for pasta boiling, the video says pasta boiling and i have only pasta", but suddenly you see gordon cooking the octopus too. So now you have to find an octopus otherwise this pasta cooking will be something different that what he is showing.
Definetely could upgrade the quality of this tutorial. This person knows his craft, or so I think. But as a lecturer he has a lot to learn. You can't just jump in Unreal Engine and expect people to catch as fast as you what the F is going on. After all the course is "Unlcoking the unreal engine material editor" not "Click click material node, some math and prints and you're good to go"

By Cesar Michel Bailon Esquivel on 8/10/2020

Exactly what I was looking for, very well explained. I've learned Unreal for other different things but they never explained properly about materials and textures and I think it's one of the most important things you need to learn for the artistic view of your games and architectural visualization

By Alex Goss on 7/23/2020

Would love to see an update on Layered Materials (3+ Material Blends)

By Anonymous on 7/17/2020

yes!