Author: Justin Geis

In this video, learn the basics of what makes up the way that materials look in Unreal Engine, as well as how to apply materials to actors in Unreal Engine.

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In today’s video, I’m going to give you an introduction to working with materials in Unreal Engine.
To start off, there are a few terms that you need to understand when working with materials. The first is the Unreal Engine is a physically based renderer, meaning basically that we define the characteristics of the materials, then Unreal Engine uses those characteristics to realistically calculate how light would respond to those materials.
We do this by defining different things about the materials within the material editor, which we’ll talk about in just a minute.
The most important things that we’re going to define are:
1. The Base Color – this sets the color of the material of your object – defined by 3 values – R, G, B.
2. Metallic – this is going to define if the surface looks like metal or not. Generally speaking, this value will be either 0 or 1 unless you’re creating some kind of corroded/dusty surface
3. Specularity is whether or not a non-metallic surface is able to reflect light. Good examples of this would be plastics. This is also a value between 0 and 1, with zero being non-reflective, and 1 being fully reflective.
4. Roughness is going to affect how materials scatter light. Values of 0 (smooth) result in mirrored reflections, while values of 1 (rough) results in a material that scatters light when it hits the face. The best way I’ve heard to describe this is to compare Glass and Chalk materials. With a glass material, light would bounce right off, creating a reflection, while with a chalk material, the surface is really rough, and the light kind of bounces around within the chalk material, so you get no reflection at all.
5. There are other attributes of materials as well, like emissive materials, which emit light, and normal maps, which give your material bumpiness, but we’re going to start off by creating and adjusting a material within the material editor.
To start off, let’s go ahead and add an example actor into our level from the Starter Content. If you don’t have the starter content loaded, you can go down into your content browser, add net, and add the starter content. Within the props section, there’s a little preview mesh object that we’re going to add to our level by dragging it in.
The easiest way to add a material to your actor is to simply drag the material in from your content browser. Let’s go ahead and add a brick_clay material to our object from the materials folder in the starter content.
You’ll notice that the object is broken up into two different kinds of colors. This is because there are two different “elements” contained within the materials in this object. These control colors of different parts of the actor. Notice that you can drag a different material in on top of the different elements to create different looks.

In this video, learn the basics of lighting your levels in Unreal Engine. We’ll talk about directional lights for your exteriors, as well as point lights, spot lights, and rectangle lights for your interiors!

In this tutorial, learn how to create a level in Unreal Engine using the box brush, and how to import and apply materials to your level!

MY YOUTUBE SETUP
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Website – http://www.therenderingessentials.com
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Disclaimers: all opinions are my own, sponsors are acknowledged. Product Links in the description are typically affiliate links that let you help support the channel at no extra cost.

Last week we talked a bit about adding objects to your Unreal Engine Levels – this week, we’re going to use those objects to create a very basic level, then try to apply some of the starter content materials to those objects.
To start off, we’re going to create a new level. To do this, open your project, then go up to file,”new level,” and select the template for “Default.” This will bring in the basic template containing the controller, etc.
Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to build our level using the box brush. This is a brush contained in the modes section under geometry, and the reason we’re going to use it is that it contains some settings that we can adjust using the brushes section of our details.
Go ahead and drag a box in from your modes section. Notice that when you select it, you can scroll down in the details section and adjust the size of the box using the brush settings.
Let’s go ahead and delete out our default ground plane, and set this box to 1000 x 1000 x 10
Now, let’s start creating our walls. We could either drag another box brush in, or we could click on this box, hold the “alt” key, and drag in order to make a copy. Now with this new copy, let’s adjust it so that it fits along one side of our ground, so give it a length of 1000, a thickness of 10, and a height of 200.
Now create a copy and move it along the other wall, then select those two, copy them again, then use the rotate function to rotate them 90 degrees.
One other function that you might find useful is that you can tap the end key to snap your walls down to whatever surface is beneath them, so if you end up adjusting your walls, you can lift them up in the air, then move them where you want them, then snap them back down.
Now we have a very basic level that we’ve created. Now let’s add some materials to it.
For now, we’re going to use the content starter pack that comes with Unreal Engine – this is very useful and contains a fair number of textures and other objects you might find useful.
The best way to find this is to go down to your content browser, go to “add new,” and go over to the button for “Content Packs,” and find the “Starter content” pack.
Go ahead and click “Add to project.”

You can then drag those materials onto different faces within Unreal Engine!

In this video, I want to talk a bit about adding different objects, or actors, into your Unreal Engine Levels. In this case, we’ll talk about different kinds of objects you can add, as well as actually adding some objects into our level.

MY YOUTUBE SETUP
https://kit.com/TheSketchUpEssentials/sketchup-modeling-and-youtube-creation-kit

Check Us Out on –
Website – http://www.therenderingessentials.com
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/easyrenders

Disclaimers: all opinions are my own, sponsors are acknowledged. Product Links in the description are typically affiliate links that let you help support the channel at no extra cost.

In this video, I want to talk a bit about adding different objects, or actors, into your Unreal Engine Levels. In this case, we’ll talk about different kinds of objects you can add, as well as actually adding some objects into our level.
If you remember from our last tutorial, any object you can add to a level is called an actor. Let’s go over a couple different ways you can add actors into your levels.
To start off, you can add various different actors to your levels from the “modes” menu. The modes menu contains a number of different kinds of things you can add to your levels, like basic geometry, stairs, lights, and more.
To add an actor to your level using the modes menu, simply click and drag an object into your level. Once your object is in your level, you can then move it around using the various tools within your viewport.
The viewport contains 3 transformation widgets that you can use to adjust actors within your level –
The translation widget allows you to move objects around
The rotation widget allows you to rotate different objects
The Scaling widget allows you to adjust the size of different objects
If you’re looking for a more control over your adjustments, you can use the geometry editing mode of the modes toolbar, which we’ll discuss more in a future video.
Note that you can use this to add things like lights to your levels as well as geometry.
You can adjust the properties of actors you’ve added to your levels using the details section.
As a bit of a teaser for a future video, you can set Unreal Engine to simulate physics on different objects, allowing you to add actively moving and reacting actors into your Unreal Engine levels.
In addition to being able to add more primitive geometry using the modes section, you can also import content using the content browser. This can be especially useful for bringing in geometry that you’ve created from 3rd party modeling programs, like SketchUp, 3DS Max, Maya, etc.
Let’s say, for example, that I create a model using SketchUp that I want to bring in to Unreal Engine using Datasmith. I would export that model using the datasmith exporter (video link below), then import it using Datasmith.
This would then show up as an object within my content browser, which I could then click and drag directly into my level. In this way, you can bring in outside models as actors into your Unreal Engine Level. You could also model the different actors for your level completely in outside 3D modeling programs, then bring them in for later use.
That’s kind of an overview of bringing different actors into Unreal Engine – leave a comment below and let me know what you thought – is this helpful to you?