Today I learned all about materials in Unreal. Basically they do their best to imitate real world materials through textures and other fancy settings. It is up to the user to understand and manipulate these materials in the way they want. This will come in handy when I start bringing together the whole look of the game, since I’m not going for realism I want something more stylized. The more I understand the material settings and how I can play with it, the better the game will look in the long run.
I watched this whole series on the introduction to materials. The teacher is very engaging and delightful. Give it a watch if you’re interested in how a big game engine does its objects. It is both simple and complex in how much you can do with the materials. The spheres are just previews of how the material will appear on objects. You can see here I am in the Blueprint of the materials, it’s the visual scripting of Unreal. It helps you code/script without going into the actual C++ underneath it all.
Making cool looking materials is mostly about stacking colors and images together and mixing them properly to have a proper output. I started this lesson today because I knew I was going to work on the lantern, which would be made out of metal and emit some sort of light. Later on I might make the lantern light with some particle effect instead but for now I’m liking how it looks.
The model I made is a bit ugly, and I made it bigger than it should be for the purposes of seeing how it looked on the hip. I might cut out the yellow parts of the model and put a yellow sphere instead in the center. I will definitely tighten up and refine the model in the future, but that’s generally the look I’m going for. I played around with the light colors as well because it’s so fun.
Tomorrow I’ll be putting everything together to make the prototype of the character.
GG out.
GoldenGratus Games 