Creating a Master Material for your scene in UDK

[Ryan Smith]

Hey Guys,


I was feeling productive today so i thought i'd walk you through my workflow of creating a master material for the new scene i'm working on. This is a 45 minute tutorial shot in HD.

ENJOI!

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFDMFDOu474

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmE-8WeUupM

Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B5EN16trtI

Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctf4ApAeLv8

Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueGc6BdDwsk

[Sean VanGorder]

Awesome stuff. I'm always looking to learn more about creating shaders. I'll be checking this out when I get time for sure.

[cholden]

ooh, you dirty boy! Now that's the in-depth material editor video the people need to see.

[haiddasalami]

This is a 45 minute tutorial shot in HD

SHIT SON! <3 Virtuosic you planning on doing any cascade tutorials?

[fearian]

ha, I've been using the material editor for the first time today and I've been devouring tutorials - the first thing I did was make a generic mat to slap on all my untextured props. It s not that great, so I think I'll give this tut a go as soon as I'm done eating!
Thanks!

[JasonLavoie]

eeeeeeeeeee ryan you so helpful!

[fearian]

Tutorials great so far, nicely paced, and I feel like I'm picking up a a ton. I'm worried its a bit much - I set up a rim light fir the first time in UDK but I couldnt do it again without referencing the tut - I don't understand the material nodes that well yet.


One thing that bugged me was at a transition in part 2 - you set up a switch on the emissive map before hand, and it had been deleted afterwards. I was skipping around the video trying to find out where it went or if I needed it :S

(oh yeah, for thriller movie tension, play the Inception soundtrack in the background, and find yourself racing against Ryan's voice trying to follow along without pausing the video ;P DUUUUUUUUNNNN!! DUUUUUUUNNN!!)

[Ryan Smith]

ah shit, sorry. Nice critique though, i'll have to remember to go much slower next time ><.

The emissive static switch param that disappears around the 2 minute mark in part 2 of 5 is not important. you can proceed without it.

[planaria]

great tutorial for master material creation ! also you have a nice voice, bob ross would be proud.

[Autocon]

Great tutorial Ryan. Was always hesitant to create master materials that effected a large variety of props due to the fact I had no clue about the switch parameter.

Thanks for the share :)

[fearian]

The emissive static switch param that disappears around the 2 minute mark in part 2 of 5 is not important. you can proceed without it.

The speeds actually fine. If I knew my way around the mat editor better I could probably follow along by your voice alone. (I was alt tabbing a bunch).

I've nearly finished but I ran into a problem with setting up the height map. Once I plugged it in to everything the texture coordinates was plugged into, I got error after error.

http://imgur.com/VuIP0.png

I can only imagine some setting is different in mine, but I can't think what.

[Lamont]

That section you cropped isn't the issue. It's further down the line. Show what you have.

[mkandersson]

Great Im bookmarking this! Will buy your other tutorial on vertex paint as soon as I get some money :P Thanks for sharing

[Ryan Smith]

Actually the problem is because your plugging the 24 bit Black Node into the height input of the BumpOffset node. You want to use one of the colored 8 bit channels. I usually just use red.

[fearian]

durrr :) thanks!

[Kuki]

Great tutorial, thanks ;)

to JasonLavoie (http://www.polycount.com/forum/member.php?u=14536) : Hey Jason, your Avatar really gives me nightmares :poly136:

[SHEPEIRO]

nice cheers

[JasonLavoie]

Haha Kuki you should check out the cartoon :P so good (done by a polycounter).

[divi]

neat one :)

you can reduce the instructions count by using the inverted dot product of a camera vector and an up vector instead of the fresnel. use a power node on that and make the exponent a parameter. same effect, just cheaper and with access to the exponent of the fresnel in the instance.

http://content.screencast.com/users/divi/folders/Jing/media/9331ff5c-31ad-4a56-9f32-45a932d295d9/2010-07-26_1210.png

[Ryan Smith]

Ah thanks for the tip divi :D

Note that instead of using the Up Vector, you should use your normal map if you want the rim light to be effected by your object's normal map.

[Zazerzs]

Thank you. That was helpful.

[SStrickland]

Thanks a ton. The tutorial was a blast to go through. I learned a lot.

Are you planning on throwing your next tutorials on 3dMotive like your Advanced Mesh Paint tut?

[breakneck]

haven't watch the videos yet, but thanks for the effort!!!

[Ryan Smith]

Strickland - I am planning a Cascade tutorial for UDK that will be another 3D Motive DVD if the pitch gets accepted, however i'm not entirely sure what the DVD will encompass just yet.

After that i'll probably do an advanced materials DVD that will cover my workflow and design methods for making materials look as realistic as possible.

[Jesse Moody]

Ahhh nice Ryan... I have tried to show people in the past the benefits of master materials and the use of submasters and how quickly you can create variants from those and quickly make changes in your scenes..

Nice stuff..

[mathes]

Slick work Ryan.

[gauss]

Hey Ryan if you can believe this, I came to this thread from outside the forum--my own damn fault for not keeping up with the threads in this subforum. I browsed the tutorial earlier and its merits are beyond self-evident, going to follow through in actually constructing the master material right now.

Thanks for helping people understand the nuts and bolts of just how powerfully their workflow can be changed by taking advantage of how the engine works.

[Ryan Smith]

Jesse - Thanks man, I try to tell everyone who uses UDK that utilizing the material instancing is the proper way to do things. It's just setting it up right that's the tricky part. Hopefully this little tut is enough to get people started down that path.

Gauss - Thanks for the kind words. If you have any problems or questions feel free to shoot me a PM or respond on this forum. I'd be happy to help. Another great shader artist who can help you out is Divi. He's got more knowledge than I do about materials at this point.

Mathes - Thanks man, we both know that the FX stuff you're doing at DE blows my shader work out of the water :P

[Bal]

Great tutorial, thanks for sharing!
Hadn't gotten around to using master materials yet, now I have to replace all my mats in the scene I'm working on. :)

Out of curiosity, what is Fresnel doing more than the inverted DotProduct to explain the extra instructions?

EDIT: Oh and also, how about opacity? Is it possible to set up something to toggle opacity on and off with this same master material (don't really see how), or would it be necessary to build a new one specifically for materials using opacity?

[Ryan Smith]

Bal,

The Fresnel node is just the inverted dot product of the camera vector and surface normal, which is then sent to a power node (which explains the adjustable parameter of "Power" in the Fresnel node. To give it more control, you could add to this instruction count by multiplying it by an adjustable parameter, then add a bias parameter that you add to the end of the instruction,

And Yes, ASFAI you need to add a new master material for your transluscent materials.

[Jesse Moody]

And Yes, ASFAI you need to add a new master material for your transluscent materials.

Yeah I am pretty sure this is still the case. Same for double sided versions, ones with opacity or translucency and a few other options as well.

Easy enough to do though. Just duplicate the final master you made and then set the options for each one that you want set.

Just starts to suck when you are making a ton of changes over and over and you have to re-create these varients.

[Nielsen]

One thing I always like is to have some control over the detailnormal strength.
This would be the setup I'd use, there doesn't appear to be any change in instruction count compared to the original nor the appearance of the normals on the mesh, so I'm wondering whether all that appending is necessary.

http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f240/Nielsen144/Mass%20Effect%20Work%20In%20Progress/DetailNormalFunctionality.png

Is this okay?

[antonyj]

Hi Ryan.

Can't thank you enough for this tutorial. It's helped tenfold with understanding this portion of UDK. Really really loved the advanced mesh paint tutorial you have over at 3DMotive too, literally blew my mind!

Thanks a bunch once again.

Ok, ass-kissing over. But seriously, keep 'em coming!

-Ant

[Hugh]

doesnt youtube support 45 minute long videos now?

[Legend286]

doesnt youtube support 45 minute long videos now?

Up to 5 hours, maybe more.

[Oiban]

Awesome tutorial, thank you very very much!

[ikblue]

Very nice tutorial! Thanks for sharing :)

[Ovada]

Andddddddd.... Bookmarked! Thank you!

[FractaL]

Thanks for the tutorial Ryan! This is awesome!!!