I am trying to make a custom material just to teach myself how to make my own, just playing around to learn it. I made a bmp 512 X 512 of a brick as a texture and every time i link it to diffuse in the material editor it does nothing. Here's the picture of it. Any texture i add to the diffuse does nothing. The viewport will not update like the tutorial video shows and i add the material to a surface and only get the checkered default no material. Can anyone help me?

HAve you tried saving the texture as a TGA?

The textures that come with udk don't work when I make a new material do I'm not sure it being a targa is the issue. I'll try it though

The import format doesn't matter much. Most textures get DXT/S3TC (same thing) compressed. It goes like this:

Input format -> convert to raw bitmap (pretty much TGA) -> generate mipmaps -> compress to DXT -> store in package

I've been asked before if there's any way to enable/disable PSD layers, but the flattening stage removes all that data.

If it happens with other UDK textures, it's pretty clearly a problem with the materials side. What graphics card have you got and have you got updated drivers? I know newer UDK versions precache the shader binaries, and older drivers/cards may not support this which is why existing materials with caches would work but new ones without would not.

My guess is that you're stuck in mobile preview mode.

Go in to the main UDK editor window, on the top toolbar look near the far right for a dark tan box and click that.

See if that works.

That was it! I was in mobile preview. Thanks so much!