I was familiar with what materials and shaders did before this task, however I had never used them in Unreal Engine.
The first step to creating a material in Unreal is, well, by creating it. It is good practice to start the name of your materials with the letter “M” – to indicate that it is in fact a material.
I had never used Unreal’s material editor prior to this and so when I had followed all of the instructions to only end up having a material that was completely black, I started to panic. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to realise that the base colour input was black, hence why none of the values effected the material.
Once I had figured that out, I was surprised at how easy it was to create realistic looking materials. I started by creating a shiny metal material. I achieved this by setting the metallic value to 1 and the roughness to 0.
This is what the material looks like when applied to a cube. As you can see, the cube has a reflection of the chair on the right hand side, showing how shiny the material is.
The next material I wanted to make was a neon material. I was having trouble making the material neon as when the emissive colour value is increased, whilst it does create a bright effect, it goes completely white. Using a tutorial, I learnt that to counter this, a multiply node is used.
Here is what the neon light material looks like when applied to objects.
Overall, this task was very useful in learning how to use the material editor. I learnt some shortcuts (such as 1+LMC and 3+LMC) as well as what the multiply function is used for.
Reference List:
breadcola (2021) how to create neon lights in unreal engine 4 (or 5) [Video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IunFojAhr3E [Accessed 28/03/2022].