Week 7: Unreal Engine 5 materials

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week seven: Mon 6th March to Sun 12th March 2023

Master materials and material instances are utilized in Unreal Engine 5 to speed up the workflow since their purpose is to allow the user to make quick changes to materials without having to go through the process of setting up the shader again and again. My first attempt was to try and set up material rotation in Unreal for the master material bricks using a tutorial I found on Quixel* so that I could fix the rotation of the texture on the side of the roof but attempting to apply this change caused Unreal to crash. I decided not to try this again and instead went into Maya and manually fixed my UV rotation to fix the issue I was having (which fortunately did not crash the engine so clearly this was the way to go).

Since I was having problems with my roof tiles, I decided to try and see if I could fix my tiling and colour problems using master materials and material instances. Utilising the video demonstration**, I managed to set up albedo control for my roof tiles which allowed me to fix their colour so that they looked closer to their original appearance in Substance Designer and less washed out. I was also able to add Texture Coordinate control to fix the UV tiling and make the tiles closer to their original size from Designer.

Although I didn’t get too complex with master materials and material instances, I feel that I was able to make use of them enough to fix a few issues I was having without having to backtrack back to other programs such as Designer, which I feel sped up the process and allowed me to continue to make progress with my shop build.

REFERENCES * Thegreatbillybob, Ian - Product Support Specialist. 2020. ‘Texture Rotation Inside UE4’. Quixel [online]. Available at: https://help.quixel.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360009741098-Texture-Rotation-Inside-UE4 [accessed 9 May 2023]. ** Pryn, William. March 2023. ‘MasterMaterials_demonstration’. Microsoft Stream [online]. Available at: https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/8391d036-8bfd-4c5e-a045-1710be586bf3?referrer=https:%2F%2Flearningspace.falmouth.ac.uk%2F [accessed 9 May 2023].