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Materials

Controlling the appearance of surfaces in the world using shaders.

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A Material is an asset that can be applied to a mesh to control the visual look of the scene. At a high level, it is probably easiest to think of a Material as the "paint" that is applied to an object. But even that can be a little misleading, since a Material literally defines the type of surface from which your object appears to be made. You can define its color, how shiny it is, whether you can see through the object, and much more.

In more technical terms, when light from the scene hits the surface, a Material is used to calculate how that light interacts with that surface. These calculations are done using incoming data that is input to the Material from a variety of images (textures) and math expressions, as well as from various property settings inherent to the Material itself.

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Bent Normal Maps

An overview of using Bent Normal maps in Unreal Engine.

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Bump Mapping w/o Tangent Space

How to achieve bump mapping from 3D procedural shaders where classic tangent space does not work.

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Storing Custom Data in a Material Per Primitive

An overview of the Custom Primitive Data workflow for storing custom data per primitive that's accessible through Blueprint.

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Essential Material Concepts

An introductory document on UE4 Materials and how they work.

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Material Editor Reference

Guide to using the Material Editor for creating shaders.

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Materials How-To's

A How To Guide for using different aspects of the Material Editor in Unreal Engine 4.

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Material Properties

An introductory document on UE4 Materials and how they work.

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Material Inputs

An in-depth look at the various inputs available on a Material and how they are used.

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Curve Atlases in Materials

Curve Atlases store a combination of Curve assets that enables you to access Curve Linear Color data through your Materials.

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Instanced Materials

Hierarchical material relationships that allow modification of properties to alter behavior and appearance of child materials without shader recompilation.

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Material Shading Models

Calculation models used by materials to determine how surfaces interact with light.

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Layered Materials

An introductory document on the Layered Materials technique in UE4.

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Material Expression Reference

Reference for all material expressions available for use in the Material Editor for creating complex node-based shader networks.

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Material Functions

Snippets of material graphs that can be saved in packages and reused across multiple materials.

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Material Parameter Collections

Assets that store an arbitrary set of scalar and vector parameters which can be referenced in any Material.

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Customized UVs

Feature that allows running calculations in the vertex shader to increase performance over running them per-pixel.

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Physically Based Materials

An overview of the primary Material inputs and how best to use them.

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Refraction Using Pixel Normal Offset

Overview of the Refraction mode for Pixel Normal Offset in your Materials.

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Material Layers

Build complex layered and blended materials that take advantage of material instancing.

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Material Analyzer

This page describes how to locate and use the Material Analyzer tool.

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