All right, welcome one welcome all. In this video we are going to show how to work with materials. When dressing up your levels. Materials are essentially the coat of paint that you apply to surfaces in Unreal Engine four. And there are some key concepts to understand before you really get rolling with this. And that's what this video is going to be all about.

We're not going to go into making materials, but rather how to apply them and work with them. So a key concept I want to show right off the bat here is placing materials on static meshes versus geometry. Now static meshes are going to be something we talk more about in the next video. But just to demonstrate the differences between placing materials on static meshes and geometry, I am firstly going to come to my basics tab. Bring in a static mesh cube. Plop that down in my lab.

Like so. And then I'm going to bring in a geometry box brush likes up side by side. Okay, so if I come under my Starter Content materials folder, I have access to all kinds of materials that I can place throughout my level. Now over on the left, I've got my Static Mesh here, and let's just say I am living the highlife and I want it to be solid gold, I can simply drag and drop this material onto the surface there, or over here in the Details panel. I'll just try to drag and drop it onto the surface, because that's a convenient way of doing things. Now if I do the same thing, let me click off of it, and it's a little dark.

So I'm actually gonna place a light nearby and we have a whole video on lighting coming up, but if I hold down the L key and left click, you can bring in a light just to help demonstrate this a little bit better. So that was the end Key and left click. Now let's say I want to apply some goal to this geometry box brush over here. Well, I can left click and drag, but you will notice that I only applied it to one side, I can apply it to this side as well. And I can actually apply different materials to different sides. Maybe that's what you want.

Maybe that's not what you want. But that is good to know. You've got finer precision control placing materials on geometry, then you do a static mesh with a static mesh, it's all or none. With geometry, you've got a lot more flexibility. So I'm just gonna delete these guys out right now because I'm going to demonstrate some of the things that we can do with materials on geometry that you can't do on static mesh. I'm gonna figure out a material to place on my floor here.

And I like something brick. Let's go something, maybe clay brick. Let's try that you can choose a material of your choosing. And I just placed it on this giant slab over here. And now some things to know are I'm not liking my grid right now being on because it's flickering. So I'm going to shut that off by going under the show tab and just turning off the grid momentarily, so I can see what I'm doing better.

And that material looks pretty nice, but I would actually like to scale it up in size a little bit. How can I do that? Well, if I click on the surface of my brush right here, and the whole surface turns yellow. You can see that over in the Details panel, I've got several different things that I can change with my surface properties. There is in fact a scale property right here that I can set to enlarge or shrink the size eyes have this material. For example, let me just change the U here to be two.

And the V i will change to be two as well. And if I click Apply, you will notice that my bricks are now twice as big. Now, if I apply for to this, the V is going to be a four as well, because I currently have this lock on. If you unlock this, you can set these values independently of one another. So check this out, I'm going to set the use of four and the V to be to actually set the VDP one and now when I click Apply, you're going to see that my bricks are stretched four times as large in the u direction here, that's left and right from this vantage point, and it is its normal size 1.0 in the V direction in this perspective, it is the up and down. So you have some dropdowns here that you can Pre choose from some pre selected options.

So I'm going to go to and to because I kind of like that. Now some other fine control you have over over materials when they are applied to a box brush or any other sort of brush is you can pan them left and right. So for example, I can click on this 160 fourth button to pan this way. These are just different increments that you can slide them over. You can also pan it in the opposite direction by toggling that button right there. And likewise, you can toggle it down, move it down or up.

So what would you use that for? Well, that would be a really good way to align your clay if you have let me select that and set that to be the same size. So now I've got the same material applied to both of But you can see that they're not quite aligned. So if you're really picky and you're like, Oh man, I really want to set that right. You can, you know, Pan it up and down until it is pinpoint perfect, right? Know that you also have some controls over here to flip the U and the V, remember the U is left and right from this perspective and the V was up and down.

You also have fine control over rotating a material. So if you wanted to, you could rotate your bricks here 45 degrees you can change your direction of rotation like so. Now again, this is find control that you do not have when materials are placed on a static mesh. Another good thing to note here when working with materials and geometric brushes is you don't have to drag and drop material onto every slide. There is a way to actually grab multiple faces at one time. For example, if I was to place this floor on one side, that blue color on that side, it gets really annoying to have to do this again and again and again, wouldn't it be nice to just place it once and have it cover the whole brush?

Well, there is a way to do that. So the way we can do that is by selecting a face here. And then over in the Details panel under the geometry section, under select, you can say select matching brush. And if we do this, that will select all sides of this particular brush. So now if I wanted to coat that entire building there in grass, sure, now we have a grassy building. Pretty sweet, right?

Let's say we want it to get even more efficient. Well, what we could do is something like this, we'll select one face and see that just this one side This one face is highlighted, not the whole brush. I can then come under geometry select and let's say select all adjacent wall surfaces. So now what you've seen it done is it selected a whole bunch of adjacent wall surfaces, right. So now if I was to apply say that blue color onto the wall, it is going to cover my entire sidewalls here in blue, good efficiency tip if I do say so myself. Now I just showed you a little bit earlier how you can select one of these faces here and you can nudge your material left and right and up and down a little bit.

As you can see, we've got different pieces of geometry right here like this is box brush three. This is box brush to other other more efficient ways to ensure that these materials line up perfectly. In fact, there is if you were to select both of these, so I just control selected both of those. And I went under alignment, I could choose a line surface planar floor. And that'll make it so that everything aligns up really nice. Now the little drawback there is it set my sizing back down again.

So my scale went back down to 1.0. But if I Ctrl, select them both again, I set them back to two, and I click Apply. Now you can see that even though I've got these two separate pieces of geometry, one on the on the right here and one on the left, they align really nicely. So you've got alignment, planar floor, you've also got an option there for the wall too. So that's good to know. Let's fly over here to our eventual riverbed.

I'm going to show something real quick. But when What I'm going to do is select let's do a box brush here. And I am actually going to go into the the top down orthographic view to size this appropriately. What I'm going to do is cranked this up in size, what do we got? Let's go at least let's go at least 14,000 in the y and then we are going to go What is that distance holding down my middle mouse button 2000 in the x. Make sure that I am holding down control an end to snap that to the grid and it is on a grid line.

And I am going to just fit that right from the top down perspective. Okay, And you can see I've already got a blue material applied to it now why did it already have a blue material applied to it? Well, this is another good to know and not exactly where I want it to go at this point. But to demonstrate another thing another good to know with materials when you bring in a box brush, or a cone or a cylinder or any of these brushes with a material already selected. That material will come on the surfaces of that brush. So even if I bring in a curved stare right here, it's going to be coated in that blue material because I already have that selected.

Okay, back on topic here. Where was I going with this? Well, I want this to be water. So do we have a water material? Yes, we do in our Starter Content, we've got water lake and water ocean. I'm gonna try the lake water here.

Looks a little dark, mainly because my Lighting is poor. Right? But I wanted to point something out about this lake water material. If we double click on this material to open up the materials editor and again, this whole video is not focusing on working with the materials editor at all. There is a property along the left hand side called two sided and you should only see this property if you have the master material node located or selected here on the right hand side, you can see that it is unchecked. There are materials in the engine that are not labeled as two sided and this is one of them.

So know that if you place this material on a given surface, and you make that surface so that your character can pass through it. If they look up on the other side, they won't actually see that water at all left actually demonstrate this better by coming over here. I know I just placed that water right here, but I can demonstrate this a little bit easier if I come under the basic tab. And I've got water selected here, let me just place this on a plane. Okay, so if I was to click off, you can see that I've got some one actually, let me select there right there, there is my water applied to that plane a little tough to see. Especially because I don't have good lighting on it.

So let me hold down L and left click there is a light. Now if I was to fly underneath it, you can see that that material which is not labeled as two sided is in or invisible so you can actually see the underside of it. So if you ever come across some materials like that one and you want to make sure that you can see both sides of it. You're going to want to double click on that material, select your map master node and click on this two sided right here. Then click apply and save. And now if I come into my level I can see not only the top side of that material but let me hold down L and left click to bring on another light.

And of course I put the light way over there. Let me just copy this one, holding down ALT left clicking. And now you can see I can see the underside as well. So that is a good to know when working with materials. Now at this point, after our materials discussion here as wrapped up, you can decide what materials you want to place all along your floor and some of your buildings now, I wouldn't go crazy with the buildings yet I would, I would say go ahead and place materials on any of the floor. pieces, I would hold off going all out with materials until we get through the next video on static meshes.

Just next because we are going to be replacing some of these box brushes with static meshes and how many you replace is going to be up to you. Some of these you can choose to replace with static meshes others of these box brushes you can choose to leave and simply apply materials to them. All right, that's gonna do it all for this one guys. We'll see you in the next one.