Transcripts
1. PREVIEW VIDEO: Mystical Manny's Glowing Ball Material: Check this out. How would you like to have your very own glowing
pulsating ball? Like man he has right here. So in this video,
we're gonna go over the quick and easy way to create this glowing
ball material. Then it's really easy
to drag and drop on any object that we want. A tube, a light
tube, a handrail, any sci-fi element,
anything like that. It works really good. So we will be learning
how to do this, create the pulsing
glowing material itself, and then turn it into
this where we'll have control over the
brightness of it. Where we can easily, with this control over here, dial up the brightness. We can change the
pulsating speed. Let me pull this down here. So we can see it
only shows up here. So we can see the speed and let me just pause
him right there. We can see the speed, how fast it's
flickering, go in here. And then the shininess
of the object, which I don't usually mess with. I just wanted to start
it off pretty shiny. So if I want to dial
this down and make it to where it's very slow. Let's do this on number two. And you can see that
it's pulsating slower. And then we can just
dial this way up to where it's flickering
really fast.
2. How to Create a Cool Glowing, Pulsating Sci-Fi Material: Check this out. How would you like to have your very own glowing
pulsating ball? Like man he has right here. So in this video,
we're going to go over the quick and easy way to create this glowing
ball material. Then it's really easy
to drag and drop on any object that we want. A tube, light tube, a handrail, any sci-fi element,
anything like that. It works really good. So we will be learning
how to do this, create the pulsing
glowing material itself, and then turn it into
this where we'll have control over the
brightness of it. Where we can easily, with this control over here, dial up the brightness. We can change the
pulsating speed. Let me pull this down here. So we can see it
only shows up here. So we can see the speed and let me just pause
him right there. We can see the speed, how fast it's
flickering, go in here. And then the shininess
of the object, which I don't usually mess with. I just want to start
it off pretty shiny. So if I want to dial
this down and make it to where it's very slow. Let's do this on number two. And you can see that
it's pulsating slower. And then we can just
dial this way up to where it's flickering
really fast. So that's what we're
gonna be doing now, the easiest way to do this without going
into step-by-step, recreate this whole thing, which I'm going to
do in another video. With your mouse button,
left mouse button, click and drag and select
all of these nodes. And then using your
keyboard, do the shortcut, the control copy, because you can't really do it inside
of the window here. So Control C. And then what we're gonna
do is we're gonna go into our desktop and go to
new text document. And I'm going to name this m
underscore, M for material. Pulsating, glow. Underscore, BP,
underscore two loops. Because I already did this and I already have another one. So let's open this up. And then we're going to right-click and do
paste or Control V, which is the shortcut. And go ahead and let's
save this text document. Now this right here, a lot of people don't know
that you can actually copy and paste blueprints, saved them into a text file, just an ordinary text file. You have all the code here. And this works really good
when you're doing things like this glowing material. This just using colors. If you have textures and normal maps and
things like that, it gets a little bit tougher. You have to include those in
a folder along with this. But for things like
this, it works perfect. So let's go ahead
and get out of here. Let's go back to our
project, mystical Manny. Let's just create
this new material and paste, paste it in. So I'm gonna do Control
Spacebar to pull up my content browser. And then here I'm under
the mannequins materials. I'm just going to I'm going
to create it right here. So in the empty area, right click with your mouse
and go up to material. And let's just save this as
m underscore pulls. Oops. Helps if you're on your
right area of the keyboard. Pulsating. Glow. Underscore two since
this is a new one. And another fast tip
here is you notice when you're saving
materials up here, when you go to save it, it takes a few seconds to save. But when you go down here, see where it has
the little asterisk where these need to be saved. If you right-click
here and you go save, it saves right away
really, really quick. And I don't know why that is. It seems to be some kind
of a savings shortcut. So here it is, here on
the pulsating glow too. So let's go ahead
and double-click on that and open it up. And since this is just
a brand new material, we haven't saved anything yet. What do we have to do? We have, we have to go
take that code that's in the text file and
paste it in here. So we go down here, back to our desktop. And let's open that up again. And let's go to Edit. Select All edit, copy. Then let's go back into Unreal
Engine to our material. Left-click in the
empty spot here, just left-click with
your mouse and now use the hot key combo of control V. And bam. Look at their check that out. All of our wonderful nodes that do all the magic behind the scenes, including
the colors. Everything just comes here for us and we just
have to hook up a couple of things over here
in our output node here. So I want to point out here that if I click on
the pulsating speed, if it's already there, it kept everything there for us. The slider minimum, the slider maximum that
can be changed. The brightness level
C, I've got it here. Minimum five, maximum
five-hundred. We could put that to
5,000 if we wanted to. It's totally up to us. All of these that have already been turned
into parameters. It kept all of that
in our text file, just ordinary text file to be copied and pasted right here. So let's hook this up. Let's go ahead and
go to a roughness. And we hook that
up to roughness. And let's go to our
multiply node here because this is our
colors are going through a linear
interpretation mode, won't get into all that
then the brightness, the multiply and all that. This is gonna be connected
to the emissive color because this is an emissive
material that's glowing, not the base color. So let's just left mouse button, click and drag to the emissive. And boom, you see our
material over here. It's glowing now. So let's go ahead. We have to remember
to save over here, Save or Save As or if
you want to do it. I usually use the little
save icon over here. Okay, so now we have
our master material. Let's call this that
we'll be using. And from there we want to
create a material instance. And the reason we want to
do that is it's gonna give us all these neat controls. So let's go back
to, let's open up our content drawer
by Control Spacebar. That's our hot key.
And let's take this, our material we just created and pulsating GLUT2 and
right-click on it. And then go all the way up
to create material instance. And there we go, right here. Now we can change
the name if we want. I'm just going to go ahead
and keep it like that. Right-click, go up to save, and now double-click on it. And here we go. So we've got our material glowing
to instance. So that's how we do it. Now you can create as many instances as you
want, and I usually do, I'll create one that's
got the blue color, another one that's got
the orange or gold color. And that way it's just a lot faster if you're
working on a scene or a level and you just drag and drop these colors
onto the object. And you don't have to
go in there and take the time to change everything. Because when you
change an instant, it's going to change everything in the scene that has
that same instance. So it's good to, they're
very lightweight, meaning that they don't take up a lot of space in your scene. And you can have a lot of
variety by doing it this way. So now we've got
this glowing ball. And let me go back to this incident and
let's change that. We got the pulsating speed. I want to bring the
glow way up to 500. Okay? And now he's really glowing. Now. Let's go ahead and
start the animation. I'm going to backup
from Manny just a little bit so we
can see the ball go up higher. Okay. Now the cool thing
about these and missives in the
new Unreal Engine five is let's go ahead
and stop that and pause. Is that they affect
the objects around it. So if you notice that, man, he's got this glowing
ball and it's also reflecting up here on his, his face and also when his body. And as it moves, you'll see
that reflection traveling up. You can really notice
it if we change the intensity of the light. So very quickly, Let's say we wanted this to change this into like a dusk or a
nighttime scene. We just go up here to our
directional light up here. And then down here
under intensity, Let's just go ahead and
change that to two. Now, check that out. Let's go even a little bit
lower. Let's go down to one. Check that out. Isn't that cool? So just with a simple
setting change of the light intensity, we now have a nighttime scene. And you'll notice the glow is reflecting nicely
and lighting up. Manny. As it goes up and down. We can either take
the we can even take the volume of the light down
all the way down to zero. So he's only being
lit up by the glow, the glowing orb that
he's levitating. Bring it back up to
a daylight scene. Just by bringing the
light up to a level six. And that's how easy
it is to create this glowing pulsating material. So in review, what we do is
we take the master material, say you have it in
another project. Drag select Control
C for control copy. Then you go into a
create a text file, paste it in and save it. And then you're going to go
back into Unreal Engine. And you're going to create a new material by going up here, opening up the new material. And you're going to left-click in the empty area and you're gonna go Control
V to paste it in. And then these two are not
going to be hooked up. You're just going to have
this before you pasted it. So you're going to
connect the roughness to the roughness and the colors to the
emissive, emissive color. And then save your material. After that. You're gonna go to
the material itself. Right-click, create
a material instance, name it whatever you want, and then make as many
instances as you want. So you have different colors of the glowing pulsating material, the speed of it and so on. This is going to save you a
ton of time and aggravation. And the reason I'm going
through and making this tutorial is because I find myself having to go into my old scenes and go where did I have that glowing material? How do I do that again? Unless you're doing
it all the time, it's hard to remember
every single step because if you get one thing wrong, it's not going to work. And this particular material, a glowing material,
is used all the time. It's a really handy thing. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching.
Michael Ricks, Animator, VFX Artist
