Introduction to Materials in Unreal Engine 5

1. 1. Introduction to Materials in Unreal Engine 5: Welcome to introduction to materials in real Engine five. It is my pleasure to have you here with me in this course. We are going to learn a lot of things here. Materials represent 70% of the visual quality of your games maybe, and we're going to learn a lot of things about them. We're going to create a rock master material, and with that, we're going to apply all the basic principles such as the basic node operations, how to blend different colors, normal map changing, creating functions, vertex color, height contrast, work aligned textures. We're going to work on a slope mask. And by the end of this course, you will have a rock master material that you can use in your projects and also apply all the most important notes of materials. You're going to learn them here. So by the end of this session, you will be very confident to create your own materials in the future, and you will have a very, very good understanding on how to work with materials inside and real engine five. So let's get started. 2. What are Materials?: Alright, so before we go into creating materials, we need to understand what are materials and why it's important for you to learn it. Materials are basically the painting that you have in your surface. Like, it can come, like in many different shapes or forms, such as just a solid color or maybe a brick material, ceramic material or glass material. Grass, metallic materials, materials with lights, even water can be considered a material. So basically, everything that you see in the world has a material. Even this thing has a material. It's called the MI Proc grid. And everything you see in the world no matter what, we'll have a material. That's why it's really important for you to learn how to create those because just like my old boss said at UBISov, she told me, You know what? Materials pretty much will impact 70% of the visual quality of your game. And you know, it can be a little bit tricky at the beginning, but it's a very, very fun topic. So what we're going to learn here is how to create those different types of materials that you can use in your projects. We're going to go and create a master material later on so you can apply everything that we learn in this course. And obviously, you will have a good understanding on everything that you see here, any kind of material you want to create, you will be able to. So with that set, let's start explaining what are materials and what is physically based render. 3. Creating your first Material: So in order to create a new material, we just need to press control space to open the content drawer, right click, and you will see that you can create a material here. Now, you have another tab here where you can just create a material, material incense or material parameter collection. We're going to take a look at those later on. But for now, we're just going to go into material. So with that, we're going to just call it, put it an A. It's always a good idea to just call it like underscore, and let's just put it like my test my first material. It's always a good idea to put M underscore so that you know, which type of acid you're working with. And just like that, we're going to double click on this. And what you will see here, I'm going to make this window bigger. What you will see here is that at the right, you have the outputs. And here you will put all the inputs here that go for your material. So our material looks like this at the moment. Like the base color is like that, the specular value is like that, the roughness like that. We're going to take a look at all those later. But for now, if you want to preview your material, you just need to go to plus, go to shapes, and let's just put a sphere here so we can take a look at how it looks like. So let's apply our material. By applying a material, it's very easy. You can just drag and drop this one, and there you go. That's your first material. Now, if we want to change the base color, you can go to the palette here on the right. If you don't see it, it should be here on Window palette. There you go. There are multiple ways to access this. You can also right click or you can tap to access those in different categories. So obviously, we're going to go and create the most important notes first so you can get familiar with materials. And we're going to go for a constant three vector here. You will see that you have the hot keys here, one, two, and three and four for constant one, two or three vector. So you can just drag and drop here. And if you want to create, use a shortcut, hold the number and then click. For example, I just hold three and click. If I want a constant one vector, I will just hold it like that. Constant two vector, I'm going to going for it like that and constant three like that. So you may be thinking, why do we need constant one, two, or three? When do we need those? Well, basically, color is based on RGB values. If we open up some of those textures, you will see here, for example, like this one, you will see that every channel has a value. The red channel has a value, the green channel has a value, and the blue channel has a value. And when you combine all of those channels, you get the final color. So if you want to put a color here to use all the three values, you can just drag this here to the base color, and you can click here on the left where you can change the color let's just put it something like kind of like orange color, right? Now, nothing will happen here because we haven't apply. So if we apply this, you will see that our material has already changed. Now, you will notice that you can also put single values here, for example, this one, which is pitch black. You can also apply it here. And by the way, if you want to drag a note, just drag here and just like that. Okay. So obviously for color, you're going to use constant tree values, but there will be some cases where we want one vector only or two vectors. For now, we're just going to work on the color. So just like that, you have just created your first material. It doesn't have anything fancy here. Alright. So what we're going to do now is to talk about physically based render. We're going to do that in the next video. 4. Understanding PBR: Alright, so we create our first material and now what we can do. Well, a material it's basically composed of a lot of these outputs here. You can see here that we have metallic, specular value, roughness. We have normal map, we have tangent, we have or position offset, ambient clusion a bunch of those. Different inputs will give you a different look, obviously. So the base color is pretty self explanatory. It's the color that you will have in your material, right? So in our case, is this orange color, right? So we're going to go here and actually, let me delete those with just drag here and delete. And if you want to create something here with metallic, you can just go to the palette or just type constant, and you're going to go for the constant here. Alternatively, you can also press one and hold a one key and press it. It's going to be very useful for you to remember those hot keys. For now, I'm just going to show you, and later on, I will just use the hot keys. Or just going to put it here on zero. All right, so we're going to see what's going on, and I'm going to drag this thing here. I'm going to close this for now. And you will see that nothing has happened because obviously my material here is already has a zero value. Well, what happens if I put one here? If I put one and hit the ply, you will see that now my surface looks a little bit different. And the reason is we're using a metallic value here. Metalness is a very specific in output here because you either want zero or one to be physically accurate. That doesn't mean that you cannot go for 0.5, for example, something like this, let me show you how it looks like. It doesn't mean that you cannot go for these values. This is only a tool. You can use it however you want. But if you want the most physically accurate value, you want to go for a value of either zero or either one, right? So either for metallic, go for zero or one. Let's go ahead and see what the roughness value does. We're not going to touch the specular value here. Usually I recommend you to leave it at 0.5, because it already roughness and metallic will already do pretty much all the heavy lifting for you. So we're going to hold one and click again and we left click here and drag this node here. And heat apply. And what you will notice here is that we have kind of like a mirror type of material, isn't that really cool. So what happens here, the roughness, I don't know if you have touched, like, a really rough surface like a rock. It's like, it starts like your finger is hurting, right? But when you touch like marble or glass, especially when it's like a clean glass, they just clean it. You finger can just go there. It's just a very smooth surface. So obviously, the left value that roughness has the more reflective it will be. It's kind of like the surface of this one has bumps here, and the more bumps you have, it's very microscopic view of the surface. The light will hit here and then it will bump into different directions and then go out. So the reflection is lost. But when you have a really smooth surface like this, like very little roughness, basically, the light will come here, the reflection will go and go out and you will see the reflection here. That's basically what this roughness value is. So let me show you how it looks a value of roughness zero and metallic zero. It, apply. And you will notice that we have a very smooth surface. So it feels like you can almost touch, it's like one of those balls that kids like to play with, like you know, like for babies, like, very, very plastic, no harm no harm at all. It's kind of like this very smooth surface, right? As I increase the value, let's just say like 0.5, you will see that it has, like, a different value here. Now, it sees like it's more rough, right? And if you increase the value even more, to one, for example, and hit Apply, you will notice that it pretty much is very, very rough, no light, no reflection at all coming through here. So obviously, the shorter the value, the smaller the value, the less roughness it will have and the higher the value, the more roughness it will have and you won't see the reflections. Metallic is just pretty straightforward. Is this a metal surface or not? If it's metal, we can just go here and put it like that. And you can play with this a little bit, like, for example, a value of 0.6 on roughness, like, a very rough metal, no reflection at all, probably a little bit of rust here and there. So basically, these three values, the color, the metalness value, which is only zero and one, again, you can always change the value if you want, but I highly recommend you to leave at zero or one. And the value of 0.6 here, which is the roughness, roughness pretty much, all these three will determine the view of your material. Obviously, we haven't talked about normal maps or emissive colors. We're going to talk a little bit about that later. But for now, this is a very, very important concept to grasp. And if you already understand this, you pretty much know almost pretty much everything about PBR, which is the physically based render. That is the industry standard for rendering this type of services in real time applications. 5. Using Textures: So so far, we have been using single values here to take a look at what you can do with materials. But if you want to create a different look like these ones, obviously, you need to use textures. So how to use the textures here. We're going to open up the content dryer control space, and I'm using the started content. You can go to At then feature a content pack, go to content and click on Star content at the project. And you will see a folder like this. It has a bunch of assets. You also have some textures here. So what I want to do is to basically grab one of these textures, control space, and I can just drag and drop this here. And what you will notice is that I can just click here the RGB, which is going to be the red, the green, and the blue. Notice that here on the white value here is the same one as this. So we're going to just drag this here. And when we apply, what will happen is that our base color will be different. You will see that we have a texture now instead of a solid color. And basically, it will give you some, you know, more information about what's the color of the surface. Obviously, base colors are really flat. You shouldn't put any shadows here if you want to have the best look, okay? So you notice that there is also an Alpha here. That's the height map. So we're not going to use the height map at all. Let's talk about that later. But for now, you can toggle these values here on the texture editor and you can take a look at those textures, how they look in their individual channel. So what else we can do? Well, we can obviously disconnect the metallic. You can just click Alt and click to disconnect and leave it on zero. And the roughness, we're going to use probably this one. So how do you use this one? Because roughness only ask you a value of just make it bigger so you can understand better. A value of a single vector. And here we have a tree vector. We have red, green, and blue. So if you take a look at each individual channel, like the red here, you will notice that this is the roughness channel. How do I know that there isn't any shadow information? It's only black and white. And to be honest, this could also be the metallic, but let's be honest here. I don't think any kind of metallic surface will look like that. If you go to the green one, this is the ambient occlusion. How do I know that? This looks a little bit like D. If you notice, like if you painting and you add the shadows here, you notice that there is some shadows here, whereas the red channel only has very, very flat values. And the blue channel is just the same value here. You can use either the red and the blue for this. So now that we know this information, instead of dragging from here, we can actually drag from the red channel, put it on the roughness, heat, apply. And you will see that now our surface looks a little bit better. It looks a little bit weird because we don't have the normal map, and it's a good time to talk about normal maps. So what are normal maps? Let me just connect the normal map so you can see what it does. I'm going to drag the normal map here. I'm just going to place it just right here. Let me delete those so that we don't really need it. Apply. You will see now our brick looks like a brick, right? What happened here? Well, normal maps are used when we have a lot of detail here. So let me just open this up so you can take a look better. Just like this. So what are normal maps? Actually, I'm just going to make it bigger like this. Normal maps are basically information that you see from different angles. If you go for the red channel, you will see that the shadows come here means the light goes from this direction here. Is the light from this direction, and the green one is the light from this direction, right? So normal maps here are useful because basically, you can see that here in my in my texture properties, you were using world normal map, and the compression settings is set as normal map, right? So what it does is basically add all those values, like if it was model, but actually all the details are in the texture. So when the light hits, it will treat it as, Okay, this is a rough surface. Like, I'm going to treat it like it's like a little bit of a bump here and there, and this one is like inside, so I have a little bit more information about the surface quality, not only the color of it or the reflection, but also, you know, the physical property. Like when you touch it, like, can you feel like the roughness of it, like, the bumps and everything. Basically, it's pretty much bump map, right? So that's what the normal map does. And when you put it here, obviously, it's going to make our texture look really nice. If I disconnect this with Alt and heat apply, you will see that something's missing here. It looks very flat, and the reason is we don't have any light information. So as soon as you put the normal map, Bam. I just looks really, really nice, especially when you put some lights. Let me hold and click so you can see some lights. You will see that the normal map is working wonderfully here, even though our geometry is just like, let me just go for this. Our geometry is just really flat. We don't have any geometry here in this mesh. The normal map is doing the work for us. If we disconnect this, you will see that Oh, actually, there is no bump here. It's like it's kind of like faking detail. For your measures. So it's very, very useful. It's not only for faking detail, but also for making your surface look much more natural. So with that, we pretty much cover almost everything here. The green one is going to be the ambient occlusion, but to be honest, you're not going to see much of a detail here. Here, I just going to be a little bit of cluted, but that's pretty much it. With that, you have all the basics for your PVR material, which is the base color, the roughness, and oclusion I'm going to put it as optional. If you have it, you can just connect it and that's it, and then use the normal map. The metallic obviously will need another texture if your surface is metallic or not. But with that, you know pretty much about what physically base render is about. And with that knowledge, we can go on and add more complex stuffing to this. 6. Multiply and Lerp Nodes: Alright, so now that you know the basics of PVR, let's add more complexity to our first material here. So what do you want to do is to basically, for example, one of the most common operations that you can do with materials is actually changing the color. So how do you go about that? Well, there are multiple ways. I'm going to show you a couple of those. The first one is the multiply. By right click, type multiply, you will see that I have multiply here, I can just hit here. Now, this is such a common aberration that if you do that very often, you also can press and click so you can add the multiply here very easily. Just hold the M and click and you have multiple multiply nodes. So what does it does? What does it do? Basically connect this here. Okay. And multiply, basically, it is what it is, right? You know, if you multiply by a bigger value, it will just basically add more into your material. So what you can do here is actually go for a constant tree vector, hold tree and click. And go here. And now you will see what happens when I hit apply is that my texture now is black. And the reason is we are multiplying everything by zero. So what happens here is you have your RGB values. So, for example, like, I don't know, like 0.7, 0.2, 0.3, and then you multiply by this value here. If it's zero, obviously, the result is going to be zero, right? But if it's like zero point I don't know, if it's like 1.2, and then this value, it's going to be like 0.6, and basically everything will change here. The easiest way to understand this is like a tint. So we can go here and actually put something like orange apply. And then what will happen here is that everything here will be multiplied by the orange color, so everything will have a tint of orange. Now obviously, this will apply to everything, right? So what else can you do? Well, you can use the larp node. Let's take a look at the larp node. If I hold L, you can call Linea interpolate. Also a very useful note. You can press L to do that. So what will happen here? So basically, you need an Alpha and two colors, right? So let me show you what I mean. If you remember our mask here, I have I believe it's not in this one. It's here on the Alpha value. You will see that I have an Alpha here where I have the white values here and the black values there. So what I can do here is connect the Alpha here. And let's just say for these values, we're going to go for B. B is going to be the it values. So B is going to be the ones here, everything here. This is going to be B and A is going to be the black ones. So maybe we can put, for example, put another constant here and let's put something like blue and connect this and click here. And this is exactly what you can imagine. What's happening here is that we are using the larp node to say, Hey, in every black value that you see here, apply the blue tint. And in every white value that you see here, apply the orange multiply by the texture. You can see here that in this case, these ones are a little bit in a gray spot because this value is not totally white. So you kind of in between the original color and this are maybe mix between the blue and the orange and you get something like this. But you can see how the larp node can help you a lot to change the look of this, right? So what else you can do? Well, for example, you can change the roughness. We can go for for multiple Again, you can just right click here and go for multiply node, and you can just go here. And for example, you want to make it really rough. So you can multiply by two, for example. Press one to put the constant here, just like this, put it here, hit Apply. All right. So now everything will be very rough, right? However, if I put zero, for example, I will multiply all the values for zero, and what it will do is basically make everything really shiny. Like, it doesn't look like a brick at all, right? It's just very, very smooth surface. So Again, multiply arp note, very, very useful. Okay, you can use those very, very often, pretty much for everything, one of the two most important notes in the material editor. You can already see how we're using those here by multiplying this to tint our original texture and then using this color to just add another tint into other areas that we have. Obviously, these masks are really important as well. When working with materials, you need to create your own mask. Most of the time the the textures that you will download will come with several masks that you can work with, and you can use those. So make sure to use these notes to your advantage. They are really, really important. Let's take a look at another node that is also very useful. 7. Add and Clamp Nodes: So let's talk about other important nodes that you will use very often, and that is the at node. The add node, it's pretty much very self explanatory. You can just right click and add. Click here. And let's take a look at what it does. Let's just go ahead and put another constant value by pressing one. But if you add by zero, like multiply when you multiply any value by zero, it becomes zero. But if you add by zero, nothing happens, right, because we are not adding any value here. Everything stays the same. So what we can do, for example, let me just put a value like five or maybe ten so that you can see what's going on here. So you will see that everything starts becoming really white. And if I put a value of like 1,000, I can just click Apply. Notice that it will always be clamped here. Like, it always be one. Like, obviously, when you add these values, for example, for example, you have the red, green, and blue, and 0.5, 0.3, whatever, and zero, if you add plus one, or you will have like 1.5, 1.3, and you have one. So basically, one, one, one equals white and this is in a new version of real before it didn't used to have that. So what can happen here is that you can use a clamp. So a clamp is really important, as well. A clamp will make sure that all your values are 0-1. And that's great, because we can just go here. And anything below zero will automatically become zero, and anything above one will have maximum value of one. Now, you don't see much difference here, but let me show you what could happen when we actually add this into the emissive color. We haven't talked about emissive. We're going to talk about it later. But for now, just so that you can see what's going on. It's like, let me just delete this clamp and put it here on the base color. Hit apply, you can already see in the preview how it looks like, right? Like, everything has a missive value, and obviously the values are so high that you are actually meeting light from here. So this is where the clamp becomes really useful. You can go for clamp and go for here. You can obviously change these values if you want. Go for the missive and take a look at what will happen here. Now, our missive doesn't have a value above one. Everything is at maximum value of one. So this is very useful when you don't want to break values, the clamp node and the at node. So if you want I don't know if you have seen some materials that says brightness. Well, basically, this is brightness and this is tint. So using these nodes here, it's going to be really, really useful for you. 8. Material Instances: Alright, so now that we have this, let's delete this because we don't really want to use it and connect it to the base color. We're going to talk about material instances. So what happens here is if I duplicate this by holding Alt, let me just click here, you will see that everything has the same value, right? So what can happen is that you also want to test some values, and, you know, going back and forth, like we have been doing like going here to change the value, to see there, how it looks like in the level, you can use a preview as well to do that. But materialistances are such an important aspect of working with materials that we're going to learn how to use them. So it's very easy. Just go for your material. If you don't know where your material is, click on the treaty mesh that is using your material and go here to the details panel, click here Bros to my asset and you will see that your asset is here. What you can do is right click and create material instance. And I will call it I my first material. So what I will do is to actually drag this and put it here. Let's just delete those. We don't really need it. And what we can do is to actually create parameters. So to put it simple, let's just right click and compare to parameter. And this will be my tint color. Okay, it apply. And notice that nothing has happened. So when we double click on this, you will see that I'm actually in another window, and you will see that I have my parameter groups here and I have my tin color. The value that you see here, it's going to be the default value that you have in your material. So, for example, if this value is white, the default value of my material will be white. So right now, I haven't I have this change, but if I go to the default value, you will see that I have white here. So what you can do is actually just try here like this. You can just change any color. So, for example, I want something like green, and what you will see is that everything will update here. So you can do this for everything. You can even right click on this texture and convert it to parameter and call it my base color texture. You can do the same here. Call it my mask texture and right click, convert it to parameter, normal texture. I can do the same for everything. I don't I don't really want this. I'm just going to click here and multiply this. I'm going to right click and call it roughness, multiply. I'm going to leave it at one for now. And just like that, we have create parameters for our material insense. So now when we go here, you will see that you have global texture parameters, roughness multiplies. So if I decrease this value, you will see it becomes less rough. And if I increase it, it becomes really rough like this. You almost don't have any reflection if you put a value like that. You can put a value of one here. In these cases, it's a good idea to put a clamp so that you can just write drag here, type clamp. Just so that you don't have values over one to not break the physically based render. So we can just go for here, and you can just play with a roughness at this point. And you can also change the textures. For example, you want another texture. We can just go back here and maybe we want to use this one here, maybe this one. And this one doesn't have a mask, unfortunately, so it's going to look a little bit weird. So and maybe we can just go for I don't know, maybe this one and this one, we can use this one. I don't know. And you will see that we can also put the tin color to white and notice that my material has changed. Now, what you can do is to actually create multiple material instances. You can actually create an instance of an instance so that you can have, when you change the parent, all the childs will be updated, or you can just right click and duplicate. For example, this is another material, and this one will be, for example, this one is like orange. And you will have different materials here. Now, material instances are pretty much 99% of the materials that you have in your level will be instances. And the reason is when you have a good network of materials, you don't necessarily need to create everything by scratch. You only want to create instances, change the parameters, and you're really good to go. In fact, that's one of our main project here is going to be creating a master material for a rock. So we're going to be using material instances quite often. So these are material instances, very, very useful. You're going to use them a lot during game development. So with that, we're going to go to the next lesson. 9. How to import textures from Fab: Alright, so before we move into adding our master material, we need to use Quilbridge. And QuickL Bridge is basically the toolset that we have in unreal integrated that we can use to grab some materials and textures and some assets. So you can just go to the Green plus icon, go to QuixLbridge. Now, Quicklbridge has been updated, unfortunately. So normally, if you already have something downloaded, you can just go to Local. Go here, for example. Let's just go for I don't know, for this one. And we'll click on at you can just choose any texture you want. There are a bunch of textures that you can use here, go to home and you can just find whatever here, you can just go for rock and whatever. And here you can just, for example, click on this one. And notice that I cannot really download from this. Now we need to download it from Fab. So if you click on this one, then you're going to go here. And how you download this? Well, you go for materials and textures, and let's find this, for example, this rock cliff here could be a good one, and we're going to download. We agree. And we're going to download that K. K is what we need here. So we're going to click on Download. I'm just showing you this step because probably you're going to encounter these same issue. So I'm going to wait for this to download, so I can show you how you can use them. Just wait a second. And there you go. Open the folder, right click, and I will extrat the content. And double click here. And you will notice that I have a bunch of assets here that I can use. So if you want to import them into unreal, you can just go here to the contre drawer, control space, and we're going to create a new folder he called textures and we're going to import it here. It's going to be very easy. We're going to grab the ambien occlusion, the base color, displacement, normal and roughness. That's all we need for now. We're not going to use anything else, I think, and we're just going to drag it and drag and drop it here. Now for the ambient occlusion, you need to make sure that SRGB is off, of course. Then for the base color, you're going to leave it as it is. You don't need to change anything here. We're going to do the same for displacement and roughness, going to turn off RGB and the same one for displacement RGB. Normal just need to make sure that the normal map is just like this. Now, if you have some textures from Bridge, download it here. Fortunately, for me, I have some. It will be very easy. You can just click on any one of those. For example, this one, click on AD and then it will create a new folder with your new textures. So now that we have this, I need to show you how to create a mask, and we're going to talk about it later. 10. How to combine Texture channels: Alright, so let's talk about how you can create a mask. A mask is essentially what you see here. If you go to Mega Scans, you will see that you have this texture here. If I double click on this, you will see that it's kind of like a green texture with a lot of colors. We talked about this before. The red channel has some information. The green channel has some information and the blue channel has some information. So in our case, we need to combine those textures. And usually you can do it in substance or Photoshop. However, not every people have that software. So I'm going to show you how you can do it in real. So we're going to go to plugins. Click here and type texture. And you will see here texture graph. Enable it and restart the editor. I already did that, so I'm not going to do it again. So now that you have this, you can just create a graph here on the texture. Let's see if we can see here, texture graph, there you go. And we're going to call it like mask generator, something like that. Alright, so double click on this. And what you will see here is a graph very similar to the material editor, move exactly the same right click to move around. Use the middle mouse click to zoom in and zoom out, and you have a bunch of notes. Now, you have way less nodes. And what exactly what's the difference between these and the materials is that you can basically create new textures from here. So what we're going to do is to go for split channels. Sorry, combined channels. Going to combine the channel, and we need an input here. So we need a color or maybe I think scalar should be okay. Never mind. Let's just actually just grab the textures here. So I can grab the ambient clusion here. Right. And we're going to call it like Ao just like that. And we're going to connect this to the red one. Then we're going to go here to the roughness one. The roughness is going to be the roughness, and we're going to go here to the green one. And then finally, we're going to go for the displacement. We're going to call it like that, and we're going to connect it here. Now that you have this, you will see here in my right preview that I have a new texture. So I'm going to go here, go to the output, and you will see that my output is like this. So now that you have this, you can just export this. Export this output, and that's it. Look at what you have now. Now, you have a new texture here. We're going to rename it as T Rock 01 mask. All right. We're actually going to create a new folder. We're going to call it Rock 01. We're going to drag everything here, just like that and move it. Now, you go to keep importing textures. We're going to work with one texture for now and we're going to keep adding more as we create our master material, but just so that you can use this to merge the textures. You don't need to use Photoshop, very handy tool, new as well in real 5.5. I believe it's here since 5.4, but it really doesn't matter. It is available for you, and now you have this mask. So SRGB is off. You can even go here for the compression settings and put it on mask. So it's like in the right compression settings. And with that, we are good to go. We have enough textures to create our master material. 11. Creating the Rock Master Material: Alright, so we will start with the project. We're going to create a rock master material. So we're going to start from scratch here, right click create material, and we're going to call it my underscore Rock Master. Just like that. Alright, so double click on this. And the first things that you want to use when you create a master material like this is that you need the textures. So let's grab those textures here. Let's go into textures, the one we created here. So we're going to grab the base color here. Okay. You can also go to texture sample, just like that. And if you have this one clicked on and you go to texture sample, then you're going to automatically assign the texture here. So make sure important things about this, make sure that the color, the sampler type is set to color, and the rest for the rest of the textures is going to set to mask. By default, it will drag the texture, the property that you have here next to the mask. So make sure that's correct, and then we're going to go to the normal map. All right. So very simple, we're going to connect these ones here. Just like that. And we're going to go here the red one to the amine occlusion, the green one to the roughness, and the blue one. We're not going to use the blue one just yet. We're going to use it for something else. We're going to connect the normal map here. Gonna hit apply. And actually we don't need this anymore. We're going to go and put the surface on here. There you go. Now, we can also use like a cub we see how our texture looks in different sizes and everything. So what we want to do first, obviously, it's change the tiling. And that's something we haven't touched on. So let me show you what I mean. If you hold the U bottom, you will go to texture coordinate. You can also type here, texture coordinate to get it. And what it does is basically you have UV tiling like U and V. So all the textures here go from X and Y, like X being here and Y being here. So you can just style this like your UVs will basically on a space 0-1. So you can multiply this texture so that you repeat the texture like over and over, just like this, for example, and you have one texture here and one texture there. And the way you can do this is very simple. You just connect these ones here. Just like that. And hit Apply. And notice that nothing will happen. One thing I will do is to create a material instance. I don't really want to I'm going to create a folder like old materials just so that you can select all those. Check those later if you want. Just in case. For now, I'm going to right click Create material instance just like we did before MIRock 01. And double click on this and notice that we don't have any parameter, that's totally fine. And the first parameter that I want to have actually it's UV tiling. So I'm going to, you will notice here that if I change this to two, so I hit Apply and you will see what happens that my texture became smaller and basically it tiles two times. So instead of changing this value, the best way you can achieve this is by hitting the multiply button here. And now you actually, I show you a really cool trick. You can just hold Control and click here, and it will connect all the nodes that are connected here. Just press the Control and drag it just like that. And now this value is actually going to change the tiling for us. So we're going to go here and create a constant, press one and click to create a constant. You can also right click and contand here, constant one vector. We're going to go here. And in order to convert this into a parameter, we just need to right click and convert to parameter. This is going to be my main tiling. By default, it's going to be zero. We don't want that. We want it to be one. So just like that, we're going to hit that. And now what we can do actually is just go for our master or material instance, and we can go here and change the tiling. And this is not changing because it's not the material instance. There you go. So we're going to change the tiling here, just like that, and you can see what's going on. The smaller the value, the bigger the rock, and that works very, very well for us. Now, this is as simple as it gets. This should be the most basic material that you can actually create. So the next thing that I want to do is to actually, you know, make some adjustments here to these textures. 12. Adding Texture Color controls: So one thing I want to add here it's basically u texture adjustment colors, something like that. Very similar to what we did before. So I'm going to go here and drag and multiply. And I'm going to show you a new node called desaturation. There is also saturation, but we're going to use desaturation for now. And we're going to just go here. Okay, we're going to go here to the desaturation, and not going to use the multiply yet, and we're going to add a value. So by default, it will be sorry, it will be saturation. Will be like zero, right? So actually, the saturation. All right. So what we can do is to connect this. And let's take a look at what's going on in our material instancee. What's happened is if I increase the value to one, you will notice that my values are black and white, which is great. Sometimes you want a neutral color. And if you go all the way to two, you basically oversaturate everything. So for example, like five, it's just going to be the opposite color of what we have, which is a reddish color. We're going to leave it at zero for now. The same can be said about going for minus one minus two. So, you know, feel free to play with this. I'm going to leave it at zero for now because there's also another node that we may need to add, and that is the at bottom. So we're going to go click A and click, click on at click here, and then I'm going to press one and go here to brightness, just like that. I'm going to go here to brightness. Click here. And by default, it's going to be zero as well. So what we can do is to actually let's put the saturation to one, for example, so that you can see what's going on and then go to brightness and you can see that I have a brighter rock, and I can just go for zero again. You know, this may be something that you may or not want. So feel free to play with this. One thing I want to do with the brightness is that I want to limit the maximum value. So the maximum value, let's just say let's just put -0.5 and 0.5. Sometimes you don't want to, you know, the user to change any value. You just want to restrict the values for this. So -0.5 and five, let's take a look at what it looks like. So 0.5 should be very bright. And -0.5 very dark. Now, I don't know in which situations you will use a super dark value, but just in case, you don't want to limit the creative freedom. Right. So the next thing, it's going to be the color. So I'm going to go here and type I'm going to show you a new shortcut called V. V and click is going to automatically create a color parameter. So it's going to be Vd tint. And by default, I'm going to leave it on one. So that you don't change anything. I'm going to connect this one here and I'm going to multiply everything here with this color. Let's check our material instancee now. Now what I can do is add a tint like we did before. For example, like a blue one, we can tint it blue, we can desaturate. We can even put this value to one or limit this value minus two and two, maybe. A we can just go here for minus two or even two here. We can even put one and everything will be the same color. And we can change the tint here a little bit purple and change the desaturation to 0.17. You can see what's going on here and it's actually working quite well. We're actually having a tint on every single area of our texture. That's great. We're going to leave it like that, and I'm going to show you how to create functions later. 13. Creating our first function: So let's create our first function. Functions are very important because you don't want to do the work over and over here. And this is a perfect example where if we want to use this in the future, then we may not want to do this all over again. So let's create a function for this. In order to create a function, you need to go here to the contact drawer, right click, go to material, and then go to advance and material function. So let's go here, and we will call it material function Alvedo controls. All right. So double click on this and what you will see it looks like a material, but it has this preview mode here where you can see nothing is going on. So it's going to be really simple or just going to go ahead and copy Control C and paste here. Now, just like this, it won't work because we need an input here. And if you check our material, the input here is this texture. Now, this texture, obviously, we're going to put a texture here. So what we need to understand is that this texture is composed of three different values, even fourth what we're not really using the fourth one here. So what we can do is go here type input and go to function input. And if you click here, by default, you will see that you have an input name. It says vector three, which means the type of the input that you will have. In our case, vector three is what we're looking for, but you also have solar, vector two, vector four, texture to the bunch of other stuff that you can use here. Vctor three should be more than enough, so we're going to go here. All right. And just like that, what happens here. Let's change the output here. So let's call it new let's call it Alvedo with a new tint, just like that. And the input will be my Alvedo texture. All right. So notice that I'm using the material, the parameters that I had before just because I want to show you something. So let's go here. And there are a couple of ways we can edit. We can control space and just dragon drop this one. Right? You have our function here, which that's exactly what we are doing here. But if you want to search it here, you need to change the here. In that description, you can just type click anywhere here empty in the graph, and the description, you're going to type like I don't know, changes Alvido color and adds new tint and just like that. And here you will need to put exposed to library. All right, exposed to library categories, we're going to call it tutorial, just like that. Torial hit Apply, save. And now, when I go to my material, I can go here. I don't know if I can type tutorial here and you will see all the functions that we are using here. And that's exactly the same. So just like that, what you can do is very simple. You can just connect this one here and connect this one here. Hit apply. And what you will see here is that nothing has happened, but we have if we delete this, you will see that everything just works just fine. We have our parameters here, and they just work the same way they used to work before. Now, why I put the parameters here. Just keep in mind I'm going to show you why I did this. The parameters here basically will be a global parameter. And this will not work if we add another texture and we change these values here because we're going to update all the textures that are using this function. So in this case, what we need to do is to create another input here, function input. This is a parameter vector one, so we're going to go for scalar parameter. We're going to put it here, and the name will be the duration, just like that. Now, we delete this. Okay, preview value as default. Yeah, we can leave it like that. The preview value will be this one, the first one, zero, and the brightness. We're going to actually, we're going to control C and control V and the brightness we're going to call it here, brightness, leave it at zero, just like that. And here, we're actually going to use Control C and Control V, this one. This is going to be a vector tree, and we're going to call it AlvidoTint and value by default will be white. Use preview value as default. Yes, sir, that's what we want. Delete this one. Because what will happen if you don't put use preview value as default, I'm going to show you what happens. Here, we hit apply, and it works. It will work just fine. And if we go here, you see that we don't have the parameters that we have because these are only let me move this one here. These are only inputs. They are not parameters. We cannot change them on the material instance. So if we check this use preview as default, we won't have a default value and what will happen if we will have an error. And if you see here, it says missing function input vedo tint, which means this is not optional. And sometimes, in this case, you want it to be optional. You don't want to change the color of every texture that you have. So in this case, we're going to put everything as optional. But because we really want to change it, we're going to delete everything here, and we're just going to connect here. The saturation and the vedo tint, we're going to just move it right here. And just like that, now we have a function. Now, this looks like a lot of work, but now every time I want to do this, I just need to track the function here and I'm done. Another thing I want to change is the order of this. Al VDO texture is here at the bottom. Notice here that you have the description, sort priority. So we're going to grab everything here and we're going to put it on one. We're going to click here. And what you will see is that you actually have the Alveda texture. Like this, right? We have the Alvido texture, can put it something like that. There you go. We can even move this like this if we want. Alveto texture now it's on the top because the priority says that Alveto texture is zero and the rest is one. So they go 0-1 to two to three and so forth. If you want to move the Alvedotin here, then Alvedotin will need to be two, and then the brightness and saturation need to be three. It's just a matter of organization. It will work just as fine. So if we hit apply and we go here, you will see that we have our parameters back and we can do the same. So these are material functions, very, very useful. Now that we know that, we're going to go ahead and work with our roughness texture. 14. Using Static Switch Parameters: So now that we have this let's work on roughness, our roughness is the green channel that we have in our mask. If you double click on this, you will see that the texture or roughness is like this, right? So it's going to be very simple. I'm going to use a larp node. So hold L and arp, and the Alpha will be this roughness here. And then I'm going to change these values. The Alpha will tell me, okay, the white values it's the number the letter B here. So I'm going to Press one and click to create a constant. Right click convert to parameter. I'm going to call it roughness max, just like that. I'm going to leave it on one. There you go. And then we're going to go here to A, Control C and Control. We're going to go for roughness Min. And we're going to leave the default value to zero, just like that. And then we're just going to leave it like that. I really need to change anything. And we're going to go here to the roughness, just like that. And let's take a look what's happening here. So let's go to our material instance, roughness, max, and mean if you go for the minimum value, if you put something like minus I don't know, minus two minus three, you will see that you have very reflective, kind of, like, a wet surface, which is really cool. Like if you are using like this material like a rainy forest or something and you want to have the rock a little bit wet, then just great. And then you can also use that roughness max. Max value of this will be like, I don't know, like two. And this one we can change it. You can just play with these values until you find something that you really like. This kind of like a little bit of a wet surface, to be honest. Um, so that's great. Let's create a function for this. So we're going to one thing we want to do is let's use control C control V. Let's create a new material advance material function, MF, roughness control. Just like this. No click on this output will be new roughness, just like that. Okay. And we're going to paste this. Now, the Alpha will be our roughness. So we're going to go for input vector one, Roughness texture, just like that. Go for this one, and this one will be my roughness Min. There you go. And my roughness max. Just like that. We can go here and put it like that. We don't need this anymore. Use pre value, zero and one. That's great. And this one we really need This one shouldn't be optional. We're going to leave it like that. And also, we're going to connect this here. Now, what we need here is actually, if we go to input, we're going to look here for a static bull. You can use static bull. We could try. So let's go here. There are a bunch of ways you can do this. You can either do this in the functions or outside. So like this, go here to static Bull, and then we need a static mesh parameter. So actually let's delete those. Keep it like this, and we're actually going to do it here. So we're going to go here and expose this library. Can put a description if you want, exposed to library tutorial and then go here to the master, drag it here. There you go. Control C. We want to actually not delete these values here. So Max and minimum will be here. Max should be optional as well. So let's go here and not this one, sorry. This is the old texture. Go for this one. Minimum, click here, maximum click here. All right. So everything is optional except for the texture, obviously. Otherwise, why would you use this function? And we're going to drag this texture here. Now, there are some cases where you just don't really want to change the roughness. And in this case, we're going to go for a static switch parameter. And here, we're going to ask change modulate roughness and just call it like that. If true, we're going to go here. If false, we're going to go here. And the default value will be false. So let's go here to roughness. Click here. And now when we check here, you will see that you have some static switch parameters values. So if you click here, you will notice that you have new inputs that you can use. But if you don't want to change the roughness, that's also fine. Check this one, and you won't need to change the roughness. So multiple ways of doing this. We can do that here. It may be a little bit messy because there are a lot of nodes here, but, you know, it's a you can see if this is worth of using a function, you can actually go here for static function static switch, and you can put this values go for input, for input bull, can put it here. And in this case, if it's true, you use this one. If it's false, you use this one. And let's see how it goes. Use pre view value as default? No. And we're not going to use it. And we're going to call it modulate roughness, just like that. Okay? So we're going to go here. Modulate roughness, apply, you will see that it's here. So we can go here for a bull, static bull parameter, and we can call it modulate roughness, we can just put it here. And now we don't need this says cannot cast static bull to bull. So apparently, this is just static bull parameter. And then we will need to change this one for input bull, static bull, just like that. It's a static ball. And there you go. So now that we have this, we can hit Apply and let's check our material. Model roughness, click, and now we have our new parameters that we can change. We can make it less rough or more rough. And if we don't want to change this, we're just going to click here and we are good to go. Several ways that you can do this. We take a look at the static switch parameters. We have take a look at booleans, overall, I will say the last thing I just want to change is this roughness texture to be on the top. So roughness texture will be zero, and the rest will be just one here at the sort priority. Okay? So just like that, it apply. And I can just put this one here. Perfect. A little bit more organized. All right. Now that we have this, let's go ahead and work on our normal map. 15. Changing the Normal map intensity: So for the normal map, we will want to increase and decrease the intensity of this. So a more intense normal will actually have a harsher light contrast, like, for example, in these areas here. So if you take a look at the blue channel, you can see pretty much it's almost like an ambient occlusion. You will see that these areas become like have more of a treaty effect. So this is very useful because sometimes you don't want your Normans to pop out and sometimes you do. So the way we're going to do that is by changing the rate and the green values are the only ones that we care about. So we're going to learn a new node today, it's called the append node. And the append node, and we're going to go append vector, We're going to append two vectors here, red and green. And I'm going to show you something that I think I haven't shown you before. If you want to take a look how it looks like, right click and start previewing value. And what you will see is that my normal map looks like red and green, exactly how it should be because I'm only using these values. Now, what I want to do is to increase the intensity. And at this point, you should know that intensity is synonym of multiply. So we're going to hit, multiply here. And then we're going to press one and click. Right click, convert to parameter, and we're going to call it normal intensity, just like that. Normal intensity or going to leave it like that, and we're going to put one for now. And I want to see how it looks like. Right click, start previewing value. And if I put something like five, for example, you will see that it starts becoming really, really intense. And if I put a value of 0.1, it becomes less intense. So already changing the intensity here, now we need to add this. How we're going to do it? We're going to use it append again, append vector. We're going to combine the red and the green channel with the blue one here. Right click, start previewing note, and there you go. Now we're going to go here and go to normal. There you go. And now, what I have here is my normal intensity. I can change it to five and you can see what's going on here. And it's even more obvious when there is a light coming through. If I go for zero, you will see that I have no normal map. One is a default one. I go for two or three. Sometimes you want to just pop out those normals like this and be careful with this. You don't want to break it, but just so that you can use it. So we're going to create a function for this is going to be very simple. Just go ahead and just save everything. And right click material, advance material function. Sorry, not material function instance. We go here for material, advance and material function, and we're going to call MF normal normal intensity, just like that. So it's going to be very simple. We're just going to drag this and we're going to copy this Control C, Control V. We're going to change the output normal with new intensity. And append, it's going to be a vector tree. So we're going to call it input function input vector tree, exactly what we want. And also, because you want to get access to those values, you can go here and break out float three components. And what this will give you is the ability to select channels individually from this vector tree. So we're going to do the same here, red and green goes here, and the blue one will go here. Normal intensity, it's going to be an input for a scalar value. So we're going to call it normal intensity. We're going to use a preview value default, put everything one just in case and put it like this. Delete this one and this one will be my normal texture. Obviously, this is not optional, hit Apply and click here, and also we can expose it to a library, exposed to library category tutorial just like that. Go ahead. And just like this, let's take a look at our function here. Normal intensity. So the texture I want it to be on top. So I'm going to go here and the intensity will be one. So zero, it's going to be the normal texture, and one, it's going to be the intensity. And now I can just delete this. I don't need this anymore. I can just grab this intensity here. You can also put a switch here to decide, do you want to change the normal map or whatsoever. I find in practice, you don't want to put a lot of switch unless you need to. So in this case, obviously, if you don't want to change the normal map, just leave it at one. If not, just leave it at zero. If not, you just change the value, right? So we're going to actually slider Min is going to be zero and slider max, I don't know, maybe it's just like ten so that we don't go below zero. And with that, we're going to put a normal map here, and just like that. Now we have our function for our normal intensity, which is very, very cool. Just like that. No normal map. It's going to look really flat. And with normal map, leave it at one by default, and it's just going to look really nicely. I can bump this a little bit if I want it. And look at that. Now we have a lot of functions in our material. We have the tiling. We can change the color, change the reflection, change the normal math. Those are the most important aspects of any texture manipulation. If you only have this, you can go a long way. So with that, we're going to use it to improve it even further. 16. Blending Between 2 Materials: So now that we have our first material, we want to blend it with other materials. And I'm going to show you how you would do it and what happens under the hood, and then we're going to do it the right way. So you don't necessarily need to copy this by any means. But what I want you to see is when you have other textures like this, you can use any texture import from fab, just like we did before. Let's try to, you know, to blend these together. So we have this texture here, and what you will do is basically use a larp node. So hold lt and click. And the Alpha, I'm going to create a constant value, pressing one and click and convert parameter called Alvedo arp or just I don't know, material blend in general. So it's going to be here. And the top material will be on B. Kind of see it like a photoshop layer where you have the bottom layer and the top layer, right? And the top layer, it's going to be B. There you go. B and A. And how much opacity this has depends on the material blend that you see here. So obviously, this one, it's going to be here and we're going to put it to the base color. Alright, so by default, nothing should happen because material blend is set to zero, meaning B has no value at all. So we go here. Let's go to actually, let's go to our material. Material incense. And you will see here that if I scroll this to one, I'm actually changing the texture. I'm just changing between these two textures. Now, you can see what is the problem here is one, I need to do this all over again if I want to have the same control for this one, and I need to do it here as well, so I can use Control C, Control B. And I can just click here to Bose and grab a mask and I can actually, you know, just put the put the roughness here for the roughness value, and the new roughness value will be this one. And we can do the same here for the normal map. We can just grab the normal here. Put it here in B and the same value here, and then the new intensity here and the normal. And then we will go for the roughness. Same for the amin occlusion, but we're not going to use it. So for now, we'll just leave it like that. Look at what will happen now is when I change the material blend, I can just tagle between these two materials. So obviously, you can do it this way, and that's actually the only way to do it. But we're going to use more functions for this because as you can see, if we want to add one or two different materials, it's just going to be really, really annoying. So I'm going to delete this. Again, you don't need to do this by yourself. It's just to illustrate what's going on. So I'm going to actually control see everything here that we see. Minus just connect this delete the larps roughness leaf here, and normal leaf here. We don't need this. Okay, so this is our previous material. What we're going to use actually, it's another node called material layer blend. And you will see that you have a lot of variations. You have the simple and you have the standard. You're going to go for the standard here. Now, the problem with this is that well, how do you connect this because you cannot connect this one here because this asks for a material. Essentially what we are having here is a material. We need the same input here. So what we're going to do is to go here and go to make material attributes. Make material attributes will create a material. So if we go here to the base color, starts this start connecting all the stuff here, and the ambo clusion goes here. And then the normal map goes here. And now, what I can do is just to connect these ones here. Like, actually, you don't need to connect all of this. You can just click here and then use material attributes. Click here folds. And what will happen here is Okay, use the outputs, the outputs of the material attributes that you are getting. So if you are not using metallic or specular, you don't need to connect those. Use this as it is, and that's it. So if we apply this and then we go here, you will see that nothing has happened. So now what you can do is to actually go here and put it as the base material. And the top material, we're going to control C and Control B. We're going to replace this later, but for now, so you can see you can put this thing here and we're going to change these here. Like all these textures, we're going to replace them with new ones. And the Alpha, obviously, for now, it's just going to be a number. Okay? So it's going to be a number, let's convert it to layer one blend. Go for here, and then go for this one. Click Apply and you will see that nothing will happen. But now, if I go to my layer one blend, I can just blend between these two. Obviously, this will be a value 0-1. You don't want to overexpose everything. Same with this one. So zero will be our layer zero or layer one, and one will be our layer two. And this is how you can blend between these two materials. You can see like everything can change on real time here. And obviously, we're used using a scalar value, which is a very simple way of blending these two materials, and we're also sharing the same inputs here. Maybe we want different inputs for different textures, and maybe we want to change those into parameters. So the next thing we're going to do before we span more into you know, our material, we need to create something that makes our life easier with these materials individually. So let's do that now. 17. Creating a function for our Simple Material: Alright, guys, I come from the future, and there is a video that got corrupted, and the video that was missing was the creation of this material function called standard material. Okay, so don't ignore anything that you see here. This will come in the future. What I want you to guide you through is the creation of this material function. So the way I did this, I'm going to create it here. You can already see that I have my material function here. I'm going to guide you through this. So my material function basically has, let's go here to my material advance and material function and call it MF material 02, just to call it that way. So what you need to do here is basically add the same properties that we had here, but we need to add them here on our material. So it is very easy. So obviously, the first one is the Alvido controls and the make material attributes. So first things first, make material attributes. Okay? And you go to copy here to the output. You can rename this output however you want. And these Alvedo controls ask you for an Alvedo texture, brightness Alvedo tint and desaturation. So Alvedo texture, obviously, it's going to be my texture here. But I'm going to grab a texture sample from this. So let's just create a texture sample. Just anyone is fine because we're going to change it in the future. So we're going to put it here in the Avedo texture. Okay? This is not an input yet. So brightness, Alveda tint and desaturation, we're going to create right click and function input, and we're going to go for scalar, and we're going to call it brightness. And we're going to do the same for all of those for this aeration. And copy and paste. And the last one, it's going to be for Alvido tint. Alvido tints going to be a vector three, and I'm going to leave it at one. I'm going to leave the use previo value as default. Same here. Brightens zero because I don't want to add anything. And this alteration has a value of zero. I'm just going to go here and connect my Al VDO here. Okay? So you will see that actually I'm missing a texture here. So what you can do is to put any texture that you have. So for example, this one, it really doesn't matter because it won't really use this texture for the function. So you can just put any texture. As long as the sampler type is the right one, like color, normal or mask, you're good to go. So the second thing is the roughness control. So the roughness control. If we go here for roughness, material function roughness control, you will see that you have your roughness texture, roughness max, modulate roughness and roughness mean. So it's very simple. We're just going to add another mask. So, for example, this and my roughness texture is going to be this. Okay? And my roughness max and roughness min, I can also put them as a parameter. I can just copy here. So roughness Min is just going to go here and roughness max is going to go here. So modulate roughness is going to be a static bull. So you have static bulls here, static bull. There you go. And you can just put it here, but you also have a function called function input, and you can go for static bull. The preview is going to be this one, and use preview as default, you can turn it on or off and put it here. And the roughness texture, obviously, it's going to be not it's a scalar parameter, right? So it's going to be the green one. So we're going to connect the green one here. Okay. And this one is going to go for roughness. Let's go ahead and continue with the normal map. So the normal, we're going to use a normal intensity. So let's add this function here and the normal texture. You can just grab any texture here, put it here and normal intensity, we're going to create a function input. Sclor and call it normal intensity. Put a preview value of one for now. And put it here. The next one, we're going to just go for this one. Okay. So now that you have this, now, we have other options here for the texture object scale and a lot of stuff. We're going to leave it simple with texture coordinate. So how you're going to change the coordinate is going to be very, very simple. Let me just connect this right on here for the amen occlusion. And what you need to do is to actually go for function input. And go for a texture two D. Okay? So if you see here, I'm actually having a texture two D, and it's receiving a texture object. So I'm going to go here and go for a texture object. And actually, I'm going to click here and then go, actually, let me click here texture object. So I can have this one. I can just put it here, and this one is going to be my Alvedo texture. And you can just put it here on textures. So now that you have this, you can actually change the U Vs here. So if you go for texture coordinate and for multiply and press one for increasing the tilling, actually, we don't need one. We're going to actually go for function input because this is also going to be an input, and this is going to be my tiling scale, we can call it. I don't know which name I use for this one. I use UV tiling. Okay so let's use the same name. UV tiling. All right. So we're going to leave it as one for now, we're going to just put it here. Okay. And then we're going to connect it here. We're going to do the same copy. This is going to be my mask texture. Put it here. And the UVs are going to be this one. And then I'm going to copy this. I'm going to go for my normal texture and put it here. And my UVs are going to be this one. So now that you have this, you do have your material function that you can use to let's just call it like material. And I'm going to call it my MF material. So if I go here, you will see that let's go for our intro to materials, MF material here. You will see that I have the same values. There's a function that I haven't changed the name is this. So it's like modulate roughness. Okay. So if you notice the order of the things are really not you know, they're really not changing. So let's go ahead and drag it again. You can see here that the textures are first and the rest ones are here. So, this has to do with the preview value. So the order that you see here on the inputs, sort priority. So I'm going to leave all the textures to zero, just like that. And the rest one, I'm the rest, I'm just going to go for all the inputs, I'm going to put a value of one. So I can have a value of one here. And when I apply, you will see that my textures are here. So obviously, if you want to put, like, for example, there saturation, you want to put it first, you will need to change the value of this put something into two. So it's like for one, zero, one, and the rest, you can put two. It's really not something that it is going to affect the result of your material, but that's how you create your material function. So instead of using all these nodes and copying them again, you can actually use the material function to add other materials. So for example, I can just connect this texture here. So I can just go for this texture. I can just put it here, put the mask, put the normal, and I can start changing those inputs to see what I can make. So that's it for the material function. Sorry for the inconvenience. And if you have any problem, just let me know in the comments. I will assist you. Again, thanks for the heads up for letting me know about this, since this material is quite important, right? So we're going to leave it like that and continue. 18. Blending with Vertex Colors: All right, so let's continue with our master material. We're going to leave this here. First thing I'm going to do is to update this roughness texture. So if you want to open up a material function, you just need to double click on this. And here you have the roughness max, roughness is this static bull. So we're going to use the date roughness. A little bit of a mistake from the latations only a typo. It should work as expected. So what are we going to do? We're going to transition this, and we're not going to use the scalar value. Instead, I'm going to show you a new node. And it's going to be vertex color. So vertex color, I'm going to show you what I mean. I'm going to go here to the molding section where we can add a mesh. I'm going to add a box. By the way, if you want to learn how to model inside and reel, I have a tutorial also here that you can watch. So make sure to check it out if you want to learn how to model inside and real. So I'm going to have 20 subdivisions for this box so I can have some vertex to work with. And now, what I'm going to do is to put my material here. So let's put our material. And let's just see what happens first. So if you go here to the mesh paint mode in the selection, you will see that you can actually paint here in those models. I'm going to put the default values here. What vertex color information is basically each vertex has information about the color, right? You can use this color information to do multiple things. So what's happening here? If I go here to the color view mode, I go to RGV channels. You will see that is entirely white. And what I can do is to actually go here and paint black. So I can just paint here, black, all the channels. I can also paint black on two channels, which will leave me blue or only one channel or, you know, all the channels, I can just paint like this. You know, you have a bunch of things that you can do. You can also fill this with black. So if I fill this with black here, all the channels, then I can start painting, for example, I only want to paint red, click here on the red, and then you will see that we have red here. We go for green, and then we have green here and so on and so on. So I'm going to leave it here as just leave it as default for now, right? So that's their text color. And what this does is we can use this information here on the material. So instead of using this, I'm actually going to use this one. So I can either choose the white one for RGB, the red one for red, green, and blue, and Alpha. So I would go for the red one Alpha. And I also want to put like a tint here. So let's put something like let's put for create our parameter vector T, and let's put layer to Alvido color. And just for the sake of demonstration, I'm just going to put something like very red, and I'm just going to put it here so that this material, it's just very, very red. Alright, so let's go here, click Apply. And let's see what happens. So let's go back to this mode. And what you will see here is that our material is red. Now, the reason for that is that Everything is white here. So there is another node I want to show you. And the reason I'm showing you this node is because by default, all the meshes will have the color data for white. Basically, everything will be one, so it will look like white. So it looks a little bit strange, but we want to paint with black. So let's go for one minus. And what it does is basically does the inverse operation. So if this is white, then the output will be black. And now what you will see is that we will have our mesh like before. If you want to see the mesh, make sure to check off this. And by the way, if you have nanite enabled, please disable it because this is not going to work with nanite. I'm going to show you a method later where you can use nanite. But for now, just keep it like this, keep it simple. So now I can just paint red. So I can just paint red here. I can paint black and see what happens here. I'm starting to paint, and I'm having a new a new material. I can do the same here or just going to work in this area for now. Now notice that the transition is a little bit funny. But the cool thing about this is that we're actually blending between these two materials, and I can actually open up the material instance and change this color back to white. And look at that. Now we have something like this. I'm going to leave it on red just so that you can see what's going on. And in the next lesson, we're going to work on the transition material that we want to use. 19. Introduction to height Contrast: So to make this a little bit more realistic, we're going to have to use our height material. And our height material, if you don't remember, we have this mask, and we have the blue channel that has the height information where the you know, the black values will be the valleys and the white values will be the peaks, kind of like a treaty view, like if you watch it from the top, you can see this height information. That's why it's called like that. So if you notice, we don't have any way to access this. We can go here and, you know, break, you know, just wrap the information for here. But I want to actually update this function. So double click on this. And actually, I'm going to show you what you can do. You can actually create another output. Function output. There you go. And here we want to use the blue one, just like that. Now we're going to call it height, and the sort priority will be one. Heat apply, save it. And now, We're back to the material, and you will see that I have my height information here. So what can I do with this? So let me show you what you can do. First, I'm going to introduce you to another node. It is called the Power node. And the Power node is also synonym for contrast. So let me just go here. Right click Start previewing note. And what you will see is that I see the height map. I can create basically a constant here. I'm going to click one and click create a constant, right click and call it height contrast. Just call it like player one height contrast. Just leave it at one. At one, nothing will happen. Let me just put this as a box so that you can see here. More clearly height looks like. I can put something like five, and you will see that the contrast gets higher. Like we don't have any middle values. It's either black or white, which is amazing. This definitely what we want. The next thing we want to do is to actually change the intensity. So with that, we're going to use the multiply node that you already know. Hit and click for multiply, drag here and click one and click to get the constant right click and call it L one, height intensity. You are going to leave it at one by default, and you're going to see what's going on here, right click Preview. And if I put ten, everything starts becoming, you know, more intense. And if I decrease it, it's going to be less intense. So great. Now that we have this, things are starting to get a little bit messy here. So what I'm going to do is to actually do a reroute note. So a re route node, it's basically a node that you can use to organize a little bit better your node. So let me go here and go for name and go at name reroute declaration node. This will be my L one height with contrast. There you go. We can even go and put like reroute notes for each material. If you don't want this, for example, reroute at a reroute Declaration note, call it one material. And how you can use this, what's the difference? Is that you can go here and type one material. And you will see that I get the same information here. So I can do the same here, one material. And for this one, I can do the same as well. I can just go here and type name reroot Declaration Node two material, and then just go here and type L two. This is not necessarily that you have to use this. It's just for organization purposes. So what do you want to do? Let me delete this. We don't need this anymore. We actually want to use the height contrast. So go for height contrast, L one with height contrast, and we're going to multiply it hit M, and we're going to multiply by our vertex color. Now, I'm going to show you what it does before the vertex painting, okay? So just so that you can see what's going on. We connect the contrast node here, and if we go here for our rock, we can actually change the height contrast and the height intensity. So we can just put one or five or ten, and we can also put it more intense like ten or 510 looks like a really nice number. You can see like we're actually putting those on the height values, right? If we even make it more evident, we will look like this, right? So very, very nice. We can increase the contrast, as well. That's you know, you can just play with these values. I'm just going to leave it like this for now. Just put like maybe ten is a seven is a decent number to work with. And what I want to do is to clamp this value. I believe we use it somewhere here. If we haven't, I'm going to show you this note. It's called a clamp. And I believe we use it. So this is where it becomes really useful because when you use this kind of operations where you multiply by seven by 15 or any kind of crazy number, things can break. And the clam makes sure that all the values are zero at the minimum and maximum one, which is what you want for this. So if you put the clamp here and connect it to the Alpha, you can start seeing that the values will you know, you can see that they are not breaking anymore. Like, they are not super strem like we see before. In order to you can either use a high values to blend like this, and it will work great if that's what you want. But for our case, because this course, we want to show you very different ways of blending. And one of the famous ways of blending different materials is by using vertex color. So what we're going to do is to actually multiply, once again, never mind, use this multiply and connect it here. Right, go to the clamp and look at that. Now we have our first material here. I don't believe we need this anymore. We're going to delete this one now just for the sake of organization. We have our first material, or second material, and this is the first blend. So we're going to go here. And I'm going to show you how to comment notes. So select everything. Click C and type layer one blending. This is, for example, our click C layer to material here, we need to stop previewing this mode. We don't really need it anymore. There you go. L one material. And look at that. It's such a big network condensed into very small steps that we can use because we are using functions, and here you have even more controls. So everything is starting to look really nice. Now, let's take a look at what's the difference between painting with the height map and without the height map. So with a height contrast, it will look something like this. Let's fill everything with white for now. Let's just paint here. Sorry, let's get out of here, go to paint. And here, actually, you're going to use the vertex color and multiply with this one. So you can just if you paint like zero, nothing will happen. If you paint with one, let me take a look at this vertex color. The black multiplies by this one. So if we go for just take a look at the colors. So put it like that, and now we can start painting. So, oh, we need to apply. That's why it doesn't show up. I was getting a little bit scared. So we need to apply first. So let's go out, mesh paint, go to paint. And now we're going to paint black in the red channel and look at what happens here. Actually multiplying here this value, and we're getting a very different result compared to before. And if you don't like this result, obviously, you can play with the material instance where you can change the contrast. You can change the height intensity, just like that, it's up to you. It will be entirely up to you. But with this, you can shift click to paint the other way around, paint white, and you will remove areas where you don't want it. So you have a lot of control with this, and it does look really nice. Let's change the height, something like that. And if you don't like it that much, obviously, you can start painting once again with shift to have a little bit more control over everything. And the beauty of this is that you can just paint your whole mesh, and you will have a different result. And if you think this looks weird, let's go back to the other valley and try to put something like a different color, you know, something that blends more nicely with this and look at that. Now we have our rock material that is actually blending between, you know, two different materials. One, the cliff and the other one, the other type of rock, which is very, very nice, very, very nice. I think it and let's go ahead and put more stuff. 20. Using the HeightLerp node: Now you will notice with our method, there are some areas where we cannot really paint. So if I go here and let me just put this one on right again. So that's super easy to see. All right. So there are some areas where I cannot paint no matter how hard I try. The reason is obviously it's behind this logic, and I want to introduce you to another node that is actually very handful, and that is the height larp. So the hight lerb if you double click on this, it will have a bunch of functions here. Basically, we'll do that transition phase where it's your Vertex painting, and pretty much similar to what we have, and we subtract the high texture and that's it. Instead of doing this ourselves, we can use this function, and height lerb basically ask for a high texture. I don't really like to use the contrast here. That's why what we're going to do is to actually use the contrast just right here, and the transition phase will be this one. And now that we have this, let me see if there is a clamp here in this function. Looks like there is no clamp. We're still going to use the clamp for this. We're going to connect the Alpha here. Sorry, not the contrast here. It's going to be the high texture. Is this one. Okay. So now that we have this, let's take a look at what happens when we paint or mesh. Now we can pretty much paint everywhere, holding shift to paint the white areas just like this. And we can also change the parameters here. So let's play a little bit with the intensity, just like that, and the contrast. Okay. So you can paint white. So you can paint black. And you can also increase the strength and the size of this if you want, so you can just paint like this, for example. And increase intensity. The intensity can be a little bit of a trouble here. We can increase the contrast, but the intensity, we're just going to leave it as it is. So there you go. So now it's much better. Now we have areas where we don't really want it. That's great. Height contrast, we can leave it at lift innsity to one and height contrast to one. Okay? So now we can change the contrast here just like that and the intensity value. There you go. And it's much better, in my opinion. Let's increase the contrast, decrease the contrast. Sorry. There you go. Intensity, once again, beautiful. There are some areas where I really paint, but it really doesn't matter. So with that, we have just used another note here. Very, very important. It's a height larp. It's very useful. You can also try the contrast if you want. Just put a high texture without a contrast. But I do find it's much better without. 21. Using World Aligned Textures: Alright, so let's continue to add more details to our material. What we're going to do is to actually use a new concept that you haven't seen before. It's called world masking. And I'm going to show you what it is. So basically, what we need to do is to add some color variation to our rock material so that we don't only have the colors from our materials, textures, but also, you know, some tint on top of it. So what we're going to do, we're we're just going to do it right here. I'm going to show you a new node, it's called world Align line texture. And for this, I'm going to use the height map of this. So you could potentially use, you know, another texture. I recommend you to use a temp because it just gives such natural results for this and nobody's going to notice it's the same texture. So what I'm going to do is to create a name rewrote declaration node so that we can change it in the future. So we don't have that line going here. So name rewrote declaration node and let's call it layer two mask. We're just going to put it right here. We can even connect this one if we want to make it a little bit more organized. And our texture two D, it's going to be layer two. It's called layer two mask. So it's going to be here. All right. And what I want to do is to actually change the texture size. So for this one, I'm going to press one to create a constant, and then I'm going to right click and I'm going to call it a color variation, world tiling. And we're going to put a value of 100 just to test things out, and we're going to just put it here. Now, what we're going to do is we have this texture here. How are we going to use it? Well, first, let's take a look at what this is doing. The first thing I want to do is to make sure I grab the blue channel from this. So what I will do is to create a component mask and what do component mask does. Type component mask. What it does is basically takes any texture that you have and basically mask only the channels that you want. In our case, we want the blue channel, so we're going to leave it like this. Notice that there are several ways of doing things. You're going to also go for break float tree components like this and break the blue one. There's not a single node that can do everything for you. You have multiple alternatives for this. So we're going to go here and instead of connecting this, we're going to actually break this. So we're going to go for break material attributes. And instead of using the use material attributes, we're going to check this. And we're going to connect the roughness here, the normal, the ambien occlusion, and that's pretty much it. Connect the specular if you want. But for the base color, I'm going to go here and put this one just so that you can see what's going on. So if we take a look at our material here, notice that we have one texture here. But what happens is, when I move it, let me go to the unlad mode, you will notice that the texture is actually worth a line blend. So what would be the difference without it? Well, let me just connect this one like this. Let me just scrap this just like that. Convert to texture sample, and we're going to just put it here. And I'm going to show you how it looks like without the word align blend. So we have this material. And notice that the texture is like stuck on the treaty model, right? It doesn't move at all. However, when we go to the other texture here, we're going to have a texture that actually it's in the world space, and it's actually working in all directions. So if I duplicate this, the beauty of this is I can duplicate this and notice that it automatically tiles. I can just move it here, and I don't need to worry about anything here, which is fantastic for us. So with that set, we're going to leave it like this, and then in the next session, we're going to add it as a color to our final material. 22. Adding Global color tint: Alright, so now that we have our mask, we need to tell the material that use this mask for changing the color because right now, what we're doing is just working with this. So this is our Alpha. And like most Alphas we have worked with before, we want to use the classic power here for the contrast node, connect this one, and then we're going to go for multiply, I'm going to connect this one, and we will create the constants here that we need. Press hold one and click to create a constant, right click convert to parameter, and this is going to be my world color variation. Contrast, and we can put it on one for now and C, Control B, and we're going to go for intensity. Just like that. Like always, we're going to clamp these values to make sure they are either zero or one. Otherwise, we will break the color. No, it's either zero or one, but any value above one, it's going to be one. A value below zero, it's going to be zero. So I'm going to open up the instance so you can say what's going on. I'm going to go for color variation, intensity, so I can increase intensity, make it brighter, and also increase the contrast like this. Now, it may look like it doesn't look completely black, but if we go here to the buffer visualization, go to base color, you will notice that it's indeed actually black, so you don't need to worry about that. So we can increase the contrast or color variation intensity. And also, if you want to change the word tiling, we can do this. The lower the value, the more tiling you will have the bigger. Obviously, it becomes, you know, big enough. So 100 looks like it's fun for now, it's going to look like this. That's great. So now what we need to do because we break the material attributes here, we need to grab this base color. So we're going to leerve this. Going to hold L and click, and we're going to larp this color. And the Alpha, it's going to be this one. So we're going to go here. The base color, it's going to be actually, let's create a name rewrote declaration note. Name, it's going to be my world tint alpha mask. And we're going to go for world tint alpha mask just like this. Use this nice and organized. And we can go here and put a base color, hold V to create a parameter, and we will call it world tint mask. We're going to put a value of I'm going to put it green for now. Say it's very evident. I know the material looks so ugly now, but yeah, just be patient for a second. Everything is going to work just fine. And then we're going to connect the base color here to the A input. And just like that, we're going to go here to the base color. And there you go. So what will happen now is that you see that we have our growing material. Now, if you want to have a more decent setup, we can just go for something like this, you know, for different variation of the layer two material and also the tint of this, we can go for something a little bit light, just like that. And obviously, we can increase the contrast and the intensity, so we can go for something like this. Intensity just like that. And now we can just go back to our color here. Just like that. Now, I want to be able to, you know, basically control the Alpha value of this. So I think I can just do multiply here, multiply node, and put another input here, holding one and call it like tint opacity. And we're going to have a slighter max of one slider mean of zero. And we're going to put the default value on one here. So we're going to go here, and then we're going to go to the Alpha. So just like that, we're going to multiply everything by zero, so we can go for tin opacity. And just like that, we can have very subtle color here and you can already see how good this looks. Can even go for something a little bit bluish if you want, have a little bit of color variation. And if you don't like it, can always go for something like this and control the opacity of the tint. Sorry, that was the other material. To something like that. If you want and control the opacity, zero, you won't have anything. One, you will have a lot. So layer two, leave it at something like this, something like reddish, and this one is going to be kind of, like, blue, something. And then we're going to go for a thin opacity. There you go. You can go for something like this, and you can always change the word tiling. Now, if this is too much, obviously, you can change the tin capacity, and you can have a slight world variation for yourself. Now, this is working really good, but I'm already having a lot of parameters, so I want to make sure everything it's grouped. So what I'm going to do is to go for all this and go for a group here and call it color variation. Click Apply. And now you will see that color variation has its own parameter group, and the next one it's going to be the layers. So this one, it's going to be layer one. And, we can just keep it like that. Maybe we can have the vertex color contrast. So we're going to call it vertex color contrast. There you go. Hit apply. And now you have the Alvedo color as well that you have somewhere here in this map. If I can find it, S Layer two V color. Always here. Well, never mind. I'm going to look it up later. But for now, now we have our color variation that is working just great. Now you can see that our material is actually working. Now what we will do is to work a little bit on the slope mask. 23. Adding the moss Material: Alright, so before doing the slope mask, we need to make sure that we have an asset. And I find that in QuickSell, if you go here for you can just go from QuickSell here and search for moss material. We can look for some moss materials here, like see materials and textures. And you can choose anything you want. I already choose one here and download it. So let's import it into unreal. So by the way, the color is here. So we're going to put it in its own group layer two, just like that. There you go. For any kind of layer two changes, is going to be here. So the next thing we want to do is to import this texture. So we're going to go for IoT materials, and we're going to double click here and we're going to create a new folder called moss 01, and we're going to import this, we're going to go here. And we can go here to the ones, we download it, import everything. And obviously, we need to use our utility that we used before. So what we're going to do is to just go here to our mask generator. And here we're just going to change the color and everything. So we're going to go for moss and the ambien occlusion. Actually, this one didn't come with amen occlusion. Let's use a cavity for now. It's not exactly the same, but it really doesn't matter at this point. Roughness and displacement we're going to use. This one, of course, there you go. So we're going to save it. And now we're going to output this. So export or you're going to see that we have our output here in the intro to materials, textures. You have our output, going to move it here and we're going to call it sorry, Ms T, mos 01 mask, and this is going to be the color, which is okay. The normal map we just need to change here for make sure it's normal map and you are good to go. The last thing you need to make sure is this mask here is actually set to mask. So we get the accurate values. All right. So we're going to go here to our instance. And now that we have this, we're going to create another layer. So it's going to be very easy. By the way, before we do that, let's go to our function and make sure all these textures samplers go for shared wrap. And the reason for that is we're going to use a lot of textures and if you notice here, there must be some platform stats. Not this one. Probably here, the rock master material, you will see that you have your samplers used, and you need a limit. You have a limit of how many textures you can use. The wrap mode basically allows you to have multiple textures in one material. So by doing that and saving it, we are good to go. We're going to copy this and paste it. And we can even change this like go for white and call it layer tree Alvido color. And this is our layer tree material. There you go. And now what we need to do is just to change these textures. So we're going to go here to the texture object and go here to the color and click Okay, and go for this one and this one, we don't need this anymore. So we're going to go here to the mask and put it right here. And for the normal map, we're going to do the same. Apply and by the way, I think I'm previewing some values here. Oh, I'm just previewing this one. So now that we have this, so this is our taint with Alpha mask. We can actually make material attributes once again and connect these ones here, where they belong. So we have our material back and we can go back to working with those. And what I want to do is to actually make a material layer blend like we did before. And we're going to go for standard. So the base material, it's going to be this one. And the top material is going to be this one. So we're going to call it Tree material. And we are going to connect it to the top material here, LT material. Beautiful. Connected putting it here. Sorry, you can go for use material attributes, connected just like that. And now, obviously, nothing will happen because we need an Alpha. We're going to work on that now. 24. Creating the Slope Mask: Alright, so let's add our slope mask. But first, let's comment all this. So grab everything, and I can just put it on top. I like to make it a little bit sequential, so I can read this as, like, from left to right. So I'm just going to leave it here and call it like world tint Alpha mask. And this is going to be my world tint LRP, probably. Makes sense. There you go. So now the Alpha, obviously, we need a transition. So we're going to use a node that is really, really useful and it's called the slope node, the slope mask. So I'm just going to put it here so you can see what's going on. Start previewing note. You will see here that I'm actually having a transition here. So I'm having the white on top and the black on the bottom. So let me just show you how it looks on this one here. So I have this material, and you will see that I have the moss on top. Now, also here, I have the moss on top, but notice that if I rotate this, the moss actually always stays on top because it's taking a look at the norms from here, maybe we can take a look at with another I don't know, maybe maybe this. Maybe a Taurus can be a good example. So let's apply our material here. There you go. So notice that every time I rotate this, the most always stays on top, no matter what, it's on top here and on top there, but it's never on the sides. Now, we can change this. We can change the angle. So let's actually move this a little bit to have a little bit of workspace. And the slope angle, we're going to click V to create a vector parameter and call it slope angle. And by default, it's going to be on one. So we're just going to put it here. And it apply and looks like nothing has changed because we're actually having the same value. But if we go for our material, and change the slope. And instead of being blue, we're going to go here to zero. 000 actually means no slope. So if we go for one, you will see that it's on the X axis. So it's actually coming from this direction, and it's pretty much like this, right? And if we go for the Y, we go for green, it's going to be like that. Obviously, you can't control the intensity here. The lower the value, the less influence the slope mask will have. So if you're wondering why will I change this? Like, at the top, it looks like the most makes a muss of sense for me. Well, the reason is sometimes, like, for example, you have a snowy area or maybe a forest, you want to put some moss on the bottom of the trees, maybe you can use this one to automatically put moss on all the tree bottom. That's a very good way, actually. Now, this sk lasks something, and it needs a tangent normal. Basically, what it will do is to give you, you know, a little bit of detail. So what I'm going to do is to actually go here and use a Ni name root declaration no. I'm going to call it three layer three normal texture or drag it here. And this normal, we're going to use a texture sample. And we're going to use a rap, of course, and we're going to drag here or layer tree normal texture. Now, if you wonder why I don't click on here, it's because our object texture is not compatible with the tangent normal. This needs to be a vector tree. We're going to go here. And now that we have our texture here, we're going to go to the tangent normal and take a look at what's going on here. We do have the most normal working here. Now, you can try with other normal maps if you want. For me, it doesn't make much of a difference. Right. But now, what we have here, it's basically a little bit of a better transition between those two. Now, what else we can do? We can actually increase the fall of power and the chip contra. So let's do that now. Click one to create a constant and call it fall of power and let's just call it slope fall of power. We're going to put it here and we're just going to leave it on one by default. And Control C, Control B. We're going to call it slope contrast, not like this. Slope contrast. And we're going to put it here to the cheap contrast. And we're also going to select everything here and we're going to group it in the slope just like that. All right. So we can go here. And also, you could potentially convert this to a parameter if you want to change, like, you know, the tangent normal. I leave it up to you if you want. For me, in my experience working with this, you don't necessarily need to put parameters for everything. The less is actually better to work with because you're actually going to work with a material that it's only have the most important stuff. If you work with other materials, you may know that, um so click on this and let's try to play a little bit with the slope. So we have the slope angle, which we already try. Let's try the contrast. If we increase the contrast, you will see that it becomes way contrasty. And if we go negative one, it's actually going to do the inverse, which is really good. We want to have that power. So fall of power, obviously, the lower you will have the more influence it can have. Which is really nice. So, beautiful. Now we have, like, a really nice texturing and it's actually working really, really well for us. So now that we have this, I think we are in a good spot to import a treaty model, so we can try our master material to see if there is anything we need to change. But for now, we're going to go here and call it slope mask. And then here moss on top, blending. Look at that. We don't need this. I don't know what's doing there. Look at our master material. It's slowly getting really, really nice. So we're going to work on that next. 25. Vertex Painting on Nanite meshes: Alright, so to test our material, it will be better if we actually import a model. So the way you do that is you will just look for any kind of model here. It can be a simple rock or whatever. I'm just going to use this one. Go to download and go to the Raw file. This is the highest resolution file you can get and also comes with some textures and whatever. We're going to use the FVX for now. But just hit download and we're going to import it. So I'm here in real, and I already have it here. So what you're going to do is to go to Import and you're going to import the Treaty file. And sometimes it's the FBX, sometimes it's the OBJ. In this case, is dot FBX. So just note that you can just import this. Just hit the default bottoms and you're good to go. So I'm not going to do it now because it's going to take some time. But first, make sure to remove the nanite here. Okay, because we're going to use some vertex painting. So we're going to drag this. Okay, we're going to just put something like this. And what we're going to do is to actually put our material here. And look at that. It's actually working really nice. Now, let's work with our parameters a little bit so we can check what do we need to change? So first off, I'm going to show you how to paint. So go to mesh paint here, click on the mesh, then go to mesh paint, then go to the paint tab, just like we did before. And now we can just paint in red here, the red channel. Notice that everything is white here. So we're going to paint in black. So holding the Shift click, I'm going to paint red, the opposite color, which is black. I'm just going to paint like this. There you go. Notice that I'm already adding a lot of detail to my mesh just by doing that, right? So keep painting. Just so that you have some color variation here. You don't want to have the same texture there, like, just like that. And we can paint the other side as well, and paint a little bit here on the ground. You know, you can be very creative with it. And we can also paint like here. Let's go for Shift click. There you go, have some paint. And it looks like it's good enough for me. I'm going to just paint a little bit here. And there you go. So now, how do you apply this? Because what I need to do is to apply this vertex color information to all the meshes. And there is a bottom for that applies vertex instance colors to source meshes, go to here, click Ort. And what you will have now, you're going to add a vertex color information to your meshes so that every time you drag it, you don't need to paint it again. Now, this is a limitation that comes from Nant. If you're not using Nante, you can have instance with different types of vertex painting colors. But for now, what you can do is to just go here. Double click on this one. I already have it here. So two things we're going to do. We're going to go for rock one. What you will see here is as soon as I apply my material, you will notice that my rock is already having the vertex color information. I'm not really sure if you can check the vertex color. There you go. That's the vertex color that we paint. So that's great. The next thing, I'm going to enable Nante a lot of people think that they cannot use vertex painting with nanite. You can actually do it, so don't worry, hit Apply. And that's why I didn't import the mesh because it will load this by default, and sometimes it will just take, you know, some time to load. So there are other ways to do the vertex painting for nanite meshes. We're going to keep it simple for now. But also be aware that you don't necessarily need to import the nanite mesh. I mean, everything you can use should be nanite by default. There is no reason not to use nanite. But if you don't want a super high resolution mesh like this one, you don't have to. You can just import the lower resolution one available in fab. So that's it. So that's how you paint on nanite meshes. Look at this. That's the beauty of using this material. So what we're going to do now is to actually improve our material based on this because now that we can have this, we can test if we like it or not, if there are some things we need to change. So let's do that now. 26. Updating the Texture Tiling: Alright, so one of the things we need to work on it the tiling. The tiling of our rock. It may seem from this sense that it's fine. This looks amazing. By the way, we have created a great material that you can use anywhere. But if you look very closely, it starts to get a little bit blurry, especially when we look into the unlit mode, you will see that, you know, it's kind of like a you know, it's very low resolution texture, and that's on purpose because we want to use two K textures for our meshes. Obviously, if you put a higher resolution mesh, it will look better, but the problem will still persist if you actually make this mesh bigger like this because the bigger it is, the more space in the screen it will occupy, and you will see all the blurry textures. So we need to change the UVs here. If you remember what we did here, we had a texture coordinate here and a UV tiling. So it's going to be really simple. We're just going to put the UV tiling here. And we're going to click one because we're already using the tiling here. We don't really need to do anything so far here. So what we need to do is just put this constant here and we will call it UV tiling. And we're going to put it one for now, and we're going to connect it everywhere like this. I go for UV tiling here, UV tiling, and here. We want all of them to have the same tiling. Obviously, you can create different tilings for each layer if you want. But for our case, I want the same resolution for all the textures. I'm also going to put it in the group. It's called UV tiling. There you go. Just like that. I'm going to go here, apply. Now what I'm going to do is just go to the material incense, and then I'm going to go here for UV tiling and change this. Let's put something like five. Alright, so now when we get closer, you can actually see that this is actually looking much better, in my opinion. All the textures are changing. Not only this one, this one as well, you can see it has a very, very nice resolution. I just really looks so nice, so nice. So UV tiling is very important. So we're going to explore some methods here that we can use because when we duplicate this and we scale it like this, you might find that actually the resolution is lower, so you need to increase the tiling, like, for example, 15, and that's okay for this size, but maybe for this one, it is too much. So in that case, we're going to take a look at other methods where we can change the UV tiling. So let's do that now. 27. Object scale tiling: Alright, so let's fix the tiling when our rock is actually bigger. So we're going to go here and make this one bigger. So there's actually a node that is very useful for us, and it's going to be the object scale. And the object scale is just going to give you basically the size of this object. So if I right click on this, you will see that it's the size. So obviously, we cannot just directly connect this here. So we're going to just put it here just so that we can try how it looks like. So what we're going to do is to go for make material attributes, and we're actually going to put this here. Just go to connect for now just so that we can see actually going to put a texture here with T, and we're going to go for textures, go for rock, go for this one, and just put it right here. And now that we have this, let's connect this into the material attributes, hit apply, and now our rock should be updated with a normal material, just like this. So how can we use this? Because we cannot really connect this one here. Like, if we do that, you will get an error because this is a float tree, and the UVs require only float two. So what you need to do is to only go for a component mask, just like we did before. The RNG is the ones you're going to make and just put them like this and there you go. So now, you have your UVs based on the scale. So let's take a look at what this looks like. Now, it looks like nothing has happened. Let's see what happens when we scale this one. Looks like something's going on here, right? So let me right click. Actually, we can multiply this or divide. So let's see which one works best for us. Hold to multiply and then click one and right click and Object scale tiling, press one for now. But put it like this. I believe we need to divide, but we will see. So let's apply and then go to the material instance. And what we will do is to change the object scale. Let's put something like 100 and indeed it is better when we divide, I believe. So let's put ten, 100, 1,000, maybe 0.10 0.001 250, 0.0 001. It's like this. And the reason this is not happening is because we need a UV coordinates, sorry, press U together texture coordinate and multiply this. There you go. I forgot about this one. So let's go ahead and do that. Do not just copy this. Just put texture coordinates first, then multiply by this. So let's go back and click on one. So now you can see that when I scale my object, my texture will also scale with me. You'll see that my texture becomes bigger, so I don't get blurry. So that is great. That's something you may want because when you have an object from distance, may look great from distance, but as soon as you get close, it becomes blurry. So let's try the maybe ten. Maybe maybe two. Maybe two. It's maybe a little bit too much. But at this size looks looks okay to me, doesn't look too blurry. Let's try a smaller size like this. There you go. 0.25. See how it looks like. It's a little bit too blurry. So we're going to go here, put like five. Put like five. It's fine, I think. Let's go for if one is very blurry. So ten looks like a decent number here, and here it looks like you know, it's styling more. So that's great, because the bigger the object, let's say the player will come here and you will not see these blurry faces. So I think ten is a decent number. Obviously, you can play with this number as much as you want. For now, we're going to leave it like that, but now the challenge for us will be to use them in our material function. So let's do that now. 28. Adding the Object Scale tiling to our function: So in order to update our function, we're going to copy this just like before. Also, we don't need this anymore, so we're going to delete it later. So control V, just like that. And this is our object scale, and this is our tiling. So our tiling will be here. All right. And basically, what we want is either use this one here or this one. So we're going to use a switch. Static switch. And what we're going to do is to put all these here. If it's true, we're going to use this one. Actually, we're going to use false for this one because we're going to call it, are you going to use object scale? Let it falls like this, default value falls. And if it's true, we're going to use this one here. So this value also going to be an input. So we're going to duplicate this and we're going to call it static bull. I'm going to put it here. By default, it's going to be false. Use object scale for tiling. There you go. Use preview value default. And for that, we need to put a static bull just like that. And with that, we already have the preview value as default. It is set to folds, which means we're going to use this one first. So we're going to apply. Okay. Now our material has been updated. Use Object scale for tilling here. So we need a static bull for this, and we're going to right click and static bull parameter, and we're going to call it use Object scale for tiling, and we're going to put it everywhere here. Here. You can also use the reroute declaration node where we can just connect those very easily if you want. So for example, name here and just use Object scale for tiling. Just go disconnect this and use it here and let's just use object scale for tiling. Click here, copy and paste, so you can have a little bit more organized. You can do the same for the UV textures if you want, for this one. For now, I'm going to leave it like that. I don't think it's such a big deal. You don't need to use it for everything. As long as it's not too confusing, I think it's fine. So just like that, we're going to delete this. We don't need this anymore, and we're going to go back to what we had hit Apply. Now what you will see is that nothing has happened. However, if I go here to my material, and let me put this in the group node where we can actually change this. What's the name, UV tiling. So we're going to go for UV tiling here and look at what will happen here. If I go to my material instance and then go to UV tiling, click here. Now, my tiling will scale with the mesh. So if I scale it like this, it's like that, my tiling will scale accordingly so that when I play my game, everything's fine. You don't need it's not blurred or anything like that. If I play like this, it's also fine. If for whatever reason I don't want that, I can check this and I will go back to the default tiling. So it's always nice that you can have multiple material instance with different parameters depending on the case. Maybe you have an object that is very big and you want to use this one or maybe you have an object that is very small, you want to use this one, you know, without the object scale. Not every setting will work for everything, so it's always good to have the flexibility with multiple material instances so that you can have multiple options for yourself. With that set, let's go ahead and continue to update our material. 29. Updating the textures with new parameters: So I downloaded snow texture here from Fab. You can choose anyone you want, just like we did before. And I already imported here to my project, so you don't have to see the same process all the time. I already have all the textures. I have my mask that I use with the utility we create before, and I'm going to put this as mask, remember? The base color here, and I have the normal map just like that. So that's great. What I want to do is the ability to change those textures in case I don't like them. That's the beauty of having this master material. So maybe you have rocks from the desert or rocks from, you know, in the snowy mountain or whatever. So I want to update those. So what are we going to do is to actually just right click and convert to parameter, all of them. Convert to parameter, and we're going to call it layer one Alvedo. Parameter two will be layer, layer one mask, and this one will be layer one normal. Let's make a little bit of room for ourselves here. Just move it just like that. All right. So now that we have this, we can group them accordingly. So we're going to put this on layer one, just like that. All right, so let's do the same here. Convert to parameter. L to Alvido. Now, you may be wondering why I don't name this rock, snow, moss, whatever. I can show you some experiences while I do this working on the AA projects. It happens sometimes that you have a lot of textures in different biomes, and you have a really good master material that you can use, and what will happen is that well, sometimes they update the texture. So for example, this is the moss texture. We're going to update it to use the snow one. So it is going to be the tree Alvedo. And what you will have is a material that says, for example, moss. And when you use it, you're going to find the moss material, and it's actually snow. So it's like completely misleading, you know? It's like why the material instance says that it's moss when it's snow and why does it say rock when it's grass? And it's exactly why the reason I personally prefer to use numbers for this because if I update the textures I want to use in the future, then you may want to also, you know, just use the right naming convention. Otherwise, it's a little bit misleading to have this. Let's just leave it like that. I don't really need the preview. So there you go. All of them are parameters. So now that we have this, we can go back to our material instance, and you will see that I actually have my layer one here, layer two. Layer three, this should be on the layer three group. We have this? It's a good thing that we notice and layer three. And we can change the textures. Maybe you don't like this rock material, you want to change it, you can go ahead and download another one. In our case, we're going to change it to another one. So I'm actually going to show you something really cool. Let's say you like these parameters, you can actually Go ahead and create an instance of an instance. So create material instance. So anything that you change here is going to change in the child as well. So this one is going to be my rock snow. So this one is going to be my rock snow. So we're going to duplicate this. Just going to put it just like this. And we're going to just go ahead and change the layers. So if we change the layers, you're going to see that we're going to put our textures here for the snow. So we're going to put the base color. We're going to put the mask here and we're going to put the normal just like that. All right, so why nothing has happened is because we haven't updated the material, so we just need to go here and drag and drop this one and look at that. Now we have our snow texture here next to this one. And you can actually change a lot of things. Now, the cool thing about this is that when you change the parent, so for example, let's say you change the slope angle, you can just go ahead and change this thing. And it will update both of them and change it to the green channel, maybe, maybe also to the red channel, something like that. It's fully covered in snow. I like that. So maybe you want to update like this. The cold thing is going to update both of them. It's going to update not only, you know, one of them is going to update all the child, so you can go here, fall off power, remove the fall off or increase the fall off if you want. That's amazing amazing stuff. So with that set, we already have a really good material that we can use. And let's talk about texture memory for a moment. 30. Memory usage: Alright, so this is special session because some of you may be thinking, why I shouldn't just download the acids that you get from Fab or any other acid for that matter that already comes with a k textures just like this. Like, the material is already done. You don't need to do anything. It's like, why are we going through this? Well, there are several reasons for that. But one of the biggest reasons is that this is very heavy. We're using an acid that has eight K textures, has unique textures for the acid. Which means if we use this for all our environment, we're going to have the same size for everything. Now, I'm going to show you how you can check the size here. You can right click. Go to the size map, and you will see here that you have different assets that are occupying some space. You have the static mesh which occupies 200 megabytes, the normal mat 78, the amin occlusion 39, and so on and so forth. This is already very low for this type of acid. Usually, you may be, you know, isolating 300-1 gigabyte each acid. So why are we doing this? Well, the first thing is AK textures are really expensive. So what you can do here, if we take a look at this asset, take a look at this one. And we can go for size here, size map. You will see that we're using the static mesh, still a little bit heavy, but we're using lower size texture. So our memory actually is less heavy. So what happens is that well, it's not that much big of a deal, you may think. Well, the thing is, we are using the same for everything. Let's say we use this material here. So let's put our rock material. Alright. There you go. Would it like that? And you can save it. And let's take a look what's the size of this. So we're going to go here asset actions, sorry, not as actions. Size map. We're going to see, okay, 64 megabytes for the static mesh, and we still have a bunch of sexurs here. In total, it's 100 megabytes. But these are the same textures that we are using here. So if I drag this asset here, we're actually using the same textures here. So in total, we are only occupying memory the size of the static mesh. The textures are already loaded. Unlike this one, the textures are unique. If you put another unique acid, then it's going to be double the size. And we can have like dozens of rocks here for this that use this rock master material, and we won't have an increase on our memory usage because we are repeating the same textures over and over again. And because we are blending between, you know, different stuff, like we have the snow. We have a secondary material to cover the tiling of the other one, and you have also moss. You can change some textures if you want. You won't really notice the difference. Actually, you may argue that this one looks better than this one. We can even try this out. We can go here and put the snow material and you can, you know, do the painting and everything, and it will be fine. Or you can just use the most material if you want. But in any case, like what you need to to consider is that this material is going to be used several times, and the same textures are going to be used over and over again. So in total, the size of your project will be very small. Not only that, you also have the flexibility of changing the look and feel of all these assets that usually come with unique textures that may or may not fit the needs of your project. So that's something to keep in mind. So with that said, that's the topic I want to touch on performance. Obviously, this has a lot of advantages, as you can see, especially in big worlds. You don't have much memory to use, so keep that in mind. 31. Wrap up: So congratulations for making it to the end. Obviously, your work will be to create the exact master material just like we did here so that you can create a rock master material and use it in your projects. Why I chose to work on a rock master material is a great example to apply all those things that you learned, such as tyiling, textures, material functions. You have reroute notes, you have material blending, height leer. We learn about object scaling. We learn about world blending. We learn about the slope. It's such a great and useful material. It's not only great for learning, but also This is what you have. When you apply when you work in a project, this is what you will create. This is a real example that you will be asked in the work or anything for that matter. To create for your project. This is all the notes that you need to start creating more materials. Obviously, the sky is the limit when it comes to materials. But hopefully, this has been a great example for you to learn all the basics of materials and actually create something useful for yourself. So if you enjoy this course, you may want to check out my other courses. I have planned courses for landscape, for many other stuff related to world building. So make sure to check them out. And I would love to see your work. So make sure to share it. Alright. Thank you so much. And I'll see you in the next one.