UE4 Materials
Alright! Let's start exploring the visual material system provided in UE4 that affords us the ability to create amazing and interesting rendering techniques without writing a single line of code! By the end of this chapter we will have created two materials that we will apply to the boss so that it looks like a sinister robotic powerhouse.
What are materials
UE4 materials are a visual node-based scripting system that is used to create rendering techniques to be applied to object surfaces. This system massively simplifies the process of developing visually impressive and complex shaders by removing the barrier to entry that is low-level shader programming! However if you wish to add to the systems vast feature set and shader library, the system is also extensible by allowing developers to write their own material expressions via shaders if need be.
Each node in a material graph represents a piece of shading code in some manner, they are known as material expressions. This means...
