Introduction

As artists, we can provide tools to make it easier for others on the team to be able to tweak the aspects of a material, while designing the game or tweaking them at runtime. For instance, thegame designers on your team may like to tweak how a material looks but may not have knowledge of how to use the material editor.Alternatively it may be your programmers want to support different weather types in the game. We can create the base material and then expose properties that can be modified to display things differently over time.

In this chapter, we will move away from the things we can do inside a material to those we can do once we have created it, such asquickly tweaking it using material instances, layering different shaders on top of each other, or affecting multiple material settings at once.