Introduction

Even though we have already exposed ourselves to a material in Unreal Engine 4, that was back in the first chapter. We were toddlers back then! Not really, but that experience was an introductory one. Seeing the inner workings of a PBR material got us close to the material editor and several of its nodes, but we are yet to properly use and master them. And that's what we are planning to do now.

Starting gently—as we always do—we'll begin working on a simple scene where we'll learn how to set up a proper material graph for a small prop. Beyond that, we can also look at how to create materials that are going to be applied on large-scale models, and what clever techniques can be implemented to balance quality and performance. And from there, we will also take a look at a bunch of other interesting resources: material effects driven by the position of the camera, large-scale optimizations, and semi-procedural creation techniques:

Let's get started!