Materials and Material Instances
Before moving on to the next exercise, we need to first briefly discuss what Materials and Material Instances
are before you can work with these assets and apply them to the new enemy character. Although this book is more focused on the technical aspects of game development using Unreal Engine 4, it is still important that you know, on a surface level, what Materials and Material Instances
are and how they are used in video games.
Note
For more information about Materials, please refer to the following Epic Games documentation: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/index.html.
A Material is a type of asset that can be applied to a mesh that will then control how the mesh looks in-game. The Material
editor gives you control over many parts of how the end visual result will look, including control over parameters such as Textures
, Emissive
, and Specular
, among others. The following image shows the default mannequin skeletal...