Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial - UE5 Starter Course

• This tutorial will guide you from knowing nothing about Unreal Engine 5 to creating a beautiful world.
• Every step in the process will be shown in detail.
• You will learn how to install Unreal Engine 5, navigate the 3D world, create materials, and program a game using Blueprints.
• The assets used in this video are completely free for you to follow along.
• A comprehensive guide on utilizing Quixel Bridge to import assets from the Mega scans library.

Hello everyone, if you are completely new to Unreal Engine 5, then this tutorial was made for you. In this tutorial, you will go from knowing nothing about Unreal Engine 5 to creating this beautiful world you see right here.

Now I know this might look intimidating, but do not worry! Every step in this process, from sculpting the landscape to creating the castle, will be shown in detail. This video is pretty long, but that's because Unreal Engine 5 is a big program, and we have a lot to cover.

To help navigate this video, I divided it up into individual chapters. You can find links to all the chapters in the description below.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

1. Install Unreal Engine 5 and create a project.
2. Navigate and move objects in your 3D world.
3. Create materials and import 3D models.
4. Explore Unreal's amazing new dynamic lighting system called Lumen.
5. Sculpt landscapes and paint foliage.
6. Download free assets from the Mega scans library.
7. Briefly program a game using Blueprints.
8. Create the fantasy environment you see right here.

I know learning Unreal Engine 5 can be tough at first, which is why each chapter in this video can be treated as its own self-contained lesson. So if you're ever stuck on something, you can always go back in the video and rewatch that chapter.

Also, all the assets I use in this video are completely free, so you can follow along with me. Now with all that being said, let's jump into Unreal Engine 5 to begin!

Before we can use Unreal Engine 5, of course, we have to download Unreal Engine 5. To do so, you need the Epic Games Launcher; you can get it from their website. Come all the way down here to the Unreal Engine tab.

Now with the tabs up here, you want to click on Library, and if you don’t see Unreal Engine 5, then you don’t have it downloaded. To download it, you want to click on the plus icon next to engine versions and make sure you have 5 selected, and then click on Install.

Now it's going to ask for an install location. You can just leave it at the default place, but if you do want to bring it somewhere else, then you can click on Browse and select a new location. But I'm just going to leave it at default and click Install.

Once Unreal Engine 5 is done downloading, all you have to do to open it up is click Launch or you can click Launch up here. But Unreal Engine 5 is not set as the default engine. You can set it as a default engine by clicking on the drop-down and selecting Unreal Engine 5.

Alternatively, if you don't want to go through the Epic Games Launcher, you can click on the drop-down right here and create a shortcut on your desktop.

Now that that shortcut has been created, let's open up Unreal Engine 5 by just double-clicking on the application.

The Unreal Project Browser will pop up when you open up Unreal Engine. Essentially, this is where we open up recent projects or we create a project completely from scratch, which is what we're going to be doing now.

You can create your project from a template, which essentially is a pre-made project to help point you in the right direction with a lot of stuff already done for you. For example, if you're in the car industry and you want to render out a car, then possibly going into the automotive tab and selecting Photo Studio will be a good template from where you will start.

But for our case, I want to start from complete scratch, so I'm going to come to Games and make sure I select Blank. Now down here is the project location where our project is going to be saved.

I just want to save this on the desktop. If you do want to save it somewhere else, then click on the file icon right here and browse through a different folder. Now right here is the project name, so let's call this one First Project.

The project settings are going to leave at Blueprint since we're not going to be going over C++ code in this video. Down here, I want to make sure Starter Content is enabled. Starter Content will give us some nice assets that we can play with to help us learn Unreal Engine 5.

Below that is Ray Tracing; we're not going to go over Ray Tracing just yet, and of course, to create this project, let's click on Create.

So this is what you should see when opening up Unreal Engine for the first time. Don't worry, we're going to go over what all these different windows and buttons do in just a second.

But before that, I want to go over how Unreal Engine stores projects. So let's exit this project, and we can see that a brand new folder was created on our desktop. Remember, I selected my desktop as the place to save our project.

Essentially, this folder contains all the data that makes up our project, so whenever we make a change in our project or we create something in the project, it's going to be stored right here.

Now to open a project again, all you have to do is double-click on the .uProject asset right there, and that will open up your project from where you last saved it.

To begin, let’s briefly go over how to navigate the user interface and what all these different windows do.

The window that sticks out the most is the Viewport right here. The Viewport is essentially just a view into our 3D world that we're creating.

For example, we can fly around and look at our world, we can even grab objects and manipulate them all within the 3D Viewport.

Now don’t worry, we are going to go over camera controls and how to move objects in just a bit, but I first want to go over what the different windows do.

Right above the Viewport is the Toolbar. The Toolbar is pretty important because it’s where we get a lot of our tools and a lot of the different buttons we're going to be continually pressing. For example, what if I want to add an object into our world?

Then I can click on the plus icon and scroll down to Shapes. Maybe I add in a Sphere and place it in the world. To move it around, I can also switch modes.

Right now I’m in Select mode, which is the main mode where we can move objects around. Let's say if I'm making a landscape, I can go into Landscape mode and create a landscape, or I can go into Foliage mode and start to paint foliage if I do have those assets.

If you are curious, we are going to go over both modes later in the video. Now to the right of that we have the Outliner. The Outliner is essentially a list of all the objects that make up my current world.

So for example, if I want to select a chair, but the chair isn't in my view right now, within the Outliner I can select a chair right there.

I can also select multiple objects by holding down Control, so maybe I want to select both chairs; just hold on Control like that and maybe also the statue right there.

The Outliner is also a great place to organize your world; for example, we see we have all these folders. Real quickly, if you want to create a folder, all you have to do is right-click, Create Folder.

Let’s call this one My Folder, and hold down Control, let’s select both chairs and simply drag them into there just like this.

We can also hide and unhide objects; for example, maybe I want to edit something that’s behind the table, but the table’s in the way right now.

I can come here and temporarily click on the 'I' icon to hide the table and then click on the 'I' icon again to unhide it. And right below the World Outliner, we have the Details panel.

The Details panel is essentially where we can edit all the properties of an object that we have selected. For example, maybe if I don’t like the scale of this chair right here, I can select a chair and come to Scale and maybe increase it by two in the Z-axis, which is the vertical axis, and see that we have a really long and tall chair.

Now, I don’t like that edit; it looks kind of weird, so you can always press Control and Z in Unreal Engine to undo anything.

Now we do have one more default window that’s arguably the most important window since it stores everything we’re doing; it stores information on the chairs, the table, even the entire world, and that is the Content Drawer.

You can get the Content Drawer by going all the way down here to the bottom left-hand corner and clicking on Content Drawer like that to bring it up.

Alternatively, since this window is pretty important, you can press Control and Space at the same time to bring it up and close it.

So if you press Control and Space it's going to bring up the Content Drawer and this gives us a folder view of all the assets that make up our project.

So for example, if we want to see where this chair is being stored and maybe we want to edit the chair, then we can come under Starter Content, Props, and right there we have SM_Couch.

If I double-click on it, we can see the chair asset and make any adjustments if we do need to. Now we’re going to go over the Static Mesh Editor later, so I can exit out of this window by clicking on the 'X' icon.

I’m going to press Control and Space again to bring back my Content Drawer.

And probably the best example I have for the Content Drawer is that it’s like your computer’s file explorer. So just like on your computer, where you have folders, and in those folders you have subfolders, and those subfolders contain assets like text files or Word documents—same exact thing with the Content Drawer in Unreal.

So you have folders, and in those folders you have subfolders, and finally you have all those assets that make up your project.

So for example, here we have the Starter Content folder, and I can go into it by double-clicking like this, or I can click on it right here within the folder window.

Now I can go into any of these different folders; for example, the Maps folder contains the map we’re currently editing, so we can see up here that this map is called Minimal Default.

Right there is Minimal Default, we can double-check that we are editing this map by double-clicking on it to open it up.

Let’s go save, and we can see that it did open up the exact same map. Now if I ever want to go up a folder, I can always click on here; so right now we’re in the Maps folder. If I want to get out of that, I can click on Starter Content, and if I want to get out of that, we can even go to Content right there.

Now don’t worry if you don’t have Starter Content; you can click on ADD, and then Add Feature or Content Pack, and then go to Content and simply select Starter Content and add a project. I’m not going to do that since we did add it when we were creating our project.

As you can guess, the Content Drawer is a pretty big deal, and maybe you don’t want to press Control and Space all the time to bring it up. You always want it docked in your layout.

Well, all you have to do is click on Docked in Layout like this and now your Content Drawer will be right here at the bottom.

Notice how it’s called Content Browser right now, not called Content Drawer. So whenever I say Content Browser and Content Drawer, just know that I’m talking about the same exact thing.

Now this is great, but this tab right here is taking up a little bit of real estate. If you ever want to get rid of a tab, all you have to do is right-click and click on Hide Tab.

If you want to get back that tab, then you can click on the very small blue triangle, and that will bring back your tab. Also, tabs are great because if you left mouse button and hold, you’re able to move this around and dock it somewhere else.

So maybe if I don’t want Content Browser at the bottom right here, I can dock it to the side, or I can even dock it to one of the tabs right here and now I'm able to switch in between Details and the Content Browser.

Also if you ever want to move windows around, you can hover in between the windows and then you're able to move it down just like this to adjust exactly how you want your user interface.

Now another neat trick is that if I dock my Content Browser right here and let's go make it a little bit smaller and maybe I don’t want it always visible, I can right-click and go Dock to Sidebar.

Now whenever I want my Content Browser or any other window, I can just click right here and it will show. Now if I don’t want to dock to sidebar, I can right-click and Unlock from Sidebar just like that.

Now I’m going to click on the 'X' icon to get rid of that Content Browser. Alternatively, if I want to automatically dock all my windows in a sidebar except the Viewport, I can click on F10, which will go into full-screen mode.

Now we can see that my Outliner and Details window and any other windows I have on the side will go into docked mode and then I can click on F10 again to bring those windows back. So F10 is a neat shortcut to automatically dock all your windows.

Now these are just the default windows. If you want to see all the windows that are available to us, we come up to Windows and select any of these.

Now one window that we are going to be using a lot is the World Settings. So World Settings, as you can guess, just has a bunch of different properties and settings that we can play with to edit the map we currently have open.

Now for example, what if we really mess up our user interface; it’s basically unreadable, and we have no idea what is happening? Don’t worry; we can always come up to Window and all the way down here go to Load Layout, and click on Default Editor Layout, which will just reset all of our windows.

Now that we have the very basics of the user interface out of the way, we can move on to the fun stuff, and that is camera navigation.

So how to navigate our camera around our 3D world so we can view it at all different angles? To navigate is actually easier than you think.

So you want your cursor inside the Viewport, and then you want to hold down the right mouse button. If you now move your mouse with the right mouse button held down, you will be able to look around your scene, and still with the right mouse button held down, you’re able to use the W, A, S, D keys to move around.

You can also use E and Q to go up and down, so that’s E to go up, Q to go down, W to move forward, S to move backward, and A and D to move left and right, all while holding down the right mouse button. If you are not holding down the right mouse button and you try to use W, D, then nothing will happen, so make sure you do hold that down.

Now we can also control our camera speed; so let’s say for example there's an object that's really far away and you want to go towards that object, but your camera is moving too slow.

Well, if you come up here to the top right-hand corner and select the camera icon, you’re now able to control that speed. So right now we're at four; we can also bring this up to six and now we are a lot faster, and we can bring this all the way down to one, and we can see that we are pretty slow.

So let's leave it at four, and a shortcut to access camera speed is to, of course, hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel.

So scroll wheel up will move faster and scroll wheel down will move slower, so that’s a shortcut, that’s why you don’t have to come up here and continually play with the camera speed.

If you do want to move faster or slower, here’s a really good tip. Let’s say if you scroll really far away, so you fly really far away from where the bulk of your geometry where your world is, and then you look around and you can’t find your objects anymore, what you can do is come up to any of the objects right here.

Let’s say for example the chair, select that and then press the 'F' key to focus on that object. So if you select an object, you can press 'F' to then snap to that object just like this, so that’s how you’re never lost in your world.

If you ever played any first-person games, you should be right at home since the muscle memory is there for the W, A, S, D key and rotating your camera by moving your mouse. Now if we press 'F' again to then zoom in onto an object, we can rotate around that object by holding down ALT and the left mouse button.

So ALT and left mouse button allows us to rotate around a pivot object, and if we hold down ALT and hold down the right mouse button, we can zoom in and out, so right mouse button zoom in and out, left mouse button to pivot around that object.

And to focus on an object, of course, you want to select it and then press the 'F' key just like beforehand. Before we move on, let’s briefly go over the Viewport controls so we know the different ways that we can view our world.

So up here we have perspective, let’s say if you want a top-down bird’s eye view, then we can click on the perspective button and select Top like this.

So to control in an orthographic view mode, you want to hold down the right mouse button to pan, and of course, use a scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

So right mouse button pan, scroll wheel to zoom in and out. We can also view it from the side, side like maybe the left side saving controls.

And of course, if you want to go back into Perspective, we come up here, select the button, and click on Perspective.

Notice how a lot of the buttons in Unreal have a shortcut right next to it. For example, perspective shortcut is ALT and G, so instead of coming all the way up here and selecting perspective in the drop-down, I can just press the ALT and G key at the same time to go back into perspective.

So right next to our view modes is the Showx, so Showx allow us to turn on and off different object types. For example, what if I don’t want this grid right here at the bottom, then I could come to Show, let’s go find where grid is and uncheck that to hide the grid.

Now maybe for some reason you don’t want to show our static meshes and essentially static meshes are all the objects you see right here, then within the Show flags, we can uncheck static meshes and we no longer see those static meshes.

Now obviously we don’t want that, and if you ever mess up your Show flags, you can bring back the default flags by clicking on use defaults and keep in mind that we aren’t deleting anything with Show flags; they just help us see what we want in the Viewport.

And finally, this is my favorite Viewport option, and that is Game View. So if you come up here and click on the button with the three lines, we have Game View all the way down here, and we can see that the shortcut is 'G.'

Now if I enable Game View, we’re going to see exactly what the player will see in the game. So if I press 'G' to disable Game View, we can see that we have all these different widgets, and we have the grid right here.

And of course, the player won’t see the Sun widget right here, which controls the Sun’s rotation instead. If we want to see exactly what the game will see, we click on 'G' to hide all those widgets and features that are here for us the editor.

So just know that throughout this tutorial, when you see a bunch of widgets and these widgets just disappear, that’s because I toggled on Game View with the 'G' key.

Now that we know how to navigate around our world, it’s time to go over how to create new objects and move them around.

So we’re going to go over moving, scaling, and rotating objects. To begin, let’s go over simple movement. I’m going to press the 'G' key to get rid of our editor widgets, and now all we see is our world.

So to move an object, simply select it, and by default, we get the translation or the movement gizmo. To move an object, hover over any of these arrows and hold down the left mouse button so I’m able to move this chair around.

But notice how moving the chair isn’t smooth. That's because by default, snapping is turned on. Now you can turn off snapping by coming up here and unchecking the grid icon like that.

So now we can smoothly move our objects around. Now I’m going to turn it back on, because it’s important to know that Unreal uses centimeters.

So right now since there's a 10 right next to the icon, it's snapping every 10 cm. We can change this by selecting the number and in the drop-down, let’s select 100.

So now it’s moving every 100 cm, which is 1M. So every time the chair moves, it moves 1M. So that’s pretty important to know. Now I’m going to uncheck it because I do want smooth movement.

Next up is rotation. So to rotate your object, you want to change its gizmo. To change the gizmo, you want to select one of the buttons up here. So right now it’s on translation, right next to it is rotation.

Now I can rotate this chair in all these different axes. We can see that rotation snapping is turned on. If I want to turn that off, then right next to translation snapping we have this icon right here, make sure it’s not blue, and now we’re no longer snapping every 10°.

I can press Control + Z to undo all those changes, and let’s go over scaling. So right next to rotation, we have scaling, and scaling works pretty similar to the rest of the gizmos.
All you have to do is hover over any of these squares, hold down the left mouse button, and now we’re going to scale in that exact direction.

So if we want to turn off scale snapping, of course just uncheck the icon right there, and now we can smoothly scale and press Control + Z a bit because it’s important to point out that if I hover my mouse over one of the individual squares but the one square that's connecting all of them, so the one in the middle, hold down the left mouse button, I can move my chair and scale it uniformly up and down, so not in any particular way.

So I press Control + Z to undo all of those, and if we hover over all these buttons we see that there's shortcuts. So movement is 'W', rotation is 'E,' and scaling is 'R.'

So that means it's 'W' to move, 'E' to rotate, and 'R' to scale. So those are some of the most common shortcuts that we're going to be using consistently throughout our time in Unreal Engine.

So again, one last time, it is 'W' to move, 'E' to rotate, and 'R' to scale. I also want to point out that if we want to move our object in the direction of our object, then come up to this little globe icon, select it; that's how it's now a square.

And we can see that we’re now able to move the object in that object's direction, so move it locally instead of globally. If we want to switch it back to global, then click the square icon again to make it a globe, and now we’re moving it in the direction of the world and not that individual object.

It's also important to point out that if I press 'W' to get a translation widget and if I hover over the square that's in between the different axes, I'm able to lock it and move it only in those two axes.

So if I hover in between the Y and X axes, I'm just moving it in between those and not in the Z-axis. I can also lock it in between the Z and Y axis just like this.

So let’s press Control and Z to undo those changes. Now you're probably wondering how do we create an object in our world? Well, there are a couple of ways.

Number one is that we can duplicate an object, so with any object selected—for example, this statue—if I press Control + D, then we just duplicate that object. Now we didn’t notice any change; that’s because it duplicated in the same spot as the original object, so if I hold down the left mouse button and move it out of the way, we can see that we did duplicate that object, and within the Outliner, there’s now a new object called Statue 2, which is a copy of the original Statue.

So let’s delete Statue 2, and there is an easier way to duplicate, and this is the way I duplicate, and that is hovering over an arrow with a translation widget selected and holding down ALT and the left mouse button.

So hold down both of those and simply drag, and now we’re able to easily duplicate and drag an object away. So let’s press Control + Z to undo all those changes.

Now, another way to create an object is by using the Add tool up here in the toolbar. So for example, let’s click on Add, and let’s come all the way down here to Shapes, and maybe we want to drag in a sphere, simply drag it in like this, or we can even add in a light like a point light, and we’re able to drag it around in our scene.

So let’s go delete those! And finally, the last way to add an object is through the Content Browser; so let’s bring up the browser by holding down Control and Space at the same time, pressing both of those, and let’s go into Props.

And to add an object into a Content Browser, hold down the left mouse button and drag it into your world—for example, this couch.

So let’s go move it down just like this, and now we have a brand new object. So by holding down SHIFT, you can select multiple objects.

So for example, if I have my chair on the left selected and I want to select a chair on the right, if I hold down SHIFT, now I have them both selected. If I hold down SHIFT again, I can add in the table and the statue. Now if I want to deselect an item, all I have to do is hold down Control and click on any items to deselect them.

Now all we have is the statue and the left chair selected, and here’s another tip. If I have the chair selected, hold down ALT and the left mouse button to drag out a new chair.

Let’s say if I want to drag this chair all the way over there, then I’m going to have to drag it across the screen, move my camera, drag it across my screen again, and it’s just a huge hassle.

Another way I can do it is by holding down SHIFT while I’m dragging, so if I'm going to hold on the left mouse button, I want one of these arrows, and I want to lock my camera to the object; simply hold down SHIFT, and you’re able to lock a camera to an object, which can save a lot of time.

So I’m going to press delete and let’s create a very, very simple scene just to get a hang of all the controls.

So to begin, I want to hold down SHIFT and let’s select these two chairs, hold down ALT and duplicate the mouse.

So let go, hold down ALT and left mouse button again, ALT and left mouse button again. Now let’s go rotate some of these chairs that way they’re facing inwards, so select a chair, press ‘E’ to get the rotation gizmo up, and have them all face inside just like this.

Again, it doesn’t have to be pretty perfect because we’re just trying to get used to the controls at this point. And then I’m going to select the table, press ‘R’ to scale it, and I want to elongate the table just a little bit, maybe even in its X axis.

Press ‘E’ again, let’s rotate this, press ‘W’, move it into the middle right there. Select the chair, hold on SHIFT, let’s select the other chair and move them all in.

Let’s select the statue, move it into the middle, press ‘R’, scale this up, and maybe add some lamps on both sides of the table. So press Control and Space.

Within our content, starter content and props, we have this SM_Lamp_Ceiling; if I drag it in, this is exactly what I want. But right now it’s in the opposite direction, so I want this to be placed on the ground.

I could press ‘E’, rotate this and try to get it to 180°, or I could press Control + Z and re-enable Snapping for rotation right here and rotate it exactly -180°, which is what I want.

So press ‘W’ and let’s move it, that's so it’s directly placed against the ground, like right here. So, I could try to guess exactly where it is, or I could snap any object I have selected to the object that’s directly below it by pressing the END key.

So that’s ‘E’ and ‘D,’ not the end letter, so press ‘E’ and ‘D’, END, and snap it there just like that. So press ‘R’ again, scale this up in the Z-axis, hold down ALT and drag it in both the Y and X axes, right there like this.

Let’s hold down SHIFT again and drag both of those across our world just like that, and I would say congratulations, you now have a very, very simple level.

This is definitely not the best map, but it is pretty good as a first level. Now that you finished your first level, it's time to move on to the Post Process Volume.

We’re going to go over how we can change the settings of our viewport camera, specifically exposure. While in the process of creating our first level, you might have noticed that if we zoom into the shadows, we see our screen gets brighter and brighter, and brighter, and then when we zoom out, our screen gets darker.

So that is auto exposure, and what exposure is trying to do is it’s trying to mimic the way our eyes work. So for example, if you've ever been in a very dark room, and you decide to jump out into the daylight, you can feel your eyes start to hurt and everything is really bright.

But slowly, over time, your eyes start to adjust until everything comes into focus, and that is exactly what Unreal Engine is trying to mimic by brightening our screen and darkening our screen.

So I think we can create a better example by duplicating this map and creating a little house. So to do so, let’s press Control and Space to go into our Content Drawer, and I want to duplicate Minimal Under Default, which is right now located in Starter Content and Maps.

So right here is the current level that we have, there’s a little asterisk right next to it, and that tells us that it needs to be saved. So press Control + S to save the level, and to duplicate the level, simply press Control + D to duplicate.

Now let’s go rename this to Post Process Example, and let’s go save it. So if I double-click on Minimal Default, this is the current map that we’ve been on; and then if I double-click on Post Process Example, this is the new map that we’re about to edit.

Now notice that our grid is pretty large right now; that’s because we have our snapping set to 100. We can make the grid squares smaller by saying this back to 10 as its default.

So now our grid is a little bit smaller, or you can press 'G' to hide all those editor widgets. Now I want to start deleting all these objects, so simply select an object and delete it to get rid of it.

And here is a little tip: if I go into the Outliner, since I do want to delete all these chairs, I could hold down control and select each chair individually, or I can select the first chair at the very top of the list, hold down SHIFT, and select the last one.

Then it’ll select everything in between, so control is to select individual objects, and hold down SHIFT is to select a row of objects and press delete.

Now let’s create a little hut. So I’m going to come up to Add and hold down the left mouse button on Cube to add in a very simple cube. Keep in mind that this is just for demonstration to show exposure, so this won’t be the best.

Hold down ALT, let’s go duplicate this wall and hold on ALT again, press 'E', and I want to make sure snapping is turned on so I can rotate this exactly 90° right there.

Hold down ALT again and drag it out just like this. So hold down ALT, rotate this as a roof, and I do want a slight opening so that the sun can come through and illuminate the inside of this hut right here like that.

So now notice that if I zoom in on this, and go inside the hut, we can see our screen gets brighter and brighter and brighter, and then as soon as I fly out, our screen gets darker.

Now this can be annoying if you are building out worlds. So to turn it off and to lock your screen to a certain brightness, we could come up to LIT and all the way down here under Exposure, uncheck Game Settings.

Now we have a constant brightness; that even if I go inside the hut, we see that our screen isn’t getting darker. Now right underneath Game Settings, we have EV00.

If I bring this down, our screen gets brighter, and if I bring this up, our screen gets darker, so we can leave it at zero for now.

Now there is just one issue, and that is this change doesn’t apply to gameplay. To play the game, come up to the toolbar and click on the Play icon.

Now we are currently in game, but if we let’s say go into the hut, we see auto exposure is turned on since our screen gets brighter, and when I leave, the screen gets darker.

On a side note, if you want to stop playing the game, press the Escape key to exit out. Maybe this is what you want when you’re building out your world; you have a constant exposure, and then when you're in game, you have auto exposure turned on.

But if you do want to edit the exposure directly in-game, this is where post-process volumes come in handy.

Now we won’t be able to see the exposure changes with the post-process volume with Game Settings turned off, so come to LIT and make sure Game Settings is turned on again and within the Outliner by default, we will have a global post-process volume for this map.

So with the post-process volume selected within the Outliner, we see that we have a drop-down called exposure, and we have exposure compensation. Now in order to edit any of these properties, you want to make sure that they are turned on first and then we’ll be able to adjust exposure.

But auto exposure is still turned on right now, so what we can do is select Metering Mode, and instead of auto exposure histogram, select Manual.

Now we control exactly what our exposure is with the exposure compensation. So if we leave it at 9, press Play again, we see that we don’t have any auto exposure in-game.

So you might be wondering exactly what the post-process volume is. Well, the post-process volume is a great way to add some effects after everything has been rendered.

So the post-process volume only affects our camera. For example, maybe we want some more bloom, so we select Bloom, and right now intensity is at 0.675. I can boost this up all the way to, let’s say, 8 and maybe if I want the default values back, instead of trying to guess what the default values are, I could come over here and select that backwards arrow, which will set everything back to its default value.

We also have a bunch of other settings; for example, under image effects, we can add a very strong vignette. So right now, it’s at 0.4; we can bring this up all the way to 1, so there’s a lot of darkening around the sides of the camera.

Or we can completely turn off vignettes by bringing it down to zero. So by default, Unreal does have a little bit of vignette with it being at 0.4.

We can also go down here and change some of the color grading. So maybe if I select saturation, I can move the wheel around; we see just a little bit of changes.

I can even boost the saturation down here. So instead of 1, drag this up, and now we have a really vibrant and saturated scene, and of course, I can uncheck this to get rid of that change.

So if you want, there are a ton of different settings you can go through and see what all them are. But you might be wondering how do I create a post-process volume if I don’t have it inside of our world?

So to begin, I’m going to press 'G' key to bring back all of our editor widgets, select the post-process volume, and let’s delete it so we can go over how to create a post-process volume from scratch.

Of course, we’re going to select the Add button; it’s going to be under Volumes. Down here we have Post-process volume, so simply drag this into our world and we see that we have a little square.

So let’s make a very quick change. So the change I want to make is down here within globals and saturation instead of 1, I’m going to change this to 0.

But we notice that there are no changes to our camera right now; that’s because the post-process volume by default only affects whatever is inside the post-process volume.

So if we move into the cube, we can see those changes taking into effect. And right now by changing global saturation, bringing it down all the way to zero, it gives us a black and white world.

Now what if I want this post-process volume to affect our entire world? Well, scroll all the way down here, and under Infinite Extent Unbound, make sure that’s turned on.

So that’s how we don’t have to be within the post-process volume for that post-process volume to take effect. Now it’s time to go over materials.

But do keep in mind that materials can be a little bit complicated, especially if you’re brand new to 3D art. So if you do find yourself a little bit lost throughout this course, do keep in mind that you can always go back and rewatch it.

To demonstrate materials, I want to create a brand new map. So to do so, let’s create a folder where we’re going to store all the assets we create.

So I want this folder to be under Content, right next to the Starter Content folder, right-click and select New Folder. I’m going to call this folder My Stuff and double-click to go inside of it.

Now to create a level, I could right-click and under create basic assets select level, but I want to use a level template since this will just create a completely blank level.

So to use level templates, you want to come up to File, New Level, and you can select Open World or Basic. I’m going to select Basic, and now we have a pretty basic level; it’s just the floor right here and the sky.

Now in order to save this level in a specific location in our Content Browser, you need to press Control and S, and it’s going to ask us where we want to save this level.

Select My Stuff and let’s call this one Material Example Level, and then select Save.

Now pressing Control and Space to bring to my Content Drawer, we can see that under My Stuff our level is saved.

So if we ever want to go back into this level, I just have to double-click and we will open up that level.

Now I do want to make some adjustments. If we zoom in on the floor, we can see that our grid is showing through and it’s right on top of the floor.

Now this grid will be distracting when we’re showing off materials, so I’m going to come up to Show and uncheck the grid to hide it.

That’s how all we see is the floor material. Also, I think this floor is a little bit too big for our purposes.

So I could use 'R' and hover in between the Y and X axes to then scale it down like this, or alternatively, within the Details panel of this floor, I can set it to one in the X-axis, one in the Y-axis, and one in the Z-axis just to give us a smaller floor.

I also want to add in an object to place our materials on top of. We can do so by pressing Control and Space, and Unreal actually comes with a bunch of assets and objects by default.

So this is content that’s not located in Starter Content; instead, it’s located in the Engine folder. And if you don’t see your Engine folder right here, that’s because you need to come to Settings and make sure Show Engine Content is enabled.

Now we get access to all of Unreal’s default content that is contained in every single project.

So let’s go into Content, and I believe it is under Engine, Meshes, and it’s specifically SM_MoreMapPreviewMesh.

Now we can also select the Engine and type in SM_Mat to bring up that asset. So I’m going to drag it into our world, and let’s rotate it 90° and we can rotate it 90° exactly by making sure Snapping is enabled up here.

Now, I also want to control the exposure since if we zoom in on the shadows and zoom out, we can see that Auto Exposure is enabled right now.

So let’s create a Post-process volume by going to Volumes, Post-process, simply drag it out.

I want this to affect the entire world, not just whatever is inside this box, so scroll down and make sure Infinite Extent Unbound is turned on.

Now if we go up here under Exposure, make sure Metering Mode is set to Manual instead of Auto, and Exposure Compensation we can bring this up. I found a value of 11 to be pretty good.

Now as a reminder, if your exposure isn’t changing from your Post-process volume, you need to make sure that in Lit, Game Settings is turned on because otherwise, it’s going to default to EV0.0 setting right here as the exposure amount.

So make sure Game View is turned on; that’s how we’re using Post-process volume. And since I do like my scene right now, we want to make sure to save everything with Control and S, and actually, I think I’m going to bring down my exposure to let’s leave it at 10.5.

So now it’s finally time to go over materials. Adding a material to your world is actually pretty simple. So press Control + Space, and luckily Starter Content comes with a bunch of materials by default under the Materials folder.

So let’s double-click into Materials, and we see we have a bunch of materials that we can use.

So to add a material to our world, you want to simply hold down the left mouse button and drag it until you're hovering over whatever object you want this material to be placed on, and let go; it is that simple.

So now we have a brick floor. Or for example, to make this object steel, I can drag a steel material onto the object and let go.

We can even add grass right there like this, and we can see the reflection updates on the metal right there whenever we are switching our different materials, which is pretty cool.

So let’s select the grass, and I do actually want to make this just a little bit bigger, so let’s scale it in X and Y axes like this.

And I think the screen is too bright, so I’m going to bring its exposure compensation down to 10.25. So that’s the basics of adding a material to our world.

What if we want to create or edit a material? Well, to create a material is also pretty simple. It’s just like creating a level.

Press Control + Space, and come into My Stuff where we’re going to create our material. Right-click, and under Create Basic Assets, select Material and let’s call this First Material, and press Enter to create it, and double-click on it to open up the Material Editor.

First off, before we go over any of these settings, you’ll notice that my window is right now floating, so something I like to do with all my editor windows is to hold down the left mouse button on the tab and then dock it up here just like this.

That’s how really quickly I could switch in between my main level view and any of my editor views. So in the middle, we have the Material Graph. Essentially, what the Material Graph does is basically we have a bunch of nodes that connect to each other and their end goal is to eventually be outputted into one of these outputs right here, which will create the actual material.

Now the controls are pretty similar to the controls of our Viewport. When in Orthographic View mode, hold down the right mouse button to pan and then use a scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

So right mouse button pan, scroll wheel zoom in and out. You can select nodes by just clicking on them or holding down the left mouse button to marquee select.

Now to the left right here is the viewport. If you hold down the left mouse button, you can pan around this preview mesh right here, which helps us see our material when we’re editing it.

Now we can change the preview mesh down here, so maybe you want to use a cylinder or a flat plane, a square. But for now, I’m just going to keep it at a sphere, and right below that is the Details panel.

So if we select a node, we’re able to edit that node’s properties right here in the Details panel. So how do we create a node?

Well, we come all the way over here to the pallet. Click on it, and now we have a selection of all the different nodes we can use to create a material.

We can also right-click anywhere to get that same pallet. So under pallets, I want a Constant3Vector under Constants. The reason why is because a Constant3Vector is essentially Unreal's version of color; it’s RGB for red, green, and blue.

Right now this node is set to black. I could edit it by coming to the Details panel and double-clicking on the color to get a color picker, or I can double-click on the node itself to get that color wheel.

So notice how when I do change the color right here there are no changes; that's because its value is set to zero.

I can bring up its value by clicking on this rectangle right here. So now when I change this color, we notice that color is changing, and when I do like a color, I want to confirm that this node is going to stay that color by clicking OK.

So now we have our first node with a new color. Essentially, if I hover over this pin right here and hold down the left mouse button, I'm able to drag out a wire, and I can choose where I want to place those wires in any of the inputs right here.

Now, of course, because this is a color, it should probably go into Base Color. So with my left mouse button still held down, I'm going to hover over the Base Color pin and let go to connect it.

Now we can see that our color is affecting our material. So let’s see what this looks like in our level. So press Control + Space, and let’s drag the First Material onto the sphere, and notice that there are no changes right now.

This looks like the default material, and that’s because we first need to compile our material. After we make any changes to see that change in our level, so go to First Material, and to compile a material, you want to click on the Apply button.

And also while we’re at it, let’s save it; so if Unreal crashes, we don’t lose our progress. Now if we come back to our level, we can see that change took effect.

Now jumping back into First Material, if we let’s say change the color to a light blue, jump back into our level, we see that there were no changes because we need to make sure that after we edit a material that we compile it with the Apply button, and now we see that light blue.

That’s how you add color. Now what if you want to edit how shiny or reflective the material is? Well, on our First Material, instead of editing the Base Color, we're now going to edit the Roughness channel right here.

And roughness doesn't take a color value, of course; instead it takes a scalar value in between 0 and 1. So zero means it's really smooth and one means it's really rough.

To get a scalar value, you want to come up to Pallet and under Constant, select the Constant1Value, left mouse button hold, and drag it out. Now we get a node that is simply a number.

So zero will be smooth and one will be rough. Let’s make this really smooth by giving it a value of 0.1, and simply left mouse button hold and drag it into Roughness.

If for some reason you ever want to break a wire, all you have to do is hold down ALT and hover over any of these pins and left-click.

So ALT and left-click to break any pins, and we will not see this change in our level unless we press Apply.

So jumping back into materials, I’m going to press F and hold down ALT and left mouse button to pivot around my material.

While it’s nice reflective values, notice how we can see all the different clouds in the sky being reflected off the material now, so that’s roughness. But what if we want to make our material metallic?

Well, go back into First Material, and this is where the Metallic input comes in really handy. So we need another Constant Vector, and we could get it by selecting that node and pressing Control + D to duplicate it, or I can get it from the pallet.

And of course, I can right-click and simply type in Constant, so normally when I'm getting nodes in, I just right-click and type in the name of the node and press enter to bring it in.

So I'm going to give this a value right now of one since by default there is no metallic value; it's set to zero. So send it to one and plug it into Metallic will make this blue pretty metallic.

And in fact, let's go change the color to something orangey, press Apply, and now we made a gold material.

It's very important to point out that Unreal Engine's material system is based off of Physically Based Rendering or PBR for short. For example, right now I have a project open up to demonstrate PBR values, and the two main ones to know about are Metallic and Roughness.

We’ve already played with them, and essentially for them are on a scale from 0 to 1. Now, by default, Metallic is set to zero, so there is no metallic on the material, and our roughness is set to 0.5.

Now as I bring down the roughness, we see our material get shinier and shinier. And then if I bring it up, our material gets rougher and rougher.

So if I bring it all the way down to zero and play with the Metallic value, which is right now its default value of zero, so it’s not metallic. But slowly, we can see it goes from a plastic material all the way to a very shiny gold material.

And if we play with a roughness value, we can really see those changes taking effect. Now both these values are clamped from 0 to 1.

So let's say if we input a roughness value of negative one, then it’ll be clamped to zero. Or if we go above one, then it’s going to clamp it down to just one.

So keep that in mind that if you do try to input a value that's outside the 0 to 1 range, you won't see any changes, and it's important to point out that generally for metallic values, we never go in between 0 and 1.

You won’t really see a material that's 0.5 metallic; instead, materials are either all the way zero or all the way one.

Here I am back in our original project, and you notice that we no longer have our material opened up here. Well, that's fine; you can always open up the material on any object by clicking on that object, and then in the Details panel, we see all the materials that are currently on top of that object.

So just double-click to open up our original material we created. Alternatively, you’ll get a little magnifying icon right there; if I select that, then it’s automatically going to jump to that material's location in our Content Drawer and we can double-click to open it up right there like that.

So the PBR sliders we were just playing with are the Metallic and Roughness values right here, so those sliders correspond with these values.

So hopefully you understand exactly what they do now. Now I’m going to make a slight edit, so for Metallic let’s bring it from one to its default value of zero, so now it's kind of like a plastic material right now.

And also, I think it's a little bit too bright, so double-clicking on the color, I’m able to decrease the brightness by playing with its value, so bring it down a little bit, press OK, press Apply, and now I do think we have a nice material.

But normally when you have plastic outside, it wouldn’t be this uniformly shiny; you would expect dirt to pile on this material and make some areas of the material rougher than others.

So let's jump into First Material, and to add a texture, press Control + Space. Let’s go into Starter Content since Starter Content comes with a bunch of textures under the Textures folder.

And the texture I want to use is specifically tore paint noise, so to get a texture into your material, simply left mouse button hold, drag it in, and let go like that.

Alternatively, you can right-click, type in Texture Sample, select that, and then within the Details panel in the drop-down of Texture, go ahead and find whatever texture you want to use and select it.

So that's an alternative way to add in a texture, and now that we have tore paint noise, if we open it up, we can see that it's just black and white; all the pixels of the texture represent a value in between 0 and 1.

So they are perfect to plug into either Metallic or Roughness. Plug our texture into Roughness since I wanted to drive the roughness value of our material and delete the old node since I no longer need it.

Press Apply, jump back, and turn Material Example. And now if I angle it with the sun, and here’s a nice tip: if I hold down Control and L at the same time, I’m able to rotate that sun, so I’m able to bring it down, like move it around and see what our material looks like in different lighting scenarios.

And right now, our material is looking a lot more realistic; we can see that because of our material—all the black spots represent shiny areas, and all the white spots represent rough areas—which gives our material a nice, smudgy look to it to just break up that uniform shininess.

At this point, let’s switch up the colors since if I go into color mode by going ALT + 3 for unlit, we can see that's still all one uniform color. Pressing ALT + 4 to go back into lit mode, I want to where all the smudges of a different color that's a little bit more brown than orange to represent dirt.

So let’s go back into First Material, and we can duplicate this by pressing Control + D, or we can right-click and type in Constant3Vector and select that.

So double-click on this, and I'm going to give it a brownish color, maybe like right here, press OK, and now I want to Lerp in between the orange color and the brown color depending on our alpha texture.

So wherever there's white, I wanted to pick brown, and whenever there’s black, I wanted to pick orange, and we can do this through a Linear Interpolate node.

So right-click, type in Linear, and then interpolate; select that or a shortcut is to hold down the L key and left-click.

So let’s plug this up to plug the brown one to B, and for alpha texture, I want it to Lerp, depending on our original mask; that’s right now driving our Roughness.

Drag RGB into alpha and drag that all into base color, and now we can see that where our object is shiny, the color changes to a dirty brown.

Pressing Apply, jumping back in here, we notice that our material is definitely a lot more realistic. You can imagine that this was once plastic or really shiny paints and over time dirt has slowly started to build up on the material, making it pretty dirty.

Now we can make this even better by instead of Lerp in between two colors—we're Lerp in between a color and another texture. So there's a very good texture under Starter Content Textures, and it is right here.

So it's tore metal rust; open this up, and we can see what it is, but right now we don’t notice anything. That's because the alpha channel is turned on, and the alpha channel handles opacity.

So if you ever open up a texture and you don’t see anything, make sure you come up to A and uncheck that. So now we can see it, and while this is rust, I do think it functions well as dirt, especially for some very small detail like on this material; it's going to be hard to tell that this is rust instead of dirt.

So let’s drag this onto our material graph and plug it up right there into the original dirt and press Apply.

So congratulations! You just made your first material in Unreal Engine 5. While it’s not the best, it definitely is a good introduction to the power of the Material Graph.

Before we continue, we first have to download some free assets I created for this tutorial to help us learn Unreal Engine. You can find a link to download the free assets in the description of this video.

The reason why is because in this section we’re going to go over how we can take a texture and import that texture into Unreal Engine and use it in one of our materials.

So to begin, I’ve already downloaded the assets for this tutorial right here in Unreal 5.zip. Double-click to go inside of it, and double-click to go into Intro Unreal 5.

So I want to make sure that I do unzip some of these assets, specifically the beginner assets folder. To unzip it, simply drag it onto our desktop.

We are going to go over Castle assets and Intro Unreal project in just a bit, but for now, we don’t need these, so I’m going to exit out my zip folder.

And now we have a brand new folder with a bunch of assets we’re going to import into Unreal Engine 5.

So to begin, we’re going to create a very simple material using these three textures right here. You can probably guess that Spanish pavement color handles the color of the texture; Spanish pavement roughness handles how rough the texture is, and the normal map—which looks pretty weird—don’t worry, we are going to go over what a normal map is in just a second. But for now, let’s go import all three of these into Unreal 5.

So let’s open up Content Drawer and go into My Stuff because remember we created a folder called My Stuff to hold all our assets.

And I’m going to hold down my left mouse button and drag all these assets into my Content Drawer. So you want to make sure that your Content Drawer is open, so you are able to drag it in, let go, and automatically these three textures have imported.

You’ll notice that all three of these textures have little asterisks right there; that tells us that these textures need to be saved.

So select all them and press Control + S, or we could have clicked on Save All.

So if I double-click on Spanish base color, we can see that the texture has successfully been imported into Unreal Engine 5, and SRGB is turned on for color textures.

We want to make sure SRGB is turned on for everything else, such as masks and normal maps we want SRGB turned off for Spanish pavement roughness.

We see that’s turned on. I'm going to check this to false and save it.

Now for our normal map, if I double-click on the normal map, Unreal is smart enough to know that this is a normal map, so it already automatically sets some of the parameters.

SRGB is turned off, which is what we want, and the compression setting is set to normal map now. If you do import a normal map and Unreal doesn’t know it’s a normal map, then you want to make sure that you set pressure settings to normal map and that SRGB is turned off.

So let’s go and create our material by right-clicking, go to Materials, call one M_Core Spanish pavement.

Now you do not have to add the M core in front of our name, but just for convention, I like to add M underscore over all of my materials to tell me just by quickly reading the name of the asset that this is a material.

So double-click to go into M_Cor Spanish pavement, and let’s dock it up here so we can switch in between my level and my material graph.

Now I’m going to press Control + Space, and I could drag in each texture individually, or I can hold down Shift and select all of them and drag in all of them at once.

So I’m going to leave my normal map off to the side since we are going to go over this in a bit.

But let’s just handle our roughness and our base color, so base color will go into, of course, Base Color, and roughness will go into Roughness.

Now we don’t have to play with a metallic value, because metallic by default is set to zero, because our material is not metallic.

We can leave the metallic input empty since it will just default to zero, and within Material Example Level, let’s apply this brand new material to our floor.

Right away, I notice that there are two issues with a Material; number one, our material is tiling way too much, it’s too small, and number two, there is no depth; there are no shadows given by the crevices of our Spanish pavement, it’s almost as if someone got wallpaper and plastered it onto the floor trying to pretend like it’s real flooring.

So to fix this, we use normal maps. Essentially, what normal maps do is that they fake bumps, so they fake depth, and they make it look like our texture actually has height when in reality it doesn't; it’s just a material.

So to add a normal map, it’s pretty simple, as you can probably guess. We grab the normal map and simply drag it into Normal.

So let’s press Apply, and immediately we’ll see that our texture looks a lot better; there’s actual depth, and if we come to the shadow right here and add in a basic light, we can see that as I move this light around, the material itself is casting a shadow.

So since the light is right here, now the crevices have a little bit of a shadow, so normal maps really go a long way to make our material look really realistic.

Now let’s fix our tiling because in my opinion, I think it’s tiling way too much right now, and to fix tiling, let’s go into M Spanish pavement, and we’re going to use a brand new node.

So right-click, type in texture coordinates, and select that. Essentially, texture coordinates will allow us to change the scale of our textures.

So if we just drag it into UVS, nothing will happen; that’s because we need to hold down M and left-click to add in a multiply node or we can right-click and type in multiply.

Since we are going to be multiplying the value that comes out of texture coordinates, and on a side note, if you ever want to break wires, hold down ALT and left mouse button to break it.

So let's move multiply up here like this, hold down the left mouse button and drag it into A, and then drag this out into the UVS just like this.

We can multiply this by a number, which is a constant scalar. So as you can guess, we’re going to type in Constant and grab one constant.

So plug this into B, and let’s give this a value of instead of 1, something smaller like 0.5.

And this will increase the size of our texture to make our Spanish payment bigger, and we can see immediately that it did make the texture bigger; we can maybe even make this a little bit bigger.

Let’s try 0.35 and press Apply, and now I do like the scale of our pavement.

We can also add in a little bit of customization, so maybe I don’t like the tint of this; I want to make our pavement a little bit more red or a little bit more green.

Well, I can marquee select by holding down the left mouse button anywhere in my graph, select all of my nodes, move it back a bit, since we’re going to be adding some nodes right here.

So hold down M and left-click again to add in the multiply node, and drag RGB into it like this and then drag it out into Base Color.

I actually want this RGB to go into B, not A, so I could hold down Control and hold down my left mouse button to then grab this wire and place it into B to just switch it from A to B.

Now I’m going to hold down 3 and left-click to add in a constant 3-vector, and I’m going to say default value is white and plug this into A.

So since R, G and B are all 111, there's going to be no changes right now with a Spanish payment.

But if I want to make a Spanish payment a little bit more red instead of it being white, I’m going to move it in the red direction and press Apply; we can already see a change right there, and now our Spanish pavement is really red.

So generally, you don’t want the tint to be that intense, so just a little bit red; kind of like an off-white and then press Apply.

Now we do have a more reddish payment, or we can even add some greenish blue and subtract a lot of red from our Spanish pavement.

And maybe you do like the look of this better; right now our material looks nice, but there is one big issue, and that is it is not real-time.

So whenever we make a slight adjustment, we have to press Apply and wait for it to compile in order to see changes in our world, and as you can imagine, if we have a really complex material and we make a slight change, the compile time can take a while.

So we’re able to get around this with parameters; so parameters allow us to make real-time adjustments without any compile time whatsoever.

So let's jump into it to show how to use them. Before we create a parameter, we first need to create a material instance, and this material instance will hold all of our parameters.

So to create a material instance is pretty easy. First, you want to find the material you want to create an instance of—in our case, it's Spanish payment.

We already have the location opened up within our Content Drawer, but just as a reminder, if you want to find exactly where this material is, select object with the material on it, and within the Details Panel, select the little magnifying glass to jump to that location in your content drawer.

So here we have M_Core Spanish payment, and to create a material instance, simply right-click on your material and go Create Material Instance.

Now instead of calling it M_Spanish payment, I’m going to call it MI_Spanish payment, so I like to use an M to tell me that this asset is a material, and I like to use MI to tell me that this asset is a material instance.

So let’s double-click to go into the material instance, and we’ll see that we don’t have any parameters right now.

A parameter is essentially a setting that allows us to change our material, and that’s because I need to tell Unreal exactly what settings within our material I want to make a parameter, what variables I want to expose to the material instance.

So for example, if I want to make this value right here a parameter, right-click and go to Convert to Parameter.

It’s that easy. Now it’s going to ask for a name; let’s call this one Size, and now within our material instance, we notice that there was no change, because I have to press Apply.

And now we get a brand new parameter within our material instance called Size.

Now before we can play with this, let’s go add our material instance to our world since the Spanish payment is not our material instance; instead, it’s M_ Spanish payment.

So let’s go grab our material instance and drag it on there to make it the instance and not the main material.

Now with our material instance opened, I’m going to check Size, and let’s go play with this value.

So I can see that as I increase it, it’s all updating in real-time, and as I decrease it, I’m able to see exactly the size that I want.

So trying to figure out size this way instead of having to jump into our material, manually edit something, and then click Apply and jump back; by just exposing it as a parameter for our material instance, it makes creating materials a lot easier and, in my opinion, a lot more fun.

Now we're not just limited to creating parameters for scalar values; we can even go into M_Spanish payment and let’s turn this color into a parameter.

So call this one Color Tint, and let’s go back into Material Example, and we do not have anything because I forgot to press Apply, and now this color tint is available to us.

So maybe I don’t want it to be this kind of greenish; I just want to bring it over to let’s do actually let’s make it even more green like this.

I can even bring down the value to make it pretty much no color, just pure black.

So we can even give ourselves more control; for example, right now our normal map is doing a pretty good job, but what if we want to decrease the effect of the normal map, or we want to make this normal map even more intense so that the shadows are more pronounced?

Well, if we jump into M_Corin Spanish payment, we can control the intensity of a normal map with the Flatten Normal node.

So let’s hook up the normal map to normal right there, and the result to normal. Now it’s asking for a flatness value. If I hover my mouse over it, it says the default value is zero.

So I’m going to hold down one and left-click to create a constant scalar value and hook it up right there.

Now I’m going to right-click and go Convert to Parameter, and let’s call this one Normal Flatness just like that.

So zero won't do anything; press Apply, jump back into our world, and check Normal Flatness; zero is its default, there are no changes.

But if I increase Normal Flatness, our normal strength decreases because it’s getting more and more flat.

But if I make this value go below zero, so into the negative ranges, like negative one, then we have some really intense normal maps. Maybe let’s go five.

Now this is almost like it’s from a warzone. We can even add some more adjustments.

So let’s jump back into M_Cor Spanish payment, and I want to control the intensity of this normal map with just a simple Multiply node.

So I could select this Multiply, press Control + D to duplicate it, or I could hold down M and left-click to bring in a Multiply node and hook it up like this.

Now I want to bring in a parameter scalar value for B, so I could hold down one and left-click, then right-click to convert to parameter, or a shortcut is to hold down the S key and left-click to create a constant parameter.

And it’s going to automatically ask us for a name; call this one Roughness Strength and plug it up like this, and this will immediately get rid of any roughness and make it pure glossy.

We don’t want that, so let’s go increase the strength from 0 to 1, which won’t do anything by default, but this gives us the ability within our material instance to then, let’s say, increase this roughness strength to make our payment even more rough.

So maybe beforehand it was at one; you think that this is a little bit too shiny? Well, you can just increase it and get the exact roughness amount you want.

So with just a couple of controls within our parameter value, we’re able to in real-time completely change the way our material looks, which is pretty amazing.

Now I prefer the way this material looked like originally, so I can reset all the values to its default value by clicking on the arrow icon.

So set that to zero, one, to 0.35 and set it back to a little bit off green.

Now that we know how to create material instances, it’s now time to go over Master Materials. Essentially, a Master Material is one material to rule them all; so imagine we have a single material, and from this material a bunch of material instances are created that are very different from each other.

These instances can be anything from paint, concrete, wood, pretty much anything you can imagine, and they all share the exact same Master Material.

So I know what he just said sounds a little bit complicated, but it’s best to show with an example. We’ve already done a lot of the work to create a master material, and it’s actually M_Cor Spanish payment.

So we’re going to turn this into a generic material from which we can create multiple materials from. So let’s jump back into our map, and within the Content Drawer, instead of calling this M_Cor Spanish payment, let’s right-click and go Rename and call it M_Cor Master Material just like that.

So let’s double-click on it, and I want to make this Master Material pretty generic. Now I want all my parameters to have the default values, where if I didn’t edit any of them, it would basically be the same as if we plugged in all three of these textures without any of those edits.

So down here, Normal Flatness won’t make any edits or changes to the normal map, which is what we want. Normal strength is right now set to one, which will not change the roughness map or make it more rough or more shiny.

Also, I notice I misspelled strength, so let’s go fix that. And up here, Color Tint isn’t pure white if it was pure white, then it wouldn’t edit the base color, but it’s an off-green right now.

So I want to make this pure white. Let’s double-click on this, and I can do so by grabbing the saturation and bring it all the way down like that.

So now we have pure white, which isn’t making any edits to the base color. Now we are making an edit to the Multiply Node right here, so this is a size of 0.35, so it’s going to decrease the tiling and make our texture a lot bigger than what it would be by default.

So I need to set this to its default of one right there. So let’s press Apply, and as a reminder, if I open up MI_Ro Spanish payment, essentially by changing the values within the Master Material in a material instance, we see Size right here is 0.35.

To change it to its default, all you have to do is click on