Materials in Unreal Ed

Submitted by LiveWire on

having just read that the next modeller challenge will be focused on the mod i decided this would be a good time to work out how materials work as they will probably effect the specifications of the challenge. so here's what i came up with:

basically, i'm wondering how the glowybits will work. how visible do we want the teams to be? the point being we can make certain parts of the textures (ie, the glowybits) illuminated so they are uneffected by shaddows. this gets into how the game will play though - if it's fast deathmatch style action like UT then bright, glowy, easily decernable characters are fine. if however we want the characters to be able to hide in the environment better, it might be best not to illuminate the glowybits (hence they dont truly glow).

none the less here's how i did it in unreal if we do want them to glow:

[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/LiveWire/20053190325_glowymateri…]

the room has only one light at the top and box boxes are static meshes. as you can see both boxes are shadded due to the lighting, however the left one has illuminated sections. this was as simple as creating a standard shadder material in UE, applying the standard texture as the diffuse map, any other (or the same one) as a spec map, and then applying a spec mask to define what areas are illuminated.
note a spec map in UE is not greyscale, it can be anything and it will act as a reflection of sorts (best used with a cube map). the spec mask will define how specular an area is.

furthermore you can make a panning texture (or any other type of shadder for that matter) and apply it as the spec map and it will only who up in the asked area (as you can see above) pretty obvious i guess but it shows how versitle UE is.

the right box has a strip of polys around it with different material IDs. as you can see it has the panning material applyed to it but no specular shadder.

so, in conclusion: if we want illuminated glowybits then this can be done simply by painting a mask to define them. no extra maps, material ids, or anything needed. if you want to use an anited texture or panning texutre then it might be a good idea to do that as a seperate texture.

anyway, now that you've all read my essay, there's just something to take into account when writting up the specifications for the modeller challenge.

Submitted by souri on Sun, 20/03/05 - 2:15 PM Permalink

Yeh, I was hoping that the glowing parts would be illuminated on characters so you can tell who is in what team if there are dark areas. It'll definately be an option for challengers if they want prep their models with a special shader where you could do some real cool effects.

Submitted by souri on Wed, 30/03/05 - 2:49 AM Permalink

Can you point to a tutorial somewhere which can explain to someone who's never done this before how to do it? I'd like to link to that as part of the Modeller Challenge #7 Topic/guide.

Posted by LiveWire on

having just read that the next modeller challenge will be focused on the mod i decided this would be a good time to work out how materials work as they will probably effect the specifications of the challenge. so here's what i came up with:

basically, i'm wondering how the glowybits will work. how visible do we want the teams to be? the point being we can make certain parts of the textures (ie, the glowybits) illuminated so they are uneffected by shaddows. this gets into how the game will play though - if it's fast deathmatch style action like UT then bright, glowy, easily decernable characters are fine. if however we want the characters to be able to hide in the environment better, it might be best not to illuminate the glowybits (hence they dont truly glow).

none the less here's how i did it in unreal if we do want them to glow:

[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/LiveWire/20053190325_glowymateri…]

the room has only one light at the top and box boxes are static meshes. as you can see both boxes are shadded due to the lighting, however the left one has illuminated sections. this was as simple as creating a standard shadder material in UE, applying the standard texture as the diffuse map, any other (or the same one) as a spec map, and then applying a spec mask to define what areas are illuminated.
note a spec map in UE is not greyscale, it can be anything and it will act as a reflection of sorts (best used with a cube map). the spec mask will define how specular an area is.

furthermore you can make a panning texture (or any other type of shadder for that matter) and apply it as the spec map and it will only who up in the asked area (as you can see above) pretty obvious i guess but it shows how versitle UE is.

the right box has a strip of polys around it with different material IDs. as you can see it has the panning material applyed to it but no specular shadder.

so, in conclusion: if we want illuminated glowybits then this can be done simply by painting a mask to define them. no extra maps, material ids, or anything needed. if you want to use an anited texture or panning texutre then it might be a good idea to do that as a seperate texture.

anyway, now that you've all read my essay, there's just something to take into account when writting up the specifications for the modeller challenge.

Submitted by souri on Sun, 20/03/05 - 2:15 PM Permalink

Yeh, I was hoping that the glowing parts would be illuminated on characters so you can tell who is in what team if there are dark areas. It'll definately be an option for challengers if they want prep their models with a special shader where you could do some real cool effects.

Submitted by souri on Wed, 30/03/05 - 2:49 AM Permalink

Can you point to a tutorial somewhere which can explain to someone who's never done this before how to do it? I'd like to link to that as part of the Modeller Challenge #7 Topic/guide.