ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with materials and the material editor in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) and explores material expressions in greater detail. Materials are much more complex than just the paint applied to a surface. They encode within themselves the way light interacts with and reflects from a surface in UE. The chapter discusses a list of commonly used material expressions with example usages of most commonly used expression. It talks about the concept of physically based material, a newly introduced concept revealed in SIGGRAPH 2013 and how the shading model in UE4 makes use of two new material channels to simulate physically realistic materials efficiently. The chapter also talks about the features and functionalities of the engine’s rendering component. It explains how to create materials in the material editor, how to build up the material from a simpler version of itself and create complicated visual simulations of the real-world materials in UE4.
