Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone has a good resource that they used for creating material shaders. As a 3D artist, I know little about programming or mathematics behind shaders so I am trying to find a place where this is explained without going too technical. Most documentation I found assumes great understanding of C++ or mathematics which I don’t have. So far my materials only use the most basic features the Blueprint system has to offer like an albedo map, normal map and a roughness value whereas any good UE4 material has a complete tree of nodes that really give it a unique effect.
I found a couple of tutorials that I’ve tried to follow which explain how to make water, rocks or skin for example, but none of these really explain what they are doing. I see they add a load of Lerps, vectors, multipliers and other stuff but they never tell why they use this so I’m basically just copying someone’s shader without undertanding a single bit of it. Analyzing those nodes only goes so far.
So I hope to find a place somewhere where materials are explained more in-depth so that I can know how to make such materials myself. Any Googling I’ve done so far either gave C++ mathematics for advanced programmers, basic information I already knew or just links to pre-made assets. Being such a broad area to learn, it’s really hard to just trial and error. Does anyone know where I can learn more about this or how I could approach this the best way? Perhaps a good (video) tutorial about creating a shader that actually explains each node being added and why it’s there?
