I’m going through Eat3D’s UDK Modular Masterclass with Tor Frick.
So far it’s been simple enough, but now he’s on to vertex painting and making a material using constant bias scale nodes, Lerp nodes, etc. and ffs I hate this stuff.
I use substance designer for node based texturing, but UDK and UE4 are just too complex for me.
In a larger studio, tech artists are going to be the ones building complicated materials. But understanding the material editor and how to take advantage of it is a useful skill set. Honestly I think it’s usually easier and more straight forward that making a texture in Substance Designer, but they both just take practice and some tutorials.
If you are mostly making individual assets and props, you really don’t need to do much with the material editor if you don’t want to. But for larger scenes, world building, environments, etc, you are going to have to start using it if you want to do things like break up tiling.
You should, but if there’s something really complex that’s not necessarily going to be something you’d have to figure out. Bigger studios would have a shader artist and they’ll figure out the complex stuff but you still need to know the basics and be able to set up the mesh properly for certain material techniques.
You will want to know at least the basics, otherwise how are you supposed to generate appropriate texture masks and test your assets in the editor / environment?
I make pretty cool environments and I don’t know half that stuff, but then again I work alone and i’m learning as I go. I’m sure in a highly professional environment you may need a lot of that knowledge so I suggest you learn as much as you can while you still can.