I have a bit of experience with blender and basic 3d stuff, and I’ve figured out how to set up lighting and make decent looking scenes. But I cannot for the life of me figure out how people actually know and use all the different nodes for materials and actors. Where do I even start to try and wrap my head around these concepts?
I was attempting to find information on making a water material that creates ripples as the character moves through it, and it seems like such a simple idea but there’s very little information I can find on that specific thing, or it’s too complicated for me to understand.
I found one free plugin that achieves the effect im looking for, but the documentation is very unclear on it, and just tinkering around with the provided examples I couldn’t figure out how to change it without breaking everything.
I tried a series on YouTube called 5 minute materials and it started out okay, but then he started talking like “just lerp this and multiply with a sine” and I got so lost and confused. I don’t have much time to devote to learning all these new skills, but I also don’t want to give up on this. Any advice?
Your best start would be to check with tutorials on Youtube, but be specific about what you want to learn. Not sure what made you think that adding ripples to water was “easy”.
If you got lost on lerp and multiply, then you don’t have the basics down. At least not for custom material design.
Start with some material from Unreal Sensei, he’s an Unreal instructor and his videos are excellent.
either way I would start looking in the character physics colliders, those that can interact with clothing. once you figure otu how to get the info and position from them you can input them inside the shader. do some math there to know where to add the ripples and how big they need to be (depending of the impact force from the colliders that are on the character)
are you sure there is nothing like this on the marketplace?
also I’ve forget to add it in my first post
this project here has a lot of examples, for particles, I think even shaders, and how they interact one with another. I don’t recall if there is something about water but who knows.
Thanks, but I can’t seem to find anything except landscape materials from that guy. I did watch one of his 5 hour beginner tutorials though, and feel confident with the barebones basics. Every other tutorial I find will tell you ‘place this node here and connect to this’ but I can’t find anywhere that explains why those nodes interact like that with eachother or what each node does. I guess I’m looking for something more intermediate?