Material creation and application help please!

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Hey all. I’m just jumping in to Unreal and at the start of my learning curve so I apologize for any lame questions you suffer with daily or weekly.

I built and textured a model in Blender, exported to .fbx, then imported into Unreal 4.26. The import seems to have worked well. The materials seem fine. the main one I’m concerned with shows wonderfully in the material editor, complete with normal map and specularity and such. In the preview on the sphere it looks great! But when it doesn’t show up on the model when I drag the model into the viewport. And dragging the material onto the surface seems to only apply the specularity. Nothing else looks right.

Why!? How do I fix it? What did I do wrong? I’ve gone through a few tutorials now and can’t figure out where I went wrong.

In the one screenshot you can see the material looks great! The other screenshot is a view looking through the floor of a convenience store. The big plane doing the reflection bit is supposed to be the ceiling with tiles and fluorescent lighting. You can see it looks pretty good in the blender screenshot. How do I fix this? How do I make it work?

Thank you.

Screenshot 2021-09-23 224146
Screenshot 2021-09-23 2241461902×999 132 KB

Screenshot 2021-09-23 224257
Screenshot 2021-09-23 2242571760×1009 157 KB

Screenshot 2021-09-23 224538
Screenshot 2021-09-23 2245381836×1023 139 KB

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First thing that jumps out to me is that the mesh has 4 material slots in Blender but only 3 in Unreal. What did you do in between? Also, make sure that you apply the material to the slot with the same name in Unreal and Blender. You can’t necessarily rely on the position of the material because they might get shuffled around during export (because of vertex positions and stuff, it’s kinda opaque and unpredictable).

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Thought I’d replied to this. Ooops.

Yeah, between Blender and Unreal, I’d done nothing. Simply tried to export and import. I’m not sure where I eventually found an answer, or even if I just stumbled onto it, but I eventually found where to go to remove unused materials in Blender and things started exporting much better. Still needed a bunch of tweaking, but so far seems to be working much better.

Thanks!