Struggling with Unreal Engine Materials - Looking for a Learning Path

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Hi all,

I’ve been working with Unreal Engine for a while, but the material editor is still a bit of a mystery to me. I’m familiar with the basics like using emissive connections and creating material instances, but I’m really lost when it comes to the why and how of the nodes themselves. For example, I don’t fully understand how the Texture Coordinate node works or why pixel values impact colors (like 1 being white and 0 being black).

I feel like I’m missing a solid learning path that takes me through the fundamentals up to creating complex materials. I’m interested in how others might have approached this. Did you follow a specific course, or use resources like Unreal’s documentation or online communities? What exercises or smaller projects helped you build up your knowledge of material nodes and how they work together?

Any advice, learning roadmaps, or suggestions for resources would be greatly appreciated. I’d love to be able to create more complex and visually compelling materials, but right now, I’m just not sure where to start.

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I came to unreal materials from coding shaders point of view. Materials and HLSL are shaders, one is text based source another graphs. So this advice may totally not work for you.

So try SHADERTOY. Look at code, and read comments people in comments ask questions and explain how things are working.

So look at shaders there as text, you can see that almost everything is just single integer (or BYTE) number or set of those. Something is color because you use set of 3 numbers as color. Unreal materials kind of hide this stuff.

I also had some nice link that explained things about shaders, if i find it i will update here.

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Hey there @qSMCoR! Welcome to the community! There’s no one true path to competency when it comes to such a wide subject as materials in general. Most users end up taking their own path which consists of a mix of technical aptitudes (As Nawrot mentioned, previous shader experience), picking apart complex materials, tutorials, trial and error, and documentation.

You’re likely past this level of tutorial group, but it’s good to mention:

Here’s a more advanced learning path:

I’d also recommend when you come across a material you can’t make to seek out resources specifically for it. This is how I’ve upskilled without dedicated training towards materials.