From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

Applying materials - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

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Applying materials

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Materials are a great way to add color, texture, and character to your objects in Unreal Engine. So let's take a look at how to apply materials to your objects. So we're going to start off simple. I'm going to go ahead and select this table here. And then just hit the letter "F" to frame it. Now once you have that selected, you'll see that in the details panel down here, we should have a materials rollout. And that will have a material in it. Now it can have multiple materials but this particular object just has one. Now materials actually live in the content browser, in this case, for this scene, they live in under Assets, Cabin_Scene, materials. And you'll see we have a lot of different materials here. Or we can go over here to this pulldown. So you'll see here we have patio table material and that's the one that's applied to this object. But if you scroll down, you'll see we have a couple of other materials in there that we can use. So I have Patio Table B and C. So if I were to click on one of those, it will change that color of the patio table. Now these also live in my content browser as well, so I have these in my Cabin_Scene materials folder, and you'll see if we go all the way down here, I have Patio Table B and C. So I can also left-click and drag to apply a material. So if I wanted to put it back to normal, I could just go ahead and click and drag and notice how it changes here. Now objects can have more than one material applied. So a good example of that is the house itself. So if I click on this "SM_Cabin" object, you'll see that under materials, we actually have 10 different materials applied. So I can again just change these simply by selecting them here. So I have WoodSiding_Mat in element 10. And that's basically the side of that building. And if I were to click on this, I can basically insert whatever one I want. Now you can scroll through all of these. Or another way to do it is to simply do a search. So I'm going to type the word redwood and you'll see we have a RedwoodSiding_Mat. So I'm going to click on that and notice how that changes. Now if I want, I can also click and drag. So let's say I wanted to change the roofing maybe. So I have a MetalSiding_Mat. I could left-click and drag that onto that building if I wanted to. It's not really what I want, so I'm going to hit "Undo". But I could also drag that metal siding to the side of the building and it would apply. And what this does is it replaces the entire material that is in that slot. So element 10 here, which was the WoodSiding, also incorporates the side of that building. So if I were to change that back to, say, the WoodSiding_Mat that was originally on it, you'll see that it changes both on this side and this side. So when you click and drag, it's going to understand what material is in this particular element and then swap it out for the entire model. So applying materials to objects is really very straightforward in Unreal Engine. And you can use either materials that come with your project or you can create your own or you can download materials from the Unreal Store.

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