Discovering the Material Editor

Unreal Engine Materials determine the characteristics of objects in a scene, controlling their visual appearance. They provide instructions to the rendering engine on how surfaces interact with light, encompassing aspects such as color, reflectivity, texture, and transparency. These calculations rely on data from images, Material Expressions, and Material settings and happen “under the hood.”The place where everything takes place is the Material editor, so let’s start learning about it.

Material Editor interface

Creating shaders for your project in Unreal Editor does not require you to write any code – not directly at least. Instead, you can use the Material Editor, a visual scripting interface, to generate assets called Materials. These Materials are constructed by combining Material Expressions, which are nodes in a shader Graph. The results from these Material Expressions are then passed into the inputs of the Main...