Unreal Generalist: Practical Materials & Effects

Craft Stunning Materials: Holograms, Fire FX, Chameleon Shaders & Beyond

What you'll learn
- Master material creation in Unreal Engine — from foundational setups to advanced, production-ready systems.
- Design optimized VFX materials for Niagara and volumetric VDB-based effects.
- Build complex surface behaviors like water condensation, toxic fluid flow, and holographic projections.
- Explore multiple material workflows and understand when and why to use each approach.
- Create a reusable, modular material library—your own set of "Lego pieces" to speed up future production work.

Requirements
- Basic understanding of Unreal Engine’s Material Editor.
- No advanced math or code required.
- Familiarity with tools like Substance Designer or Embergen is a good to have, but not essential.

Description
In this course, we’ll start by building a clean, simple base material with essential controls for Base Color, Roughness, AO, Metallic, and Normal adjustments.

From there, we level up — adding detail normals, object radius-based tiling, custom tiling parameters, and a texture variation function to push visual quality even further.

Next, we dive into 2-way material blending, exploring multiple blending techniques. That sets us up to create a DFAO shader featuring various blending types, including Z-up masking for terrain and props.

We’ll then repurpose our existing material functions to create a stacked layer material — showing you how to reuse your tools efficiently across different material types while keeping everything organized and scalable.

You'll also build a glass condensation shader, complete with fogging, refraction, water droplets, and running water — featuring a dynamic 4-way masking system, reusable in other FX and perfect for cinematics and high-fidelity projects.

We’ll cover Parallax Occlusion Mapping, then tackle auto terrain materials using slope masks and edge noise to drive natural transitions for large environments.

From there, it’s VFX time: advanced flipbook setups, Niagara integration, Embergen basics, and VDB workflows — everything you need to craft cinematic real-time effects.

You’ll reuse flipbooks to create atmospheric burnup and wind resistance effects, develop a chameleon shader that blends characters into surfaces, and construct a dynamic multi-layered hologram.

And finally? We bring it all together in the toxic river — a complex effect combining everything we’ve learned into one stunning showcase.

This course is built for generalists who want to work smarter, not harder — and leave with a flexible toolkit ready for production.

Let’s build.

Who this course is for:
- Ideal for Unreal Engine artists or technical artists interested in building complex, production-level shaders.
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