Level: Intermediate | Genre: eLearning | Language: English | Duration: 50 Lectures ( 14h 3m ) | Size: 16.7 GB
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.
Homepage:

https://www.udemy.com/course/unreal-generalist-practical-materials-effects/