why are materials so complicated in UE4? and how can i learn

>>510518
google substance painter, substance designer or quixel

>>510562
whats the difference between them?

>he thinks node materials are difficult

>>510876
>he thinks node materials are difficult

i have 0 experience or knowledge of it. it looks complicated, idk where to start, im scared, send help

Well, node-based systems like that in ue4 are really just simpler visual languages that are based on or are directly converted to something like glsl, so knowledge in that may be useful. Imo it's actually pretty simple, once you get used to the general syntax and what each function does, etc. Start off by messing around with the simple math functions and what they do, the content examples map is really important and helpful for beginners. After a while you should get a better understanding of the texcoord node, what fragment shaders are and how they work, dynamic materials, etc. It all sounds complex but it gets pretty easy w/ some time and experience.

>>510895
The end result of a node network looks often very complex/difficult, but since you built them step by step its actually not that difficult.

>>510872
Substance is a procedural texture generator which follows shit ton of very simple rules with lots of sliders and drag tools.

Its like UE4, but it has a big library you can study and producing content or do variations is actually very easy once you get it.

You can pipe content over ID maps and texture objects dynamically. Good for simple environments, distant objects or simpler looks.

Substance Painter builds on Dsigner's library and tools and features and allows you to paint materials across all map types directly upon geometry to achieve a desired effect. Its extra work but it will make your work look pretty fucking amazing.

Quixel, like Substance has a photo-realistically designed system but is instead based on physically scanned properties of real materials and it has the benefit of hooking into Photoshop to work. The downside is it can be pretty sluggish on all but the beefiest machine and its incredibly limited in terms of subtle customization and it tends not to know how to deal with UV seams forcing you to fix things manually. It also includes a special tool for producing normalmaps and a tool for turning captured photos into seamless textures by assessing what light does within the image and then extrapolating that to produce estimated heightmaps, diffuse and other complex properties.

Quixel is also shortly, getting a painter tool and the library of available materials is about to be expanded enormously.

That said, you can't create materials from scratch so you're kind of up shit creek without a paddle if you want to create something that's subtle, nuanced or unique -- and ontop of that, Substance if you get good at it can peel away tens of hours of work by working smarter rather than harder: eg, substance is resolution independent so you can produce a 1k or 4k map and it'll procedurally just update from the brush-strokes it remembers.

My recommendation is to get Quixel anyway because its incredibly cheap and then to try out Substance.

>>510881
https://youtu.be/ZXsS4Q0cSOo

Start from the start. Go to the finish. A will only make sense once you've watched B, C will only make sense when you've watched D (if you understand my analogy?)

Just brute force it. I wish I could use it to texture inside Max now that I know it because it's so open.

God speed you glorious bastard.

>>510956
>Substance Painter builds on Dsigner's library and tools and features and allows you to paint materials across all map types directly upon geometry to achieve a desired effect. Its extra work but it will make your work look pretty fucking amazing.

how is that different from mari?

and can materials made in Substance be exported and imported into other engines? or does it just create textures?

>>510956
P.S. if i understand this correctly TL:DR version

Substance designer is for creating materials. like sand, stone, metal ect.

Substance painter is to use the materials you created to paint directly on top of your 3D models.

>>510956

Can you rotate the textures and masks in uv space in Quixel yet. I seem to recall someone saying you couldn't so I never bought it.

so Substance designer creates original materials from scratch by plugging shit in.
and B2M creates textures from images that pretty much on the same level as materials made with Substance Substance, so wouldnt it just be easy to use that and create image based textures rather than do it from scratch in substance?

>>511083
Substance Materials/Shaders can be used in both Unreal and Unity, also Maya. Painter creates Textures. Designer creates shader networks (also textures if you wish).
>>511087
The magic lies in its flexibility and procedurality. You can create one material and use it to create 100 variation textures who follow the same rules, but look distinct.
And you can mix it flawlessly with Images/Materials processed from photo sources.
Designer is like a node based 3D photoshop on crack cocaine.

>>511091
so in a nitshell say a pipeline for creating say a sci-fi soldier you can create a metal material, cloth material, rust material in designer, export it to painter and paint your soldier with it. than export the base color/secular/gloss/normal/roughness as a texture map to use in an engine...
but in the engine like UE4 its not as simple as plugging in the maps to get a good rsult. you gonna doo all the shit showen in OPs pic. but if you already have the materials for each thing exported from designer do you just use a mask to plug it in?
god i hate when i cant wrap my head around shit.

>>511092

I haven't used UE4 but I assume you can save those shaders and create some kind of node group / shader group (in other words condense all the spaghetti into a custom built box with inputs and outputs), which means next time you just change a couple values / textures

Also, those nodes seem complex because you're trying to look at everything at all at once.
Read it from left to right, and understand that every time two things are being connected into a third thing (i.e. TexCord & DefaultNormalScale into Multiply), it's doing one operation or task (i.e. multiplying two things together).