Vertex Normal WS Node | 5-Minute Materials [UE4]

[@PrismaticaDev]

Which node would you like to see covered next?? Let me know below!

[@Aethelvlad]

DitherTemporalAA is an amazing node for cheapening transparency, plus i love the aesthetic of it

[@etchasketch222]

Hey dude, I get behind these tutorials, will be solid. My constructive criticism is to get to the point right away. It get's the most respect, especially if they are super informative in a very short time. Show the final product first, then how you did it. This sounds bad, but no one cares who you are, what you look like, what happened to you lately. Why do I say that? As someone who's worked with software for the last few years, there are times when I have to come back to a tutorial because I forgot how to do something. Or I tried to figure it out on my own and got pissed that I couldn't figure it out. So when I hit up the tutorials because; A) I tried to figure it out on my own but couldn't so I'm a bit pissed/embarrassed that I have to watch a tutorial because I wasn't clever enough, so I'm coming in with the "yeah yeah, get to the point" attitude. B) It's something new and cool to learn, but I've also cross referenced your tutorial with another just to see if your way is the best most efficient way, and that dude has a intro, yours has a intro, the dude after you will have a intro. Like Mat Weinstein's "Hello, this is a tutorial for x" and he has a kid saying "Tomato" in it somewhere too. That's valuable viewer time I don't need to waist. I see what it is about in the title description. C) Some KZbinrs love to go on at the start of the video about how they look, the weather, why they are late/slow at uploading etc. Then they ask for a subscription before I even seen the content which is ass backwards. As a viewer, I don't care, I didn't come here for your personal stuff, I might not subscribe at all. I came here for the tutorial, so move out of the way and get to it. If you have good valuable content in which I learned from, then sure, I'll sub. Also, I might watch this tutorial a year from now, and it's summer when you're talking about winter. It just takes up viewer retention. I say this as a guy who spent hours upon hours in tutorials and will continue to do so (as anyone should grow their skillset). We need people like you who are willing to make awesome tutorials about materials. Mat's are my weakest point. Same with Niagara effects. But please, for the love of god be informative and quick. And explain WHY you use a node like "we use a scalar parameter so we can adjust it in our Mat instance. And we use a mat instance so it uses less resources and is scalable etc. Looking forward to seeing what you make man. The world needs solid cool material tutorials. I just learned about using depth and stencils and post process effects. Mat's can be powerful.

[@PrismaticaDev]

​@@etchasketch222 hey there my dude! I understand completely about people that don't get to the point - this is why in this video we get started within 15 seconds. An introduction is 100% necessary as it tells the viewer what they're about to experience, the nature of the video and also gives them an incentive to Subscribe to the channel if they want to see more in the future. In these videos there is no final product - it's a discussion about the applications of a Node in the material graph and the possible use cases of the node, rather than "How to XYZ". Give a man a fish Vs. Teach a man to fish. I also do make a note of explaining why we use each node in my other tutorials, although I'm going to do a video about basic Math nodes soon (Add, Sub, Mult and Div) which I can redirect people to if they're unfamiliar about why I'm Multiplying something in order to Mask it. Hope you're enjoying the content! :)

[@dwaynarang500]

Great vid. haha @etchasketch222. Use your left and right arrow keys to skip through the vid if you can't stand someone saying their name at the beginning of a video they made. I get annoyed by people pausing for long periods during the tutorial but use your first minute and a half to introduce yourself and even pitch some sponsors for all I care. As far as a next video, I would love to see something about "material attributes", or however Quixel's textures are setup. Relatedly, are you able to use material instances inside of a landscape texture? If so, that's also something i'd like to see. Good work so far, look forward to seeing more of your work.

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@dwaynarang500 you're unable to use an Instance inside a Landscape, but you can set up a Material Function as a 'proxy instance' and then shoot that into the Landscape Blend. I'll definitely do a longer video about landscapes at some point :)

[@emmlenius4167]

interesting I just found your channel and my knowledge increases as my sleep decreases.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha I also stay up too late watching UE4 videos :P

[@BlackVulpes]

Holy shit this entire channel is an under rated gold mine! Im learning more in minutes than I have in hours of googling and struggling on my own! You're a real hero for all of this.

[@polyvoxelgon]

Just hear to be another voice of "THANK YOU SO MUCH" and "Your content is exactly what I need". Seriously, thank you 🙂

[@MichaelSeguraBaritone]

The wind effect on the rock actually made it look a little bit like the extreme heat effect you see in volcanic areas. When the heat waves seem to bend the visual of the object.

[@senpaisplash]

this guy is a whole game studio by himself. fr you inspire the crap outta me

[@AshbeeGaming]

Slowly but surely things are starting to make sense thanks to your videos 🙏

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers Ashbee! Glad you're finding it all helpful :)

[@DarrellToland]

Nice! Thanks for this. Short and informative.

[@yohatch]

You'd get a sub just for that blueprint my bro, let alone for the rest of the content. Thank you, you're a hero.

[@RmaNYouTube]

6:22 the Blueprint @ the end for subscription was so hilarious that I Chuckled & Laughed while watching it in my workplace 🤦‍♂😂😆

[@YourSandbox]

Fabulous as always. This man knows what he does

[@PrismaticaDev]

Not as knowledgeable as you but I'll get there one day!

[@mikelandjelos]

This is the best channel about nodes in Unreal. Thanks !!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Very glad to hear that :') Thanks a tonne Dusan!

[@vera4176]

Your channel has helped me from being such a noob and getting frustrated every time I open the material editor (or just unreal in general) to actually being able to have fun with it and creating things on my own rather than just following along with a complex tutorial. Thanks so much!

[@steven-bh2ii]

Your channel is a gem...

[@Mad_Mom]

I was having a hard time with these nodes, but you made them so interesting.

[@prithviabilash7713]

This channel deserves more subscribers ! Becoming one now, myself.

[@carlrotebrink]

Charlie, you're awesome. Thanks so much.

[@michaelarby]

great wee series of videos - this is a great way of doing the moss on top. i had been using the worldalignblend node method but could never work out how to get the values to do what I wanted - might try this instead. loved the heartbeat example too!

[@Fokkusu]

Super interesting, thanks :D, love the series already and this is the 1st!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha thank you Alejandro! Hope you're looking forward to the next one :P

[@Fokkusu]

@@PrismaticaDev 100% ♥

[@vincenzoarnone7406]

Wow! Thank you! You deserve tons of subs.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Thanks Vincenzo :) Make sure to share with a friend!

[@yanofumo535]

I think this format is great and wil be very useful for me, especially because I come from blender nodes, and some nodes don't work exactly the same (other than the math nodes) so I get to struggle when I want to have some node based logic on the textures from one software to the other. Thanks a lot!

[@PrismaticaDev]

That's great to hear! I wish there was a global standard for material nodes haha. I have a few other tutorials on my channel that you might find handy if you're getting in to UE4 - particularly about Runtime Virtual Textures which I'm not sure are used in Blender

[@ooooolk]

haha this is by far the best way to ask to like and subscribe! also great series, keep it up :D

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha looking back at this, I hope people didn't feel threatened by the "Destroy actor" node :P

[@ooooolk]

@@PrismaticaDev Hey Philip DeFranco used to start every show by "threatening people" to punch them in the throat :D you're good.

[@Rezgi]

Really hyped for this new series ! Keep it up ! I'd love to see how you achieved the explosion effect by using a mesh, it's a very interesting concept !

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers mate! I might do a little walk-through of my explosion material in a future video once I've ironed out a few kinks haha

[@Rezgi]

@@PrismaticaDev Would be wonderful ! Thanks !

[@Aethelvlad]

Great tutorial, I use this on some photoscan meshes to control my dither blending with my ground (to exclude the top of the mesh)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Very smart! Getting things to blend with the terrain can be hard at times - dithering sounds like a very cheap way to do it!

[@pretendpumpkin]

i love how clear your explanations are!!

[@PrismaticaDev]

I'm glad you think so! I always feel like I'm rambling on and on hahaha. Luckily I can edit 30 minutes of footage into ~5 minute videos.

[@galafik1718]

This was a fantastic explanation. Thank you for the informative content!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers Gal! Glad you learned something :)

[@StevenDiLeo]

Another fantastic video with great examples, thank you!

[@meekigames4246]

Great tutorial - I also love this node!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers mate! It's a ripper, that's for sure.

[@insipidcrate3815]

"The reason that is so colorful is because." - Inspiring Quotes by Charlie

[@creatiffshik]

Australia EMF safety regulations create a substrate for art to flourish! hank you for grate tutorials. Im 7+ yrs in UE and yet watch your awesome stuff sometimes! hank you for community contribution

[@murnoth]

Thanks dude, your content is Super helpful! Love the conditional at the end too

[@sarahl6011]

great tutorial! I combined the WPO technique with the wind to make a great underwater algae base!

[@Unyverses]

Once again super helpful

[@KotatsuStudioDubs]

I unfortunately don't have a computer right now to test this materials, but with your information, theoretically, i could make a waterfall, which, if i am not using the default UE water plugin and using a mesh, i can make the textures wobble and deform as it gets vertical

[@PrismaticaDev]

yep, you could also make it foamy!

[@UniversityOfBlue]

these are the best vids man

[@dest8065]

AHAHAHAH LITERALLY NEEDED THIS WHAT THE HELL THANK YOU

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha sounds like I picked a perfect node for the first episode then!

[@sayanbiswas7364]

Beautiful. Instant subscribe.

[@PrismaticaDev]

You're beautiful! Thanks :)

[@Bazinga73904]

That explosion effect was so clever

[@PrismaticaDev]

Haha I felt like a hugebrain when I made it on stream!

[@danieles6684]

@@PrismaticaDev Do you have a link? I'm trying to wrap my head around how you would have a discrete "animation period" for something like this rather than just a looping sine wave.

[@Sauroctone]

So clear, I love that. Thanks

[@ryansenger408]

Bloody Brilliant.

[@gilserranito951]

I was just gona watch the vids and move on But those last nodes... they me told to... i didnt want- HE DID NODES! I HAD TO FOLLOW THE CODE!

[@PrabhjotSingh_]

Thanks man i was looking for these for so long but people make tutorial only like " let make x material" they don't explain

[@PrismaticaDev]

Really glad you're finding them helpful :)

[@dandy445]

Hey All. If you wanna use the vertex normal for World Position offset, you need to multiply by a V3 instead of using component mask. For some reason, in ue5, my B channel component mask did not yield a z offset, but a combination of xyz offset when multiplied and plugged into WPO. So, I just multiplied the vertexnormalWS node by a 0,0,1 vector to get the z vector that way.

[@deebee5378]

I really appreciate your tutorials. Sometimes it's hard to follow because of how little screenspace you give the material graph compared to everything else. It's hard to see how the nodes are all connected when it's cropped so much. The preview window really doesn't need to be that big to demonstrate the effect

[@Jaegerger44]

Thank you, please make more example for WS node

[@stefanovietina1403]

Great tut! Is there a way to rotate the mask in a desired direction and not only Z-up? (I am thinking about something like a slope surface...)

[@PrismaticaDev]

You can use a Dot Product between the Vertex Normals and any normalized 3-vector

[@stefanovietina1403]

@@PrismaticaDev Not sure to understand, sorry 🙃

[@il4w]

Hi awesome tutorial man , hey could you tell me if I could use this node in local mesh space instead of world space somehow I am trying to learn the material nodes. When i saw this video of yours it immediately struck my mind i could use this in implementing a suppressor' cooldown in my FPS games automatic ARs and SMGs from a hot orangish red texture to its normal black colored texture.. but the thing with that is i want the material to offset within its local x axis space instead of world space which is why i wanted to know about my above query ! Thanks man and cheers to you for explaining everything so well.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey! You should be able to use the "Transform" node to transform from World space to Local space. Alternatively, if you're using an animated SK mesh, you can use the Pre-skinned local/Pre-skinned Vertex Normals nodes to do some cool stuff (Check out my videos on the pre-skinned nodes)

[@il4w]

@@PrismaticaDev thank you much Ill give this a whirl this is awesome

[@HuiHuiKingg]

extremely helpful!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Glad to hear it! :)

[@shmuelisrl]

I'm coming from blender to ue5 and I do a lot of procedural materials and stuff and I'm trying to figure out the unreal materials node but I can't find a node that can snap to a value we have a node called snap in blender basically let's say you Have the X gradient of the uv (the texture coordinate) you can snap to any value you type in and it'll be a solid color every ___ (number you specify) so a gradient from 1 to 5 and snapped to 1 you'll have 5 solid colors. if you know how to do this in ue please let me know.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey! Sure do - Multiply by X, Floor, Divide by X-1. X is the number of bands you’d like to create :)

[@denizyldr5372]

Great tut,

[@kuunami]

I'm having trouble understanding why the multiply node controls softness but the add node controls offset.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey! Check out my material math video here and you should get a better understanding :) kzbin.info/www/bejne/f4a9YpiurtBpntk

[@kuunami]

@@PrismaticaDev Thanks! That cleared up a lot for me.

[@rein556]

2:17 umm, what's the difference between a saturate and a clamp node?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Saturate is just a clamp from 0-1, but is free for the GPU to compute. I'm guessing a static 0-1 Clamp would be compiled as a Saturate anyway

[@rein556]

@@PrismaticaDev oh ok, got it, Thanks

[@protophase]

If I want to add this to my trees WITHOUT height maps, what node can I use for that?

[@PrismaticaDev]

I’m not exactly sure what you mean - could you explain a bit more?

[@protophase]

@@PrismaticaDev Okay, so I am making a game with a retro aesthetic in mind. Which means no normal maps. Right now I am trying to figure out how I can blend a snow texture on top of my leaves texture. So I want to blend a 2d snow texture with a 2d leaves texture and combine the alpha channels together by using the vertex normal node. I don't know how I shall do this, since I need the alpha mask from the leaves texture to keep them transparent I guess I also need the alpha channel from the snow to blend in with the texture before the final output.

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@protophase Ah, gotcha! So you'd want to be doing a HeightLerp (I have a video about it) using the Vertex Normals as the Transition Phase. However, depending on the tree type you could possibly use the UV coordinates at the transition phase instead (would work well with pines) If you happen to catch one of my livestreams I'd be happy to show you an example there :)

[@protophase]

@@PrismaticaDev I appreciate the response man, I've been looking everywhere for help on this. I'm not an expert at Unreal Engine but I will take a look at your Heightlerp video and see what I can do. The tree that I am currently making is a european spruce/ fir tree that I made in treeit using a trunk as base and leaves turned downwards. I'll try and catch your livestreams aswell!

[@protophase]

Holy shit, this is more what I am looking for. I took the alpha from my texture straight to the opacity, ran the RGB through the HeightLerp - "Height Texture" and the vertex normal -> Mask(B) -> Multiply as the transition phase. But my question now is, can I invert the value of the VertexNormals? Because now the snow comes from inwards -> outwards instead of the opposite. Can I also somehow connect a noise as to not make the transition a full gradient but more of a pattern?

[@alessioalonne4333]

This blueprint gonna like and unlike every tick your beautiful channel.

[@red4666]

how do i get vertexnormalWS to not split polygons when i push them out using WPO? currently it's splitting me meshes into pieces.

[@PrismaticaDev]

You’ll need to edit your mesh to have smoothed shading - sharps will be split in to seperate verts

[@Baleur]

1:10 not even 2 minutes in and im already getting "ahaa" moments of how this could be useful. Excellent. I know this sounds extremely noobish, but....... Would you consider doing a similar "5 minute nodes" series for Blueprint nodes? One thing i hate with most tutorials is that nobody bothers to explain WHAT a node does and WHY its being used. It also doesnt help that 80% of the nodes in UE are NOT named what you'd expect. Switch = FlipFlop (because thats an easy thing to guess, flipflop). IF, THEN / TrueFalse = Branch And dont even get me started on "Cast To", which i thought meant that you sent a signal TO said object (since its called, cast TO), while in reality it seems to be used as an conditional "If true" statement. AND of course as in this video... "Saturate", which has nothing to do with Saturation, but is actually a Clamp....... I mean ive fallen in love with Unreal Engine 5, but jesus christ would it kill them to name things logically? Flip Flop.........

[@albertomercado9807]

how heavy is the shader complexity of this kind of materials?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Super cheap - the Vertex Normals are already getting sampled anyway so they're readily available without any noticeable additional cost :)

[@albertomercado9807]

Man I was struggling a lot to create cool materials in UE, this guide is awesome, thanks a lot! @@PrismaticaDev

[@federicozurani]

Great video! Please more normal content ahaah

[@tylerwomble3005]

I wish I had the mathematic skills to understand what it is you are actually multiplying to achieve these effects

[@PrismaticaDev]

Check out my shader math video, hopefully it will explain things :)

[@rexx4K_]

Prismatic when will your game be out?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey Rexx! We won't have a playable demo for at least 6 months I think. You can stay up to date in our Discord though :)

[@avrahamrosenberg2905]

can i learn this for ue5?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yes :) UE4 and UE5 are exactly the same

[@avrahamrosenberg2905]

@@PrismaticaDev wow ok thx

[@christuusgnosis]

This node really makes a quest janky In pcvr I use it everywhere but wind and foliage and vnws just kill the quest framerate idk if foliage can actually move on a quest its got so many uses

[@parkerhartzler]

going to use this for a nasty glowing alien flesh

[@HalleckArts]

I love you

[@SkSafowan]

My PC isn't powerful enough to run UE5 Will there be any problem if I learn it with UE4 ?

[@bobcharlotte8724]

You said "doodle" hehe...

[@montather9770]

😥😥💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

[@JavadRezaii]

How can I destroy actor on KZbin, if I found this video not Entertaining and Educational ? 😁

[@junewaddington3367]

I think it's very frustrating to watch this video, from the perspective of someone trying to learn. You're way too hyper, clicking around the different nodes, and don't really give people a chance to see how you're configuring each. For example, when you first create the Mask and other nodes near the beginning of the video, you click around it too quickly and eventually it's not clear how you configured each of them. Frustrating, because otherwise the overall techniques you're applying would be interesting.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Sorry to hear that June! I don't script any of my videos so they are very run-and-gun, which is also how I am in life haha. If you're looking for some slower paced creators, I highly recommend Mathew Wadstein's channel, as well as Your Sandbox and Ryan Laley.

[@danieles6684]

@@PrismaticaDev For what it's worth this was basically perfectly paced for me (and I'm a beginner / intermediate). The only thing missing was wanting to know more about that fancy explosion mesh!