4
Creating Your First Material
In this chapter, we are going to guide you through creating the frst material for the
wizard’s desk. You will learn about:
• How to create a new material.
• The Material Editor and Material Graph.
• The use of textures in materials.
• Applying materials to meshes in the scene.
Before we can begin making things, we need the project fles which include textures
for all of the assets in the wizard’s desk scene. We will guide you through download‑
ing and exploring the project before we begin with setting up a material for a simple
asset, the collection of coins on the right‑hand side of the desk.
Getting Started with the Project Files
To follow the practical tutorials in this book, you are going to need to download
the project fles which are available from the Taylor & Francis website at http://
www.routledge.com/9781032649689. You will also need to have Unreal Engine 5.3
installed on your computer.
Installing Unreal Engine
You can download Unreal Engine via the Epic Games Launcher (available from
https://unrealengine.com) in the Unreal Engine section (left hand side), Library tab.
All project fles are provided for use in Unreal Engine 5.3, they should work in newer
versions (however some issues may occur) but will not work in any version lower than
5.3. If this is the frst time you’ve installed Unreal Engine, your Epic Launcher after
version 5.3 has been installed should look similar to Figure 4.1.
Extracting the Project
The project download is provided as a .zip archive. This will need extracting (or
unzipping) using either the tool built‑in to your operating system or with a program
such as 7‑Zip.
When extracting the project, ensure that you maintain the folder structure and do
not move any fles around as this will prevent the Unreal Engine editor from opening
the project correctly.
DOI: 10.1201/9781032663852‑4 33
