The reel shows off four materials that I worked on for a personal project that correspond to objects that I have. I wanted to practice with making realistic shaders in Unreal Engine 4 using a mix of pictures taken in real life, as well as, procedural textures created in Unreal. Working from reference has really increased the quality of my work and having the objects at hand to manipulate really allowed me to get my materials looking as realistic as possible. My proudest accomplishment is the glass material that I put together in Unreal. It was a challenge and Unreal has some issues rendering glass but I am really happy with the way it came out. Also it would be nice to get some anisotropic reflections on the brushed metal.

This still showcases the glass material that I created alongside the reference that I used. I was working with an empty cologne bottle that I just happened to save. The glass had an amazing clarity and played with the light in such an interesting way. It would be great if in the future Unreal would support better refraction and light manipulation through translucent materials but the fact that Unreal is not usually utilized as a rendering software I can understand the lack of ability. That being said they have come a long way.

This is the tree bark material that I compiled in Unreal. I first took the photo under some usually not recommended settings (bright sunlight) and then tried to adjust it to the best of my ability in Photoshop. The photo adjustments proved to be a little difficult. I managed to remove as many shadows and highlights as possible and worked on getting the bark to have a visually tactile feel so it would look believable. Another challenge that I had to overcome was the fact that the color of the tree bark is slightly similar to that of a rock and I needed to figure out how to make it look visually different than that.

Again I used a part of the cologne bottle that I referenced for my glass material. The metal material really gets controlled by the roughness. I do kind of wish I could have figured out how to achieve an anisotropic reflection on the material but I have not quite found the correct reference for it. Maya provides a shader that allows easy manipulation at the cost of render time. Something like that in Unreal would really improve the way different metals can be manipulated.

I referenced my laptop bag for this material. This was probably the second hardest material for me to create simply because the roughness and the displacement were really finicky to get just right. I also had issues with getting the displacement to work properly because I constantly altered the tiling of the material to get it looking closer to the reference. Every time I changed the tiling it would change the way the displacement looked. It was a successful attempt at recreating the leather on my bag. For future exercises, I think that I want to use a larger reference.