Working inside the material editor

Let's get started with the material editor! This is the place where the magic will happen and also where we'll spend most of our time during this cookbook. Better get well acquainted with it then! As with everything inside Unreal, you'll be able to see that this space for creating materials is a very flexible one—full of customizable panels, rearrangeable windows, and expandable areas. You can place them however you want!

Because of its modular nature, some of the initial questions we need to tackle are the following ones: how do we start creating materials and where do we look for the most commonly used parameters? Having different panels means having to look for different functionalities in each of them, so we'll need to know how to find our way around the editor. We won't stop there though—the editor is packed with plenty of useful little tools that will make our jobs as material creators that much easier, and knowing where they live is one of the first mandatory steps.

So, without further ado, let's use the project we have already set up in the previous recipe as our starting point and let's start creating our first material!