1. Introduction

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Is this workshop for me? This workshop is initially designed for Game Developers at HKU, who want to explore Technical Art. But anybody with an interest in technical art is welcome to follow this workshop.


What do I need?

Within this workshop you are expected to have a core understanding of programming with C++ or C#. Also a minimum understanding of Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) is required. 


It is advised to have a working PC or laptop, that can handle UE4, to participate in the workshop and its challenges. This workshop will be making use of version 4.26 of UE4. Unreal Engine 4 is a free engine, which you can download here: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download.


Make sure that you choose C++ at “Choose whether to create a Blueprint or C++ project”, when creating your own project.

Img. 1, choosing for a C++ project


At the end of this workshop

When you have finished this workshop, you will be able to create your own effects using dynamic materials. This workshop will teach you about:

  • How to create your own dynamic material in C++.

  • How to set up a material for your dynamic material.

  • How to edit parameters in your dynamic material at runtime in C++.

  • How to read parameters in your dynamic material at runtime in C++.

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6. Creating and editing the dynamic material

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Before we can create our dynamic material, we need to find our static mesh component that contains our material. Img 23, Code of finding our static mesh component and creating and setting our dynamic mesh With the “GetComponentByClass()” function we are asking UE4 to return to us the first component object defined within the round brackets. We want to receive our static mesh component, so we use “UStaticMeshComponent::StaticClass()”. The function returns a “UComponent*”. With the “Cast<T>()” function we can convert the returned object between the round brackets to our class defined in position of “T”.  We use the “IsValid()” function as a security to make sure that the cast has been executed successfully. If the cast has failed and we were to try to access an empty pointer, our game would instantly crash. Within the if-statement we put the rest of our code. Line 25 on image 23 creates a dynamic material and assigns it to our pointer. Within the function we use “SMC->GetMat...
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5. Constructing a blueprint

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We need a blueprint where we can combine our assets. A blueprint will allow us to create multiple instances that we can place in our level. You can create a blueprint in the same way as creating a material. Go to the Content Browser, right click in the content and select “Blueprint Class”. Img 17, Creating a blueprint class A new window opens. A blueprint is by UE4 seen as a type of class. We need our blueprint to inherit our class “DMObject” in order for our blueprint to have our code. Open “All Classes” at the bottom of the window and type in your class, I used “DMObject”. Click on your option to continue. Img 18, Creating a BP that inherits “DMObject” Open the newly created blueprint. We need to add a component that can hold a mesh with our material. Click on “+Add Component” in the left upper corner. A window will pop-up with a list of predefined components. Click on “Static Mesh” to create a static mesh component. Img 19, Adding a static mesh component Let’s choose a mesh that can...
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8. Reading parameters of the dynamic material

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For creating different types of effects it can be very useful to read the parameters of a dynamic material. Let's read and output our emission color right after the effect we created earlier. Img 30, Reading and outputting emission color For our reading function, we need to create a variable placeholder that can contain the information of our color. You can see on line 38 of image 30 that I’ve created a FLinearColor placeholder called “ReadVector”. To read a vector parameter, we need to use the “GetVectorParameterValue()” function contained in our dynamic material. The function needs the parameter name, which we declare in the first parameter slot. In the second parameter slot we put our “ReadVector” placeholder. Next, we want to output our emission color to the output log of UE4. That way we can test if our code works. On line 40 of image 30 you can see how to do that. I am outputting the name of the object, following the read color. Reading the scalar parameter value is similar. ...
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