The Future of Materials in Unreal Engine | GDC 2023

Watch the recording of our presentation ‘The Future of Materials in Unreal Engine’, originally shown at our booth at GDC 2023.

Let’s peel back the layers of Substrate, the upcoming paradigm-shifting material system for Unreal Engine 5—and get a sneak peek of what’s to come!


#UnrealEngine5, #GDC2023, #EpicGames, #GameDevelopersConference, #UE5, #GameDevelopment, #Substrate #Materials

[benjaminyde]

Good and clear documentation and example repositories are what we need :)
Downloading samples and experimenting along with a linked (can be a small) tutorial is worth gold to users and beginners!

[AllenGingrich]

Holy crap, finally an Unreal presenter who was clear, prepared, and concise lol So many of these GDC videos are... not great. I appreciate how hard it is to present this technical stuff, but sometimes I get so bored waiting for them to hit high level concepts. Bravo!

[literallyjeff]

This is very exciting. I really hope to see more upgrades and improvements to the material editor itself as well. Also, something like a built-in reflective / refractive index node with common material static values would be really nice to have. I realize I can easily create this myself, but it seems like something that could come out of the box.

[CptBonex]

This is really awesome. The milky substance over the metallic copper really shows what this is capable of. Instead of cheating and using blend masks you can just describe the thickness of each layer and its then physically accurate. Thats amazing. Cant wait to create all of the materials that I previously havent been able to make. This is the best new feature for sure. ❤

[yamiprincess]

I can't explain how happy I am about substrate btw!!! I understand it cause I actually read a pbr guide and I'm so excited to be able to expand outside the limitations we had in the metallic roughness workflow. Especially because I love gemstones, translucent, and iridescent materials.

[dominicsagona]

As someone who is coming from GPU Offline Render engines, like Redshift and Octane, this approach to material authoring makes much more sense to me. It’s basically the same thing.

[vitgardon]

OMG, I thought it will be just a change of some nodes and material models but this?? It is so awesome. I am so looking forward to playing with real physical properties. I remember creating a simple path tracer and I implemented conductivity, etc., and the results we much more life-like. I will definitely use it as soon as it is out of experimental. I hope they will be able to do something similar with volumetric effects.

[UDIOTAPE]

This presentation had me mouth open and slow clapping on my own. Even though I'm not currently using UE (and I haven't, really), I am so fascinated, impressed with and excited about all of these new features and additions. What a time to be alive for game development!

[GlowboxD]

I am super duper excited for this pipeline. Very cool. BTW, this guy is a great presenter and instructor.

[cgkrab]

Very exciting improvements in physically based rendering :) looks like having all of these helper nodes will make a lot more work for artists though who can achieve similar end result now with just 3 texture samples (albedo, normal, and ORM). Feels like the notion that they were building a system for artists was lost somewhere along the way....if you need to say "so here are the extra steps required to get what you ACTUALLY want" then the system is just ergonomically wrong.

But it is obviously powerful so hopefully some work will go into making some of these functions more implicit (e.g. if you will almost always want to use a resulting color for SSS instead of absorption, then that should be the default input instead of having additional nodes that you would need to add every single time just to do the conversion for you).

[irtezamasud]

The feature is all I was thinking in a dream. this is truly epic.

[Unknown-osnb]

Hey I remember I learned about the wave nature of light (I know light isn't exactly a wave but yeah) in year 12 and I always used to try the light double slit experiment in different render engines by using path tracing and it never worked. Back then I didn't know how path tracing, textures and etc functioned in a way to be optimized. After researching about it, I thought it was going to be impossible to make light even interfere with one another to create that constructive and deconstructive effect in current computers but now I am really impressed by what you mentioned at 18:04 and I can't wait to see the results for myself.

[raydx]

I am so glad you finally fixed transmission in Unreal, It was really hard to make decent looking glass previously and was also really expensive to run.

[NormanBrigg]

Awesome presentation, awesome feature, clear examples. I just start to learn UE and try to keep up with everything that happens around it, Epic is really on the edge of technology

[AdamKiraly_d]

Haven't been so excited for a material change since PBR, well done guys (now give me back my additive decal blending)

[EyefyourGf]

@Unreal Engine It would be good if you gave us the link for the page where we could see all the numbers for different metals, or non metals i guess.

[mohamedalashiq]

This actually makes more sense than PBR

[FunFindsYT]

This seems very fun to play with, as you can use the properties of real life as a reference rather than just a visual reference.

[ReubenAStern]

Materials have never made sense to me, but this seems like it just might. Also based on my tests 5.2 looks like it might be pretty stable. I will consider mastering this "Subtrate"

[johanrojassoderman]

17:07 that actually brought a tear to my eye. Fantastic xD