Welcome back everyone. In the last video, we imported some assets and we even got a preview of what's to come those skill acquisition blueprints. And some of those skill acquisition blueprints that we saw in the last video contains some sort of orbs that were kind of floating above those little altar sort of things. So what we're going to be doing in this one is creating some more assets for those blueprints. Specifically, we are going to be creating some material assets needed for some of those skill acquisition blueprints. These are going to be materials for some of those floating orbs above those altars.

So let's hop right to it. We're going to be working in our content Metroidvania materials folder. And the first thing I'm going to do here is find some empty space over in my content browser. I'm going to right click and in my right click menu I want to create a brand new material. Now I'm going to call this one m underscore Skill underscore bass. And I'm gonna double click on this guy to open it up.

And I've got a setup of nodes here that I'm gonna try to put together. And the idea here is that I want to have a material that kind of flashes between two colors kind of subtly. So the way I can get a note out here that will allow me to choose a color is to right click, and I can search for something called a vector parameter. And I'm going to call this it's going to prompt me to give a name emissive color, one, like so. And then I'm going to double click this or not double click it I'm going to Ctrl C Ctrl V to bring in a copy although this one I'm going to call emissive color over in the Details panel, I can change it to two. Okay, and I'm going to change this first emissive color.

By selecting it, I can come under the default value. And I do have a particular value in mind, I'm going to just hard code them, you could choose a value from here, but I'm just going to punch in some numbers, I want the R to be one, not for one, the G to be zero, the B to be zero and the A to be one. So straight up red right there. And this second emissive color that I'm selecting over in the Details panel, I'm going to set values for this I'm going to leave the R and the G as zeros. But I'm going to change the B to B one and the A to B one. So I've got red and blue out here.

Now I want to flash between these two colors. So in order to go between two different values here I'm going to bring in something called a alert node. So I'm going to right Click, do a search for a loop node, or you could simply drag off of here like this and do a search for each loop node. The one I'm going to be looking for is linear interpolates, like so. And I'm going to plug this into the B value. And now in order to go from the A color, which is currently red to the A B color, which is currently blue, I need to plug something into the alpha here.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a sign node sine waves go up, down, up, down, up, down, right click, gonna do a search for a sign node. And I'm gonna plug this into the alpha value, and with my sign node selected, I need to specify a period and this period I'm going to put as a value of four. This is the monitor seconds it takes to go from A to B. Okay, and in order to make this really work, I need to plug a time node into the sign node. So I'm going to right click over here, type in time and the time node i want to plug into here. And there is more that I want to put in here.

But just to give you a quick preview of what we're going to be creating here, if I plug this into my emissive color right away, you're gonna see how this goes from red to blue, back to red, blue, etc. So that's all just a demonstrate what we're going to be doing, but I do want to add some more notes here. So I'm going to unhook this by holding down ALT and left clicking. Now off of this lurk node, I am going to bring in a multiply node but instead of actually searching for the multiply node, I am going to hold down the M McKee and isn't multiply and left click. And I'm going to do that once and I'm going to do that twice, I actually want to have these out here. I'm going to plug this loop output into the B value of this very first multiply.

And then up above here to plug into the a value, I'm going to right click, and I'm going to bring in a scalar parameter. And I'm going to name this scalar parameter glow amount. plugging this into the a pin there, so what I can do here is I can select a value and I'm gonna set my glow amount here to have a default value of say, let's go five. And you see that number reflected right here in the params setting, and it says params five right on the node. Then I'm going to take the result of this and I'm going to plug it into a another multiply node like so. I'm going to take this multiply node and this one is going to go into emissive color, like so.

Okay, but there's a little bit more work I want to do here. I do want to give this a little bit more of a glowy look like right now looks rather flat, right? So one thing I can do is I can bring in what is known as a friend l node looks like Fresnel. I'm going to right click and do a search for this guy right here. The one that looks like Fresnel called for now and I'm going to plug this into the B value, like so. And you can see in the preview window here is sort of what that looks like.

It's sort of I think it gives it more of a glowy sort of look about it. I don't even know How to describe this look, but I really like it. And last thing I'm going to try doing here, maybe I'll keep this maybe I won't is I'm going to select my master node here. And I'm going to change the Blend Mode from opaque to translucent. And then I'm going to take the output of my personal node here in plug it into this opacity input. This was not available before this opacity was actually grayed out until I change my blend node here to translucent so I'm going to plug this into the opacity and let's see what kind of a look this gives us.

Kind of see through like that sort of like that. Yeah, I kind of dig. Now with your for now, node selected here, you can change play around with this exponent. Like if you change it to be something like one. You can sort of see what that's gonna look like. You can change it to something like 10 and you can see that that color ring is really going to be pushed out to the edge I think for the time being, I'm going to go with a value of one, something like that.

Maybe I'll keep that maybe I'll change it, but a value of one is going to be good enough for now. With that, I'm going to save this. And I'm not quite done yet. What I want to do next is come into the Content Browser. And if I right click on our ms skill base here, right click, I can create a material instance from this. This is kind of a way to create a very performant material that is essentially an offshoot of our base material here, you're going to see what kind of parameters it gives us to make these really easy to alter from our base setup.

So I'm going to create a material instance. And I'm going to call this first 1am. I underscore be magic This is going to be the material that we're going to apply to the the orb that's floating above our black Magic altar. Okay. I'm going to double click on this guy real quick and you can see now I've got some parameters that I can change about this This is different from our material setup that consisted of all these nodes right now you can see I had a parameter node here called emissive color one vector parameter. This is another vector parameter node called the missive color to and this is a scalar parameter node that I called glow amount.

So notice all these names right here. In my material instance, they are right here as well vector parameters, and scalar parameters. And with these now in my material instance, I can adjust them as I see fit. So let me see for my black magic here. I'm gonna click on this emissive color one I'm gonna expand out this triangle here a little bit. And for my R value, I'm going to change that to be point 08 the G value I'm going to set Be point 005 get some very specific values in mind.

And for the B value, I'm going to change that to be point 035. I'm going to leave that a value at one, it's sort of this dark, purple ish Maroon type color. And then for my emissive color, too, I'm going to check that to make it so that I can edit it, I'm going to click this little drop down triangle. And I am going to make this straight black. So 00 A, B has got to be changed to zero. So it's going to change from this sort of, I don't know how you describe it, dark magenta to black.

And the scalar parameter value here, you could change it if you want, I think I am going to leave it at five so that's gonna be pretty good. I kind of like that. So I'm gonna save that. Then I'm gonna come under my MV test map tab one more time to jump me back to the level editor. I'm going to right click on my M scale base and I'm going to create another material instance. This one will be called m i for material instance.

And in this case it will be underscore w magic. Let's double click on this guy to open them up. And of course, I do have some settings for this. So I'm going to click on our emissive color one and expand out the properties right here. The R value I want to be 0.7. The G value I'm going to be setting to 0.7.

The B value I want to be one and the value will be one as well. emissive color two I'm going to select that expand out those triangles, the our G and B value I'm going to set to be one all across the board. So sort of a light blue, transitioning to a straight up white. I think I'll leave My glow mount at five as well. Yeah, I could change that but that's looking pretty good. I'm gonna save that black magic Let me see glow mount I'm gonna check that 10 now you know what I'm just gonna set that back to five that's gonna be pretty good save that as well.

Okay, so now we've got a couple of material instances that we can apply to some of those orbs that we're going to have floating above our skill, our skill altars, if you will, we're going to interact with those skill altars and acquire those skills. Guys, that is gonna do it all for this video. We will see you in the next one.