Unreal Material

Unreal Material is a new PBR (physically based rendering) material, which introduces the standard material of Unreal Engine 4 into Modo, as a custom material associated with dedicated shaders for offline render, preview, and advanced viewports.

To create an Unreal Material, in the Shader Tree, click Add Layer > Custom Materials > Unreal Material. The material is added to the Shader Tree and the layer's Properties panel displays.

Layer

Enable

Toggles the effect of the layer on and off, duplicating the functionality of toggling visibility in the Shader Tree. When disabled, the layer has no effect on the shading of the scene. However, disabled layers are saved with the scene and are persistent across Modo sessions.

Invert

Inverts the RGB values for the layer producing a negative effect.

Blend Mode

Affects blending between different layers of the same effect type, allowing you to stack several layers for different effects. For more on blending, see Layer Blend Modes.

Opacity

Changes the transparency of the current layer. Reducing this value increasingly reveals lower layers in the Shader Tree if present, or dims the effect of the layer itself on the surface.

Unreal Material

Base Color

Specifies the color of the material. Specify R, G, and B color values.

Metallic

This option specifies how metal-like your surface is. A value of 0 specifies a non-metallic surface, while a value of 1 results in a metal surface.

Specular

Scales the amount of specularity on non-metallic surfaces. It has no effect on metallic surfaces.

Roughness

Specifies the roughness of the material.

Emissive Color

Specifies which part of the material should glow due to emitting light.

Opacity

Specifies the transparency of the material.

Reflection Rays

This property refers to baking with F9 or Preview render. Specifies the number of rays used for sampling reflection. A higher number of rays produces better rendering quality, but increases render time.

Shading Model

This controls how your material reflects light. This option determines how Modo creates the final result of the material with lighting. The following options are available:

Default Lit - This includes the most commonly used features, such as direct lighting, normal mapping, and reflections.

Clear Coat - This option is for applying and customizing clear coat texture effects, such as clear coat amount and clear coat roughness.

Textures for Unreal Material

Modo supports texturing for Unreal Material. To add a texture, follow these steps:

1.   In the Shader Tree, click Add Layer > Image Map > (load image).

A file browser opens.

2.   Navigate to the file you'd like to use and click Open.
3.   Right-click the Effect column of the texture layer in the Shader Tree.
4.   Select Unreal and choose from the available effects.

The following texture effects are available:

Ambient Occlusion

Base Color

Bump (This can be achieved by BumpOffset in Unreal Engine. In Modo, the effect is directly specified.)

Clearcoat Amount

Clearcoat Roughness

Emissive Color

Metallic

Normal

Opacity

Roughness

Specular

Subsurface Color