This video shows how to make animated materials using Unreal Engine 5.4. You will learn how to make a sphere mesh in Blender 4.1 and a Voronoi texture in GIMP. You will then be shown haw to animate the material using Unreal Engine 5.4. The final render was done in Unreal Engine.
Making the disc (Blender)
I will use a sphere for the disc
I delete the bottom half of the sphere and scale it along the Z-Axis to flatten it
In object mode, I set the origin to the center of the disc and then move the disc to the world origin
I rotate the disc around the X-Axis 90-degrees
In the UV editing workspace, I select the UVs of the disc and scale them to twice their size along the Y-Axis (2)
I then move them to take up the entire UV space (y -0.25)
I export the disc as an FBX
For the object types, I select mesh and for the smoothing, I use face
Basic material (UE)
I will be using a Voronoi texture I downloaded from Freepik
*NOTE: This downloads as an EPS file so you will need to convert it to a PNG or JPG – there are plenty of free convertors online
The only other thing I did to this image was take it into Illustrator and export it as a 2048 x2048 square image
*You can do this after converting it to a PNG in any software
I import both the disc and the texture into Unreal
I drag the disc into the level
I create a new material and open it up
I set the blend mode to translucent and the shading model to unlit
I drag in the texture and connect the red channel to the opacity input
I add a constant 3 vector and connect it to the emissive color input
I right-click on the vector and convert it to a parameter – renaming it to color
I change the color to white
Animated material (UE)
I add a panner node and connect it to the UVs input of the texture
I add a scalar parameter – naming it speed X
I duplicate this parameter and rename it to speed Y
For both of these parameters, I change the slider min to -1 and the slider max to 1
I add an append vector node to combine these two parameters
I then connect the append node to the speed input of the panner
I duplicate these five nodes
I add a multiply node and connect the textures together
I duplicate this multiply node and connect the multiply node – connecting this multiply node to the opacity input of the texture output
I apply and save the material
I make a material instance of the master material and add it to the disc
I change the speed and color of the material instance
To change emission strength change the Value to 1 or above for color