SHADERcraft

Every surface tells a story. A scratch, a layer of paint, a rust streak or a polished edge records something that happened to an object. SHADERcraft teaches you to read that story in the real world and rebuild it as a material that responds to light correctly.

Over eight lessons you surface one hero asset, from first observation to portfolio presentation. You start with no software at all, learning to see how real materials meet light. Then you put numbers on what you see, build every map with care, bake and texture the asset, and assemble its materials in Unreal Engine.

Each lesson follows the same rhythm: Learn, Practice, Build, Refine and Masterpiece. Every lesson ends with a peer read of the work, such as the surface read, the match read, the channel read, the checker read or the bake read. Classmates judge the material cold against its reference before you explain what you meant.

The course asks two questions of every material:

• Does the surface tell the object’s history and fit its place in the world?
• Does it do so at a cost the production can afford?

SHADERcraft is open to artists with basic 3D skills: you should be able to model or source a simple prop and find your way around Unreal Engine. No prior Substance or shader experience is required. You work with a camera and reference tools, Substance 3D Painter and the Unreal Material Editor.

Lesson 01: Understanding Surfaces, Read the Surface

• Reading materials from reflection and behaviour, not colour alone
• Metal or not, roughness and its variation, and reflection at grazing angles
• Capturing reference under two lighting conditions, with close-ups of structure
• Reading wear and layers as a record of an object’s history
• Masterpiece: a Material Reference Library of at least twenty annotated materials, and a hero asset with a written history

Lesson 02: Physically Based Rendering, Put Numbers on It

• The PBR model shared by game engines, film renderers and texturing tools
• Plausible base colour values, the metallic rule and roughness as a value
• Matching real materials side by side against reference
• Masterpiece: Material Value Sheets for the hero asset’s materials, checked against the reference library

Lesson 03: Maps and Channels, Find the Broken Map

• Base colour, metallic, roughness, normal, ambient occlusion and height
• Keeping lighting out of base colour, and roughness that varies with history
• Colour space, normal map conventions and channel packing
• Masterpiece: a map plan for the hero asset, and a diagnosis of a broken material pack

Lesson 04: UVs for Texturing, Give Every Map an Address

• Seams, shells, stretching and texel density
• Placing seams along hard edges and where the camera doesn’t look
• Packing with enough padding for baking and lower resolutions
• Masterpiece: a UV layout for the hero asset at a stated texel density, verified with a checker texture

Lesson 05: Baking, A Clean Foundation

• How baking projects detail from high poly to low poly
• Naming, hard edges on UV splits, cages and matching tangent space
• Recognising common artifacts and tracing each to its cause
• Masterpiece: clean mesh maps for the hero asset, with a bake plan and fixes documented

Lesson 06: Texturing in Substance Painter, Wear Follows Use

• Fill layers, masks and generators in a non-destructive workflow
• Smart materials, and when to distrust them
• Placing wear by the asset’s written history, then refining it by hand
• Masterpiece: the hero asset fully textured, with wear that matches its history

Lesson 07: Materials in Unreal, One Parent, Many Instances

• The Unreal Material Editor and physically based inputs
• Parent materials, parameters and material instances
• Shader complexity and texture memory as part of the work
• Masterpiece: a parent material and instances for the hero asset, with performance measurements

Lesson 08: Presentation, Prove It Against Reference

• Studio lighting that shows materials honestly
• Turntables, close-ups and side-by-side reference comparisons under matched light
• Map breakdowns and performance evidence as part of the portfolio
• Masterpiece: a complete material library and hero asset presentation, presented and defended in critique

What you leave with

• A fully surfaced hero asset with turntables, close-ups and reference comparisons
• A personal Material Reference Library you can use for years
• A PBR workflow from observation to engine that works in any pipeline
• The foundation for the Craftsman tier and the rest of the CG-EH Craft Ecosystem