Using masks within a material

Welcome to the first recipe of this third chapter! I think this is a very important moment in our material-creation journey, as we are about to leave the introductory stuff aside in order to focus more on real assets. From now on, everything we do is really real and by that I mean that we are no longer talking about the possibilities or applications of what we are learning, but instead we are doing things that could be part of a real-life project. Hopefully, you'll start feeling like a pro, learning and applying specific techniques that are part of a 3D artist's daily workflow in UE4!

With that in mind, our first goal is going to be the replication of a complex material graph. This is going to be very helpful, as one of the most important steps is to actually decide how our materials should be set up. We'll do that for a small wooden toy tank, which is indicative of many different objects that we might want to texture in the future. We will also take a look at other examples throughout this chapter, but this particular recipe will serve as a nice entry point, as we are about to see.