Lesson with Overlays & Materials - Tim Kim

Premise:

So at this point in my life as an Unreal Developer (which hasn't bee that long, honestly) I find myself working on interesting things outside of simple, basic foundational stuff. For instance: I get to work on creating an outline for objects and enemies and have it changes colors when the player's crosshair hovers over those objects! Sounds a little complex, but I think I can manage.

Now imagine that you're me. Imagine things getting a little difficult, but you manage to get things set up with some help and very helpful Unreal tutorials online. Imagine getting things set up, then running into this problem...

Problem:

Why does it look like this? I've set things up properly. I made sure that the appropriate fields for this new material (named Tester for the purposes of this blog btw).

There's no asterisks over the material name in the tabs, so I know I saved and am currently up to date. I know that I've set it in my object (for this example, this is the Enemy's BP) to where I can actually see that I'm setting the Overlay Material correctly. So why does it look like that? Why is the material not matching the emissive blue color that I've set? Why does it change the whole mesh material?

Well, fret not, dear readers. If you've experienced this very same issue, I have the solution for you here below:

Solution:

There's a magical button that we often forget about, especially when it comes to materials. You can press Ctrl + Shift + S all you like, or the Floppy Disc icon multiple times. All of this is cool, but means absolutely nothing to a material unless you hit that apply button, because once you do, this is what you get:

Conclusion:

Now, imagine being me, having finally achieved this with the help of a teammate who's better skilled and more knowledgeable about these things than I. I'm not ashamed to admit that tears were involved. I'm also not ashamed to admit that this took me some time. Why? Because it's through mistakes that we get to earn these ingrained lessons that stick with us.

Even now, I know - if I create a new material or work with a material in Unreal, the save button does not matter as much as the apply button itself.

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