I don't pretend to be an expert here, but these are some discoveries I made from experiments using the existing UDK material nodes (as opposed to writing my own shader, which most topics online seem to be related to).
This particular material for a sci-fi 'virtual' fabric consists of an animated glowing golden pattern which oscillates with another pattern of green scanlines (like a glitch in the construct).
- I'm using an if statement to toggle between two materials at a certain interval (the time for this coming from a sine node and a divided time node). When sine is over .95 (i.e. a very small interval) the second state is allowed to flow through.
- Texture Coordinate nodes perform a number of functions here:
- to tile the UV coordinates (it's basic function)
- to change the UV channel (see below)
- as a three channel graypack consisting of a vertical ramp (red), a horizontal ramp (green) and a
uniform black (blue). This, again, has two uses:
- should you need a ramp texture (more useful than you think - try doing a linear wipe without it)
- as a representation of UV space, the 2D ramps can be multiplied by/ added to a grayscale
image (here i'm using a height map frontal projection) to distort the UV, and therefore the image
said UVs are plugged into.
- My glowing hexagon panner (here, broken up by a cloud greypack) is plugged into the TransmissionMask and TransmissionColor channels. These are usually reserved for faking subsurface scattering (which also glows... to an extent - and I only discovered this technique through a happy accident in skin modelling), but, blown out by any value above one, the details glow in a response to any lights in the scene (much like Spec but way more powerful).
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