Create Material Tutorial

Owned by enenra, created
Last updated: Mar 03, 2023
3 min read

This tutorial walks you through the process of creating a new material, containing multiple textures, that is compatible with Space Engineers. The material is created through the SEUT functionalities for material creation.

I. Setup Textures

First, you of course need textures that are created with Space Engineers in mind. For this tutorial, it is assumed that you have already completed that step. You can find more information about materials in Space Engineers here (including how to set up your individual texture files for use in SE).

The textures need to be exported to a format that Blender can read - for SEUT we generally use TIF. This is purely for display in Blender as it does not have the ability to read the DDS BC7 compression that Space Engineers requires.

Place the TIF textures into a [SEUT Assets]\Textures\Custom\[your name]\-folder (SEUT Assets as defined in your Addon Preferences) - or within a separate directory whose path includes \Textures\. This is required so that SEUT can convert the path to a relative one for your mod.

II. Setup Material

Use the Create SEUT Material-button to create the node tree for your material.

Note that the material shown in Blender with SEUT is not representative of what it looks like ingame. Space Engineers does not care about the material node tree within Blender at all, as it pulls all material information exclusively from the material definition as shown above. The only way to adjust the appearance of the material ingame is by editing the texture files or the parameters of the material within that material definition.

In the Shader Editor, link the individual texture files (in any format that Blender can read) to their respective image nodes in the material. Delete any of the orange image nodes that your material doesn’t use.

Note that the Paint Color-node is only there to preview how paint color would look like on the material ingame. It does not have any effect on the material itself and is not exported.

 

Learnings

 

Overview

 

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