How to Add a New Surface Type

Introduction

This guide explains how to go about adding a new surface type to your Unreal Engine project, and making sure that weapons, explosives and other parts of the asset can affect any materials using this new type!

How To Add a New Surface Type

• First, we will need to actually add a new Surface Type to the Unreal Engine project settings. This isn’t specific to the asset, so instead of boring you with details on how to go about this, you can read Epic’s official documentation on it!

• Once we have a new surface type, we will need to make a Physical Material that uses this Surface Type.

• The way to go about that is to right-click an empty place in the Content Browser, and find Physics/Physics Material.

• Clicking on this will create a new Physical Material.

• Double-clicking the newly-created Physical Material will open a window for us to edit its properties.

  • Inside here, what we really want to focus on is the Surface Type property, which will allow us to set our new Surface Type as the one this Physical Material should use.

• Now we need to assign this to whatever Material we want to have our new Surface Type. We can do this by finding the Material, and simply setting its Phys Material property to our new Physical Material.

• This will be all the setup we need to get the new Surface Type. However, if you play the game and try to shoot at an Actor that has that Material on one of its Static Meshes, you will notice that no effects are spawned.

  • This is because we have yet to define what happens when we fire at this new type of surface.

• We can define what happens when firing at this new Surface Type by going to Content/InfimaGames/LowPolyShooterPack/Data/DT_LPSP_Surfaces, and opening the Surfaces Data Table!

  • This Data Table contains all the information relating to what happens when you shoot, explode…etc different surfaces. Here, we can edit all of that.

• For this guide, the only thing we will edit is the Bullet-Impact row, which is what projectiles use when impacting surfaces.

• If you click on this row and expand the Details property, you will see quite a few data structures with a Surface Type as their key.

• This is where we will edit the specifics for what happens when firing at our new surface.

• Here, we can press the little plus icon to the right of the Details property to add a new Surface Type.

• Now we can proceed to change it from Default to whatever our new Surface Type is, and copy-paste one of the other entries into this one.

• The reason for copy-pasting is mostly to speed-up setup. You can always come back and change all decals/effects here later to make sure that your new surface looks awesome when shot at!

  • And that’s it! Enjoy!

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