What is it?
MatBatchUEr is a plugin that automatically creates instanced materials for large numbers of textures, placing basecolor/normal/roughness/etc in the correct parameter slots regardless of the shape or complexity of your parent material, based on patterns you’ve selected. Tired of making instances for 500 textures? With a couple of clicks, this plugin will do all the heavy lifting for you, saving you time, energy and money.
MatBatchUEr examines the content browser directory (and subdirectories) of your choice for textures, testing to see if they match any of the patterns you’ve described and sorting them accordingly. Everything that doesn’t match a known pattern gets treated as belonging to the default parameter you’ve selected. It will then use a base material of your choice as a pattern to create material instances for every ‘group’ it finds, where you want them, keeping directory trees intact.
The plugin looks for texture parameters in the following chains:
Base Color
Specular
Metallic
Roughness
Emissive Color
Subsurface Color
Opacity
Opacity Mask
World Position Offset
World Displacement
Tessellation Multiplier
Ambient Occlusion
Refraction
Pixel Depth Offset
Confused? Maybe this little demonstration video will help.
Where do I buy it?
You can get the latest version on itch.io and gumroad
Unfortunately, I have no idea how the marketplace works at the moment and what my options would be (this would be my first plugin Epic actually accepts for the marketplace, if they do), but I’m going to go with “there’s probably no support for that”.
If you get the username & email adress people use on ue4 launcher, you can ask someone from the marketplace team to provide the package to the people who pre-purchased it.
Though, I think if its several dozens of people it might be too much work for em.
Edit:
Question: Can I also create generated instances from an instance instead of a material?
I tend to set up “Master instances” so that would be very valuable for me.
4.13 build up on the itch.io and gumroad marketplaces.
The Epic Marketplace version should also support 4.13 now, let me know if it doesn’t so I can poke Epic.is going to take some more time it seems. Stay tuned.