I’d like to know… what are the possibilities that the ability to create new material shaders, global shaders and compute shaders through the plugin creation wizard could be added in the future? If plugins aren’t a good approach for this, can you think of any user-friendly, in-editor way of doing this?
Arnage’s Toon Shader ( Toon shading model - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums ) has recently been featured in one of Epic’s twitch streams and it has gathered a lot of attention since then. The problem is that we have to download a branch of the engine to use it and this is incredibly inconvenient. Even having this toon shader officially integrated into the engine wouldn’t solve the problem because what we really need is the freedom to create any shader for any situation that we could encounter.
While I’d cut off a toe to get compute shaders in UE4, you can do a lot with the custom nodes in the material editor. In this post I give an example of a raymarcher with volumetric lighting. You can communicate between custom nodes, and almost get the full power of functions, by calling their compiled names like: CustomExpression0(Parameters,x,y,z). The trick is keeping those names consistent. If you feed additional custom nodes as dummy inputs into a final custom node(c0,c1,c2 in my example), they’ll always be given the same name, so you can call them reliably.
You already can create compute shaders in a plugin, and im pretty sure you can also create material/global shaders as well. Check out the FluidSurfacePlugin by Ehamloptiran or VaOcean by Ufna, both are plugins and both contain compute shaders, and the FluidSurfacePlugin contains shaders for rendering the fluid surface.