Are nodes vanishing inside Material Functions for anybody else?

Hey yall. I thought I should pose this question here because I can’t gather enough information to replicate what looks like an engine bug. I made a Material Function to significantly shrink down the amount of nodes I need in my landscape material. It handles randomizing texture inputs so the landscape won’t have such obvious repeating materials, and thanks to it I got my landscape in a state I’m really happy with.

Material Function Inside my Landscape Material

This is when the “bug” steps in.

Material Function Missing Nodes

I’ve noticed twice now that a bunch of nodes inside the Material Function disappear all on their own. All I had to do was close the window, and later when I opened the function up again, nodes were gone. The first time, I just stitched back the bit of work I lost. The second time, way more nodes went missing. There’s absolutely nothing in their place to click on. When I click the Stats page, there’s a bunch of errors because of course a bunch of connections are lost. I really don’t want to keep redoing this work.

Material Function Errors

I don’t see any consistency in the nodes that are vanishing either. I have Named Reroute Declaration nodes vanish, math nodes like Multiply vanish, Texture Sample nodes vanish, and Landscape Layer Blend nodes vanish. Just to check, I reloaded the project, and all the nodes are still missing. I’m working in UE 5.5.2.

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Totally happened to me in since I was able to test in 5.5.2.

I thought I was literally going crazy, I mean it. I tried 3x and kept having the function revert back to the wiring it was before i edited it. Yet some named-references would still be in the graph.

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I think it is an engine bug. I use UE 5.5.3
When i try to create water shader follow this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBwJJqZ0nLI

Then these problem happen:

  1. Wave material functions (26:23) nodes disapear after close and reopend engine
  2. when i drag Wave material functions into BlendOffset MF (54:16), the input and outputnode not shown.

Can anybody else confirm that and report it

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I wanna ask if we were attempting to use named-reroute nodes in a child function? Can we repro this?

Hello, Has anyone made any progress on this? I seem to be getting the same issue as others have mentioned. Currently before I close any material I save it in a text file to have a backup and close/open the file to verify the info. I have been trying to reproduce this issue but have not found anything consistent. I am on version 5.5.4.

Happening to me too. It definitely has to do with Named Reroute nodes, as those are the connections that keep disappearing. It wasn’t happening for a little while in the material function I experienced it in, but suddenly became unusable. So it’s possible there’s a bug that only occurs once you’ve declared x number of Named Reroutes. My function has (had, I deleted them all and reverted to spaghetti because at least it’s reliable) around a dozen Named Reroutes.

My issue is occurring in a UMaterialFunction. I haven’t noticed it in a UMaterial yet, but I haven’t built one with as many named reroutes as my function yet.

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That’s actually a pretty smart workaround. I am however making a code plugin which will eventually be on the marketplace, so I basically have to force myself to not use any Named Reroutes now, as I can’t afford to risk the plugin’s materials breaking for people who paid money for the plugin.

I’m actually pretty frustrated about this, because I thought Named Reroutes were production-ready. They were introduced for the material editor back in the UE 4.27-5.0 days, so what gives?

Same, I was in a material function inside my main material, IIRC and then the child stopped working when I saved and closed out the project. When I drilled down the child was corrupt per the above, but I’ve not tried to test this, just what I recal..

I’ve had this bug for a bit. I’m on 5.2 still. I’ll have a material that is totally fine for a bit. Then I’ll go into the graph and change a parameter and save again, and suddenly there will be a compile error because something isn’t hooked up and there’s a random Lerp missing or something.

I keep running into this any time I copy and paste a node into a material function (especially if the nodes are from a different material). It pastes fine, I wire it up fine, and then when I save and re-open the node, the pasted nodes are missing. I am not using any named reroutes.

I tried to replicate this error just now. It happened one time, removing 3 out of 9 named reroutes.
I’m running 5.5.4

  • Didn’t break afterwards no matter what I did.
  • Didn’t happen again when creating more material functions (made 5 more, all worked).
  • None of material functions broke when re-opened the engine.
  • None of material functions broke when re-booted my machine.
  • Tried other engine versions, worked every time.
  • Tried several other projects (in different engine versions, all worked).

Anyone has a reliable way of re-producing this each time?

You’re not alone — disappearing or vanishing nodes inside Material Functions in Unreal Engine (UE) is something that’s occasionally reported, and it can stem from a few different causes.

Hi, I’m having the same issue and it does seem related to Named Reroutes indeed.
The disappearance of nodes seems to be random (sometimes a few named reroute nodes disappear, sometimes also the nodes connected to them). It also seems to happen on Engine Restart, whether it’s due to a crash or from going back to the project on the next day.

Version is 5.5.4

This is happening to me right now with Easy Snow and Mesh Blend. Really damaging to our workflow. 5.6.