I am not seeing any input in the Material Layer Instance where I can plug in the Material Layer into. Similar to how any material instance would have a parent material input. I cannot see anything like that for Material Layer Instance or even Material Blend Instance. Any idea why this might be happening?
I think this is a bug. As of today, UE 5.5 still has this problem.
- When you rename or move a Material Layer or Material Layer Blend (at this moment, the Input Parent is correct),
- and then reboot the engine
- the Instance sometimes will lose the input Parent! (at this moment, the Input Parent disappears)
But it doesn’t happen 100% of the time. (I tried to rename about 10 Layer Blends, but sometimes only one of them has the bug, sometimes all of them do.)
It’s a dangerous and annoying bug. It will break the instance and the user can’t fix it since the Input Parent disappears. One day, you may find some instances lost their parents. You can’t rebuild the same material layer instance since you may forget the parameters of the instance.
Hopes Epic will fix this bug in the future.
Was working on automating some Materials → Material Layers workflow and found this. I’ll update if I get to spinning up a workaround.