Several fundamental Epic material functions that are frequently used when creating materials are no longer exposed in the Material Editor function library.
Although these functions still exist in the Epic content folder and are fully functional, they must now be manually searched and dragged into the graph. This represents a workflow regression compared to earlier versions, where these functions were directly accessible from the node library and searchable like other standard material nodes.
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Assets
Steps to Reproduce
-Open UEFN and create or open any project.
-Create or edit a material to open the Material Editor.
-Right-click in the graph to search for material functions such as MakeFloat (2,3,4) or Break Float (2,3,4).
Expected Result
Common Epic material functions like Make Float2, Make Float3, Make Float4, Break Float2, Break Float3, and Break Float4 should appear directly in the Material Editor function library and search results.
Observed Result
These functions do not appear in the library or search results and must be manually located and dragged from the Epic content folder each time they are needed.
Platform(s)
windows
Island Code
N/A
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Additional Notes
A simple solution would be to enable âExpose to Libraryâ on these Epic material functions so they are automatically referenced in the Material Editor function library.
This would restore the previous workflow and significantly improve material authoring efficiency.
This is a problem caused with the communication between UE and UEFN teamsâŚ
In v38.00, the UEFN was updated to UE5.7, and on that version, these material functions and break/make/append nodes were deprecated.
On that same version, they added a new âConvertâ node that replaced all these old nodes with more flexible functionality (and unexposed the old deprecated ones in favor of the new ones).
The old ones still exist unexposed due to backwards compatibility reasons, but their usages were replaced by that new Convert node after UE5.7
What looks like happened is the UE team forgetting to mention that to the UEFN team, and since UEFN uses a explicit whitelist for which features and nodes we can use, that whitelist forgot to be updated with this change due to that lack of communication between the teamsâŚ
I reported these issues as soon as the v38.0 update came out, and epic already knows about it. Sadly we did not received the fix yetâŚ
Similar things happens to some other tools and functionality, such as the new color ramp nodes and so on. For now we must wait them to expose the new versions of itâŚ
The old deprecated versions can still be found manually if wearched through the material function asset selector library for us to use while the new replacement nodes for them are not exposed.
Hi Flak! Sadly I did not posted anything on the forums at that time since I already sent the feedback somewhere else so I did not ended up with duplicated requestsâŚ
I sent about it on your Discord DMs, but if you want me to create a new post here with extra details about just tell me!
Here is some examples of the new node that is replacing these old ones, added with UE5.7:
