Currently if you’ve a parameter in a material function and use that material function twice (or multiple times) inside your Material all of the functions will use the same parameter.
It would be nice to add a “ParameterSuffix” to the MaterialFunction Node inside the MaterialWindow so each Parameter inside that node could become a special parameter for the full material.
Example:
MF_Color being a MaterialFunction that just returns a Color, the color being a Parameter with name MyColorParameter
M_ColorMixer being a Material that has two MaterialFunctionNodes into a lerp.
Both Material Functions would receive a different suffix lik “_1” and “_2”, and the Material has it’s own parameter to control the lerp.
MI_Orange being a MaterialInstance of M_ColorMixer, it would have 3 parameters now:
MyColorParameter_1, MyColorParameter_2 and MyLerpValue.
and it would set them to red, yellow and 0.5f
obviously this is a trivial example. A more fitting example would be a Landscape Material where each layer has a lot of the same parameters (base texture, normal map, …) that get mixed.
currently you’d need to define all the different parameters in the material, pipe them INTO the MF and get the result out.
With Suffixes, you’d skip like half of the hassle.