I don’t see why not. It would for sure take some clever management on the dev’s end of the house but it seems the collection is best of both worlds w/regards to TexArrays + UDIM features, w/o the same limitations.
As described in the article, the only REAL thing you need to worry about is how to determine WHICH texture you want out of a (potentially) singular collection. That value can be in a BP, in custom-data, etc, etc; where is up to you.
But functionally, I don’t see why if your game is aligned properly you could have 1 or at least a minimum of shaders.
My use-case doesn’t work in 5.6, so i might not spend the effort to test until the next hotfix, but I what I CAN say is that I am using the UDIM address-space in the same way I could use the Collection. There would be one big-mega-sheet/texture where I had the textures for every landscape layer, rock/debris meshes, plant meshes, etc and they could all look ‘across’ the spectrum of what other things looked like, since they are in the same-space, so could do all sorts of nifty things given a rock ‘knows’ what a plant could look like. Instead of using Pixel Depth Offset, or some kind of dithering to blend 2 distinct meshes, I am using master-materials to make a very-few set of things that all point to the same UDIM space and each item sorts itself out.
A collection would be a virtual 1:1 swap for the UDIM’s I’m using know, otherwise, what that person is doing in their game, I am already doing in mine, w/carrying Custom Data on things to tell it which texture-set to pick out of the UDIM space.
So, ‘yes’. The REAL trick there is to be able to code a performant shader to do-it-all..
ref - some challenges around 1-shader/draw-call and UDIM limitatons:
