How to copy Material Parameters per hand

Hey There,

is there an easy way to copy material parameters from one material instance to other material instances with the same parent material?

I often use one Uber Material on many different objects. Sometimes I have 20 Concrete Materials, but I only want to change them slightly, without changing every parameters all over again.

I could just duplicate the materials, but I already import my objects with Material instances on them, so I just change the Parent Material and not the instance it self.

Cheers Daniel

Just copy the material instance in the content browser, and make the final tweaks.

Yeah, as I mentioned, this I could do, but I already have all the material instances on my objects and named. If I reload my assets via datasmith, the names should be the same, so I can reapply them easily.

For example. I have 20 Treeshaders, and I finetune one of them. Now I have to delete, duplicate and reapply every shader, every time I change something. There hast to be an easier way I hope.

Especially in interior design, you have this situation multiple times a day. A copy paste would be a big time saver here.

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I think you could use an editor utility, but I know very little writing those.

Possibly blueprint, but more likely, Python.

Thank’s, that is what I was thinking, I think it’s time to go into scripting.
Cheers

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You can make one material instance the parent of another. EG: Material → instance1 → instance2. If you can build a chain of dependencies, changes at the root will automagically filter/propagate to it’s children. Example: you have your base tree material, bark and all that. Make an instance and tweak it as you like for your basic, generic tree. Then make a child instance off of that for specific-settings to make an Oak. A different child for Spruce, etc…

Unsure of your exact setup but if you can do this, it could be a timesaver.

Otherwise, you can use a material parameter collection to store settings in a common-container? EG: I have a master value I use to set my texture-scaling against for everything in my game, it’s effectively my texel-size-control. Since every material I make uses that value, I can change the look of my game in one go.

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Thank you, some parameters are already driven by PM.
I will give the grandchildren’s thing a try.

Cheers.

Great tip, thanks so much!