How to set up physical materials for a large number of materials?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
,
1

Is there an efficient way to set different physical materials for a large number of materials?
It would be very tiring to set up hundreds of materials individually.
For example, select multiple materials and set them to the same physical material.

2

You can change mass parameters in almost everything. Just multi select assets, then right click and there it should be somewhere in popup menu.

If there are some rules (and really huge number of assets) you can make blueprintable editor tool, and create some code that changes (sets materials) depending on folder, name etc.

1 Like
3

Just multi select assets, then right click and there it should be somewhere in popup menu.

I’m guessing you’re talking about a property matrix.
But this doesn’t seem to work for materials…

4

Oh then only solution (that hopefully works) would be editor tool, You can make editor tool widget that assigns physical materials. However check if physical material can be modified from blueprints.

For eg, move (sort) materials into folders. Then assign physical materials based of folder they are in. Or add some keyword in material names, etc.

Then there is also python scripting for unreal. But i did not touch that yet as blueprintable editor tools are enough.

1 Like
5

It’s unfortunate that that’s the only solution.
Given the scale of my material instances, it seems like creating a tool, testing it, and running it would take just as long as doing it all by manually.

6

Creating UNREAL widget tool, is not that hard.

First find out how to manipulate physics material inside one you have.

Then watch tut about making tool (you can either make just blueprint event) or whole utility widget tool. It is not complicated (Almost same as making regular widgets).

7

The problem is, sorting the materials for use with the tools. I don’t create materials with automation in mind, so I have to sort everything manually.
I may need to create and move folders around and possibly rename materials to use in the tools.
Doing all this manually is not too different from manually assigning physical materials, in my opinion.
I think it’s effective to make it first. But it’s too late now…

8

Na not too bad. You sort it all like this:

  • make tool that displays information you need to decide category of material.
  • make UMG buttons that are connected to classes/types of material displayed
  • you press button, decide type of material, apply physical mat, rename it (move to new folder), and save. Even saving in folder for category, can let you apply material in second pass.
  • going trough 1000 mats this way should take 1-2 hours, and bonus is you have all nicely sorted.
9

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.