Material Editor 2.0

Sounds to me you describing something like substance painter :stuck_out_tongue:

“. . .and by its self is as about as useful as a car with out tires. Sure you could sit in the driveway going vroom vroom but you not going to get very far very fast”

+1 for funny, to-the-point, and good use of metaphor. :slight_smile:

Here is another feedback :slight_smile:

  • The TextureSampler node should have an option to make the white RGB pin to also carry the Alpha, basiclly outputting a Vector4. It would save me many “Append” nodes in cases where I use 4 channel texture masks for blending. (My functions use Vector4 inputs).

Yeah painter would be excellent “if” you could us it in app (inside of Ureal4) and composite in place a fit-to-finish asset.

An example of in app editing using 3ds Max’s Viewport Canvas feature.

I think this could be cool but should not be part of the Material Editor. This could be done as an in World Mega Texturing feature, like how they did it in Rage. But it probably fits better in a separate thread.

I am certainly hoping that we will be able to use Curves, Arrays, For loops, etc. These are the main limitations I have found with the material editor so far.

It looks not as easy to use for ones who don’t know shading language. But with an additional entirely shader programming support feature as an alternative will be great.

At the moment, the only access to the geometry shader is World Position Offset (and World Displacement, if you turn on Tessellation). But if you want to make stuff like fur shading, which duplicates the model and offsets a translucent texture, there’s no way to do this in the shader. Also, loops would be very helpful so people making parallax occlusion and iterative shaders don’t need to literally build out 25 iterations.

Just to correct you here, World Position Offset and World Displacement don’t use the Geometry shader, the first is vertex shader and the second one is Domain/Hull Shader. There currently is no access to the Geometry Shader from Materials. I attempted at one point to tried to add geometry shader support to the material editor and got stuck when trying to define a generic entry point.

Oh, sorry, crossed terminology! I don’t know enough about programming shaders to figure this stuff out. Actually, I don’t know anything at all.

The colours certainly make sense, though I don’t think having the numbers does (since, how do you figure out which pixel you print the numbers for?)

I really love the clean look of the Material Editor, Perhaps just a nice clean identifier as to which type of data is which would be enough in that regard. Re-route nodes are a definite want for me.

For the old fur shading you are talking about you just need multiple passes. Every pass expanding the model a bit. Don’t need DX11 features for it.

I made it using the default blueprint visualization. The numbers are just there to show the defaults. I don’t know what you mean with “how do you figure out which pixel you print the numbers for”. All those numbers are still there right now. In some cases they might be useless, like for example the normal so that could be hidden.

Personally I wouldn’t want to see TOO many changes to the editor, it is frankly the best Shader Editing tool on the market today in my opinion. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it and all that.

A part of me wants to agree with that but then again there cannot be progress if we think like that, I think there is always room to evolve and improve in some areas.
The key would be to improve/enhance the editor while not breaking existing materials and workflows.

Besides I wouldn’t necessarily say that the material editor “ain’t broke” :p… loops, arrays and things like that are very basic features (IMO at least) which are missing.

I’m not sure if that is the correct thread to ask, but is there a plan to implement Texture Arrays in the engine/material editor?

If Epic really is revamping the material editor, the feature I would perhaps like the most is the ability to add unreal shader files to the engine in a way that would automatically create new material shading models that we could write ourselves (and they would appear as new choices in the material editor, alongside Unlit, DefaultLit, Subsurface, etc…)

How possible would that be?

interesting, do you have something specific in mind that is not already there?

I’ll stick with substance painter any day of the week.

Stylized shading models, for example

Currently, it’s impossible to make any sort of custom lighting models with the material editor. Our only options are UE4’s physically-based shaders. Any custom material shading that uses lighting information must be implemented manually. For example, this is a cel-shaded lighting model I just implemented in my own branch of UE4 by modifying the engine sources ( all the credit goes to this very helpful integration, which helped me figure out how everything worked )


There are an infinite amount of possible stylized shading models, but I’ll admit that I’d be pretty happy if Epic simply added a default Toon shader (with outline width and shadow smoothing as options) to the engine. I really don’t think it would require a whole lot of work for Epic devs, and it would make lots of people happy

And then this feature get removed without any explanation.