Hello,
I would like to know what the community thinks about an overhaul of Unreal’s Material Editor.
I believe that many people today coming from the VFX and animation industry use Unreal, and opinions can vary. Certainly, someone who has always been in the video game industry might say that it’s not necessary to change the Material Editor since they have always worked with it or something similar.
But for those coming from animation or VFX, they have points of comparison like Maya’s Hypershade, Katana, Clarisse, Houdini, or even Blender.
From a personal perspective, I find Unreal’s Material Editor not very convenient:
- UI > Navigation is not great, and the detection of links, inputs, outputs, etc., could be better. The UI is not great, but that’s not the biggest issue.
The real topic is the nodes and their functionality:
In my opinion, simple actions require far too many nodes, for example: the gradient/ramp.
The number of nodes needed to achieve such a simple effect is ridiculous.
Far too many so-called “simple” functions need to be done manually.
If we had just one “ramp” node and one “input” node that allowed us to choose how the ramp is applied, it would save an enormous amount of work time.
If we combine these kinds of issues with several simple actions, the work time would be drastically reduced.
In this case, I find that Blender’s Material Editor on the EEVEE rendering engine is much more artistic and useful (even though I don’t particularly like that software).
Additionally, I find that Unreal’s Material Editor emphasizes the technical side of shading too much, when it’s really an “artistic” task. I think renaming the nodes could make the workflow simpler and easier to understand.
To conclude: Improving the UI/UX of the Material Editor, adding/removing/modifying nodes and their functionalities, and changing the names of the nodes… Well, I’d say, overhauling the Material Editor seems like a good idea to me.
What do you think?