Necroing my own thread, because it was the first one popping up when I tried searching for it…
So, been working with our current master blend material for a while now and continuously improving and adding features and I´m now hoping there has been some progress on the initial issue (material parameters not being animateable in sequencer).
I HAVE actually gotten into blueprinting since, but its also not feasible for ALL our assets to live inside blueprints, just so the material parameters could be animated.
So, while our system overall works ok, there are a couple of issues with it:
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Reusability.
Basically: Each time we want to reuse a blend material, we CAN just make a duplicate of the instance and then change stuff in the instance duplicate. However, in some cases, especially with more basic materials (instead of asset specific materials), it would be nice to just pop a layer into a new material, without having to recreate it from scratch.
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Consistency.
Similar issue as in 1 is, that if we then recreate these materials from scratch or just change some parameters, we now need to keep track of these changes for these assets or other assets using a variation. If we would be able to simply rereference he origianal layer, it would be a lot easier to keep consistency across projects.
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Complexity.
As I´ve said: I´m still continuously adding new features or improving existing features.
This IS a VERY complete material, with 3 layers, normal AND triplanar mapping (that also works with skeletal meshes), about half a dozen different blend types for each layer, detail textures for everything, animatable textures and displacement and even switches for using SSS/subsurface or normal shading.
And then all of these available across all 3 material layers makes it quite cumbersome to work with.
I´ve made as much as I could into functions and there is probably even more room for improvement there, but still: Would be really cool if I could at least limit these updates to just ONE reusable material layer, instead of havingt to maintain layers A, B and C for every little change…
Also, at times, it might be nice to have simplified material layers, as long as I would also be able to combine them with their more complex counterparts.
All of these would massively profit from the material layer system and since I´ve already made every layer into functions, it wouldn´t even be so hard to rebuild for it.
But, once more, being able to animate every material parameter on a per instance basis would be a MUST for me to reconsider material layers.
So…
Any news on that?
Any cvar maybe thats hidden away to enable the ability to animate parameters?
Next time I have some space for RnD I´m gonna just check with the newest engine version, but would love some input.
Also…EVENTUALLY we also wanna switch to substrate, especially for being able to mix translucent materials with SSS (VERY important for medical animations, which is our bread and butter)…
SO…anybody know if THOSE are even compatible with material layers?