Material Param Animation?

Ok, so i found an add-on in the Market Place called Character Appearance and Dissolve, and i can set the scale of the parameter like the pictures below. But i wanna know if i can animate the Material Param like this video: Please Help!

Yes. In blueprint you can declare a variable of type material instance dynamic and assign the asset material to that. Then you can animate it using a timeline ( and no doubt ‘set scalar’ to control the parameter ).

Could you give more detail?

Hello LightWeightUE4,

I guess you’re working in blueprint? If so ClockworkOcean made a good suggestion, depending on what you actually need, if you just want to animate a specific material on a specific static mesh, that’s a good way to go. If you need to do this in bulk I’d recommend looking into material parameter collections: ://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ParameterCollections/index.html .

I assumed you’re targeting only a specific mesh:

To explain what actually happens: At the beginning I’m creating a dynamic material instance, because I only wanted to target this specific material, from the source material. Don’t forget to select the correct material if you’re using more than one.
I then kickstart the animation with the ‘F’ key, although you can choose whatever you like, and used a timeline component to animate the scalar parameter ‘Temperature’ on my material, in your case that’d be ‘Appearance’ I guess.
Inside the timeline component (double clicking it) you have to create at least one track to make it work. Here’s a UE4 documentation link for them: ://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Blueprints/UserGuide/Timelines/index.html .

An important thing to note is, that the material that’s actually changed here is on a static mesh component inside the actor blueprint. If you want to change them for another mesh you’d have to reference it.

That said you can also change the parameters via a sequence if you want to, and you don’t need a timeline either but it gives a good control over the actual animation itself.

Hope that helps. If things are still unclear, don’t hesitate to ask.

Regards,

Vecherka.