Multiple material / Texture changes

Hi guys,

I’ve recently been experimenting with Unreal 4.15, and am running into some issues due to the large number of texture and material transitions I am attempting. Long story short I have tons of materials each with a different png texture attached to it. I want to be able to modify these textures all at once, tweaking various parameters. The matrix property editor no longer supports multiple materials, and I think I’m suppose to make one master material and then create material instances. What I really want is one material, but with many different possible textures assigned to it.

How do I effectively assign a selection of materials as material instances, or is there a simpler way to do this? I’m worried about the performance implications of using dynamic textures but maybe that makes sense in this instance. Modifying material parameters one by one would be a daunting prospect. Any and all suggestions are appreciated.

A material instance may be what you are looking for as you mentioned. Create your ‘first’ material that is the basis for all the others. Put all of your settings (lerps, masks, etc) in there. Then convert the main texture a Procedural, as well as any other items that you want to swap out in the other material instances. Once you are done, create a Material Instances from that parent one and change out the textures accordingly. If you added a mask that makes something darker or lighter within your parent, you can now control that in the parent and it will affect all other instances (making all your materials lighter or darker) because its the parent of them all. You can add ‘tints’ etc to the parent as well, and it will affect all the instances. Is this what you mean?

Thanks for the response. I went back and ended up using dynamic material instances, and setting the texture on the base material as a parameter that I can actively update. This worked reasonably well and gave me control over a large number of textures via blueprint. Thanks!