Quality switch node has incorrect output for medium and high quality AND doesn't work in game

Summary

The quality switch material node has an incorrect output for the medium and high quality. Having viewport scalability set to medium and high, will output the epic input node.

Please select what you are reporting on:

Unreal Editor for Fortnite

What Type of Bug are you experiencing?

World Building

Steps to Reproduce

Create a material.
Set the material domain to post process (just to replicate 1:1 my case, but the issue happens with every material domain, it’s within the node)
Place the quality switch node and link a different color for every input.
Link the quality switch to the Emissive Color input of the material.
Add the material to a post process volume and make sure you are affected by it (I have infinite extend)

Expected Result

The graphics/scalability settings are reflected by the quality switch output.

Observed Result

The quality switch outputs medium/high scalability settings as epic settings in the editor.
The quality switch ALWAYS outputs scalability settings as epic.

Platform(s)

windows, dx12, nanite enabled

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Additional Notes

Check the video I will attach in the replies to see in game.

In-game look at the bug

Hey @giovafncreative , please trust me when I say this is a CONSTANT point of confusion for many of us. Let me try to break down what’s going on, and I promise to conclude on something that may help your cause in the future…

A lot of these settings end up mapping to variables that get processed by Unreal Engine behind the scenes, in the case of “material quality” that maps to a variable that behaves independently from “scalability levels”. This is why changing scalability levels in the editor doesn’t produce the changes you expect in the material. You could however change “material quality” levels and that will directly control how this node behaves in your materials. But ultimately I think you want to use a different node for what you’re after…

The following nodes are wrappers that will behave more consistently, and you can find them in UEFN in the content browser:

/Fortnite/Materials/Functions
MF_QualitySwitch_MaterialAttributes
MF_QualitySwitch_Scalar
MF_QualitySwitch_Vector

Drag and drop one of these into your material and, there are tooltips that help explain which inputs apply to which platforms:

Once you have your material configured how you’d expect, in the viewport you can select your platform of choice, and you should see the materials change as you’d expect:

Please give the above functions a try, and use your preview platform to help judge the results… And please let us know how it goes!

PS In case you’re wondering, the QualitySwitch node is actually being used by these wrappers above, along with the Shading Path Switch. Here’s what that looks like:

For future reference, we briefly touched upon these functions in this doc, but I think we’re overdue for better examples and more detailed docs:

I appreciate the long and detailed reply. Thank you so much. Will take a look at this in the next days. That you again :slight_smile:

1 Like

FORT-938770 has been ‘Closed’ as a duplicate of an existing known issue.