Currently materials are limited to using 2 Material Parameter Collections. This is a problem if you are using multiple products to change your material.
Example:
For Megascan Foliage I am adding two additional products to get the foliage to look and feel the way I want
Products added:
Ultra Dynamic Weather to get wet weather effects on my foliage
Foliage Interaction to get trample and wiggle effects on foliage
Combined with:
Megascan wind and health system using GlobalFoliageActor
The products are from the marketplace designed to work on foliage and not something that I wrote.
Each of these systems comes with their own Material Parameter Collection. Becuase of the 2 MPC limitation I cannot use all 3 together in one material. It is not practical to try and move all parameters to a new collection as they are 3 different systems designed to integrate into the material.
The problems is that the parameters are from 3 different products. If I move them then I have to modify all the different materials in each product. That is a ton of work. Plus if you update the product then you have to re-modify.
This really should not be a limitation. I am not an expert in c++ or UE so I don’t know how you are loading the parameter collections. But if reading and writing to more than 2 parameter collections is a performance problem then we should be able to just make a virtual parameter collection behind the scenes of all the file parameter collections. As long as the total parameters of all the files loaded doesn’t exceed the 2048 parameter limit we should be fine. This is really starting to be a big problem for me and from what I can tell an unnecessary one.