Hi,
So I have been doing some shader programming with glsl, and recently moved to Unreal. I’m missing some core features that I have at multiple occasions found extremely helpful.
This is my suggestion for what could be added to material graphs:
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material functions that compile to a boolean.
I understand this is a tricky topic because of runtime restrictions. But if the boolean is only used as a static switch, that should mean that we can compile a shader with no branch, right? Or in the worst case, during development, have a uniform-branch (not optimal but not terrible). -
boolean operators, such as AND, OR, NOT
I actually needed to negate a boolean (should be really easy!), and had to create a material function to make my graph look cleaner - why is boolean negate not built-in? But Unreal crashed because material functions cannot output a boolean…
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This is a slightly different topic, but I overall find the “Sort Priority” of material inputs difficult to work with. I think it would make more sense to have a GUI panel with inputs and outputs, where we have a visual representation of the sorting order with possibilies to move up and down. Besides, working with integer numbers can become difficult as inputs are added because the numbers sometimes need to be adjusted.
Just a quality-of-life improvement.
Perhaps under the Details panel, we could have a category called “Sorting Order”. ?
That’s is. I hope what I’m writing makes sense. And have a nice day!