Swapping position of shader elements

Development Rendering
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1

I’m building a modular character that creates a dynamic material instance in the Construction Script, and applies it to all parts of clothing that has skin exposed, so that skin color can be changed during game play.

The problem is that some of my meshes with multiple shaders (for example a shoe mesh which contains a section of the ankle) have the skin shader at different positions (sometimes Element 0, sometimes Element 1) so then the skin shader gets applied on the actual shoe.

During export, I made sure to apply the same shader to the ‘skin’ part of the mesh hoping that UE4 would pick up that it should place the same shader at the same Element position, but it seems to be hit and miss.

Is there a way to swap this manually?

2

Simplest thing would be to add an int variable and set it for each character. Can be simple enough if you make each character a subclass of the one with the shader logic