[UE] Material Instance Hierarchy

Today’s post will be very short. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with certain artists competing for the ‘better’ master material. Mainly competing over the better instruction to feature ratio. In production this has been painful as they want to try out differing master materials between builds but have been pasting node networks into the master material graph and then saving and using perforce to revert if needed.

This has led to me adopting ‘master instances’ as a standard practice. Material instances can be instances of another instance instead of the source material. This is super useful if you create a master instance which all other instances are derived. And depending on how extensive your master material is, you can begin to make ‘master group’ instances.

For example, you could have a master material which is the parent of a master instance. And from there you could have a master subsurface instance and a master hard surface instance which have differing preset values.

Additionally, we now retain the ability to swap the source material of the master instance itself if we want to try something radically different. To keep the same values in our instances, however, we need to retain the same variable names. Unreal saves these in the instance uassets as a map of string names to values.

Interestingly, it keeps these values if you swap to a material that doesn’t share the previous one’s values and then swap back.

Here is the basic instance hierarchy I’ve settled on at work.