High-level concept explanations, detailed tutorials, performance considerations, shortcuts and other useful content that aims to improve your Unreal Engine 4 development journey.
A summarised guide on parent (master) materials and their children, creating and using material instances and overriding parent material functionality.
This relationship mimics that of a parent (master) material and a child (instance) of that material.
The child can inherit any of the properties of the parent, but not combine them (i.e parent with red and blue produces child with red or blue).
There are two methods of creating a material instance within unreal.
The first involves right clicking on the target master material and select Create Material Instance within the Content browser pane.
The second involves right clicking within the Content browser pane and selecting Material Instance from the Materials & Textures group. Thereafter, open the material instance and select the parent material from the Parent parameter under the General section of the Details pane.
The material instances do not make use of any inherited parameters by default.
These can be enabled and configured within the Parameter Groups section of the Details pane within the material viewer.
Certain functionalities of the parent material can be overridden by the material instance.
The overridable parameters can be found in the Material Property Overrides group under the General section of the Details pane.
These are use-case specific, where the Two Sided property, for example, is helpful in ensuring that the material is always rendered even when facing away.