Using custom parent Materials
Last updated
Last updated
When generating a new material, Material Toolkit creates a Material Instance using a Parent Material and assigns the generated albedo, normal, and roughness textures as inputs.
Material instancing allows you to create a parent Material that serves as a base for creating a variety of different-looking material instances. To achieve this flexibility, Material instancing uses a concept called inheritance: the properties of the parent Material are passed to its children. Properties that are designated as parameters in the parent Material are exposed to artists in the Material Instance Editor. You can find out more about material instancing at Unreal Engine's official documentation:
By default, if no template material is selected in Material Toolkit settings, the plugin searches for Quixel Bridge plugin and attempts to assign M_MS_Default_Material as parent material. In case Bridge is not installed in Unreal Engine, the toolkit assigns a simple material, located in Material Toolkit Content folder .
You can find more information about Bridge plugin at Unreal Engine's official documentation:
You can create more complex materials and override the template material. Simply select your preferred material in the VPC Material Toolkit settings section and assign the albedo, normal and roughness parameter names
Design a new material, e.g., M_MyCustomMaterial.
Add three parameters of type TextureSampleParameter2D to handle albedo, normal, and roughness textures. These parameters are global parameters, so they are visible from the created Material Instance that will be created when importing a new result from VPC
You can name the parameters as you like (e.g., AlbedoTex, NormalTex, RoughnessTex).
Ensure you provide these names in Material Toolkit’s custom settings along with your custom material.
In case you deleted the results, sent a request and forgot to choose your custom material, or want to load a previous request result, don't worry! You can find all your previous results at {Project folder}/.vpc/ or download them again from VPC Dashboard! Then you can re-import the textures and apply them to the material of your choice.
