Intro to Materials: Material Instancing | 08 | v4.0 Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine 

Indeed, Zack is the best.

8...

Unnecessary Roughness

Hows your progress mate

While i'm sure you could if you really wanted to, with today's hardware it would be best to have parents for many different types, and then make instances for everything of those types. It will save you a lot of time in the long run making all the materials, and shouldn't make a noticeable performance hit. For example, you would want to have a parent for metals, grass, rocks, water, etc. And then every time you want a variation of them, make an instance and tweak it a bit. A lot faster than making everything a parameter and trying to remember or copy down almost all the parameters just to change one little thing.

lol XD

I know I was holding my breath, pls say it pls say it lol

that was the most important sentence of the video

I'm replying here because it's the exact question that sprung to my mind and I'd like to be notified if/when reply comes. Thanks!

He said the compiling was free. If you have to adjust your parent for any reason, the children are updated automatically. That is the advantage. Also notice how when editing the parent, any changes take 2 or 3 seconds to get the results. The instances get instant results. While I suspect that instances are cheaper than copying the same material over and over again, I also know that once you change the texture, that is still going to cost you in the memory department.

Instancing is free only in compile time. Because only the parent is compiled into HLSL shader code. Then according to the parameters in the Instance, there are different values passed to SetParamaters() call on the compiled shader, when rendering the object with the given material instance. So it's using the same code to render different instances, just the values in the SetParameters() call change between the objects.

+AntiD2 It is photoshop)

***** no problem :)

Its photoshop

+Benjiko99 I don't think there is any difference in performance from normal materials. it seems to me that reduce "compile time" that has nothing to do with run time. to be honest I don't even think that those are istance, he is just extending an object. but the istances should be the one that he placed on the static mesh itself.

There might be a very slight performance benefit, as I think UE4 renders objects that use the same shader together. All your instances use the same shader code, so the renderer doesn't have to switch shaders for those objects, it only has to call SetParameters() with new values between draw calls. I.E - 2 cubes with 2 materials 1) Get shader for cube 1 2) Set shader parameters for cube 1 3) Render cube 1 4) Get Shader for cube 2 5) Set shader parameters for cube 2 6) Render cube 2 2 cubes with instances 1) Get shader for cubes 2) Set shader parameters for cube 1 3) Render cube 1 4) Set shader parameters for cube 2 5) Render cube 2

Create a Append node combining two ScalarParameter(U and V). Connect the Append in UVs of the texture.

Yup you can.Create u and v scalar Parameter then append and multiply the result with texture coordinates .Plug the final result into your texture :)

Yes this is often the case!

They do.

The pipes can call all they like, resistance is futile. C++, Java, Python, PHP, Javascript all use "color". As a Brit I have thrown in the towel and just spell it as color now ;D

You can buy it already and get an early but unpolished copy for a subscription fee.

FoodOfTheGods Yes I got their email about it, It is great and I really hope development of UE4 go faster along with documentation and tutorials.

neo Not sure if you noticed, but it's available today!

That's exactly it, less data is better!! it normally doesn't make a big difference on a small scene but combine 10 small scenes into one level and then one level into a 25 level game and you have serious performance issues...

Jody Carlos Borrageiro Less data usage does not necessarily mean better performance. What I'd like to know is how much of a performance hit it would be if you instanced all of your materials from a single parent versus having separate materials for each. I do understand that having parent-child material relationships is a good way to organize materials that are only slightly different from each other, for example different color metals that are basically the same metal otherwise, but for materials as different as the two used in the video from a single parent, how is this better than having a separate brick and copper material? If neither of them are compiled, then I can only assume that they are generated off the parent during runtime. Isn't that a performance loss if you do that to all of your materials? Isn't it generally better to use more memory space and have faster performance versus using less memory space and taking a performance hit?