If you talking about cartoon texture faces like Megamand Legends, they have all facial expression textures combined in one image. Less texture samples for materials, less heavy shader. Unless I was confused on your explanation. Also thankyou for another video! The material world of unreal gets demystified when you talk abotu it!
Yeah some projects use texture atlases/flip books, but it means your overall texture size can get really big (8k+) depending on the resolution of the faces. It was a bit of a bad example but I think it explains the function well enough haha
To be honest in the beggining I just had no clue how to follow your tutorials.. but now I no my way around Unreal your videos are great... Its strange using Unreal is like learning to read..
I wonder how conceivable it is to make a tool with the Geometry Scripting, etc in Unreal, that will take a selected mesh or some list of meshes, and create a second UVmap and place the UVs of the mesh into it. Since a lot of projects deal with many meshes coming in from the marketplace, this sort of tool could come in real handy. Maybe I'll look into it. I never quite understood how the second UVs relate to the first UVs (I don't mean lightmap). EDIT: I guess the tricky part is the selection of an element by material ID, and then assigning that to a particular square, none overlapping.
There are definitely tools in the engine that can remap UVs and stuff, and you could use the Material Slot (if using multiple mat slots) for the index etc
Is there a way to build a material in which you can switch texture sets in the parameters?) But for one switch to replace the entire set of textures, for example from 1k to 4k textures.
Textures with different resolutions don't need to be resized in materials - the UVs just go from 0-1 based on the texture. For an entire set of textures in one container, you could look in to Material Arrays
I can’t figure out if it’s possible to recreate the master material using switch nodes. I don't understand how I can add a normal map to a color. It turns out that the node switch merges the “channels” of colors together and there is no way to add normal maps for each color. or am I missing something?
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks!! it looks like it worked, however I don't understand. Using texture coordinates 1 for normal maps, it should use small (changed) UV maps, but it looks as if it is using full scan for normals. I'm confused, but it seems to work
How many texture samples I can use in switch node ? Cuz I think its limited to 5 texture samples. When I go above that number the engine shows me an err message.. something like sm5 c:\engine\private...
If you're using lots of textures in 1 material, you'll need to set the Sampler type to "Shared: Wrap". It's best to use this setting anyway, as there is no downside. I think it's not the default purely for older rendering tech backwards compatibility
One of the limitations I found with the Switch Node is you can't use it with something really advanced like a Make Material Node to use with Material Attributes unfortunately. That's something I would really like to create some really advanced setups. And maybe Unreal will one day get an enum parameter in the material section.
I once built something that did effectively this for 8 "shades" of 32 "colors", 256 colors total. I thought then that nope, here's where I hit the limit and just use a texture sample instead, as it was some 800 instructions for the whole thing. I am very excited to rebuild that with a few of these bad boys and see what the cost diff is. Thanks for the video!
For some reason your hair plus slightly longer beard makes me think "viking vampire..." Great video, I've accidently grabbed this node a few times when trying to get the static switch, never bothered to find out what it does.
Just adding to what you said. Static switch parameter can actually be used dynamically in UE5. There is an option on the node that is called dynamic branching that allows it to be branched in realtime. I'm using it to change from different material outlines on the character (When they are friendly, aggressive, neutral etc.). Don't know that much about performance information since I didn't see anyone talking about this (not even in the documentation, tbh).
One would assume its like branches in Unity Shader Graph, it will compute both sides of the branch/static switch and then read the boolean value and apply the true or false branch.
@@Chris-jo1zrNo, I think this is a real [branch] if. There have been conversations about this since at least 2015, and it appeared in 5.2. I haven't tested performance yet. So I can't say for sure. For [flatten] if, we already have the If node
Sounds really intriguing! I’ll have to have a doodle with it in my next session. I’d assume that it compiles both versions of the shader and switches between them, or it’s computing both sides and showing the selected one. I’ll do a few tests and report back with my findings!
Oh, this shaders' complexity debugging looks like great topic for a video. At least, I definitely find it useful, if I'll need to check what logic in my materials performs better
Haha I don't like to rely on Instruction count alone (which is what the Shader Complexity viewmode uses) so I decided to do some brute-force testing instead!
What if we connected multiple textures to the switch then used a scalar and custom primitive data the set the value so it changes dynamically? Or used custom data values as an input for the number ?
Thank you for this video. Can you please do a tutorial on optimizing materials eg draw calls and instructions and how best to optimize materials in situations we run into day to day. I really appreciate any help you can provide.
Thanks for the tip, really useful, as usual! I'm a bit sad that if we put a value like 1.5, it doesn't lerp the value of 1 and 2 to create an interpolated result. But hey, it's better than nothing
If you're ok with using 2 switches, you could do: - make a "A" switch, say with your options 1 to 10, with a default for looping over ("0" or "11" value) - copy it as the "B" switch - make a scalar to go 1 through 10 - take Frac out of it, use as the Lerp node alpha - connect the switches to Lerp - from your scalar, make it +1 and attach to the "B" switch input I haven't tested, maybe it works?
Finally, materials in UE5 have something like enumerators. Can't wait for them to add enheretance, incapsulation and polymorphism and cycles and variables to make this finally usable.
We already have inheritance, sort of. You can make children of material instances which inherit the default params from the parent instance. You can use material functions for greater modularity as well
![The Switch Node | 5-Minute Materials [UE5]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
