Megan Fox
patreon
Did you know you can copy Unreal Graph, edit it, then paste it?
🕑 Added 2024-10-20 19:08:00 +0000 UTCRight, so you probably know you can copy-paste Unreal graph stuff - Blueprints, Materials, ControlRig, etc - but have you ever tried pasting it somewhere that wasn't Unreal?
Go on! Try it! Looks a bit like this. Pages and pages of this:
Which, you know, isn't immediately useful. Unless we get crafty. Say you've got a node group like this in your Landscape Material:
You'll have a LOT of these. One for grassy field, one for dirt, one for pebbles, etc, and hand wiring them each up suuuucks. So what if you just, didn't. Instead, observe how I've got this set up over in the Material Instance:
See how everything has a pretty specific layer name (GrassyField) in it? See that oddly distinct number? Well, what if we copy-paste that into a text editor and search for GrassyField:
Bingo! In fact, you'll find a clean textual entry for every one of those lines in the Instance. Now what if we just, I don't know, did a find-and-replace on "GrassyField" for "Dirt"? And then did another to replace "4001" with "4002". Then we copied our modified text, and pasted it into the material. It couldn't be that easy, could it?
Except it is! Also, if you're wondering why I prepend all of the groups with the number, that's because of, well check the instance:
Now every time we add a layer, we increment the number and change the name, and everything stays nice and sorted. It's just strings, so if you like "4.0.0.1" or whatever else, go for it. Just remember that if you add periods, you probably want "4.0.0.01" so that when you hit "4.0.0.10" everything still sorts like you probably want.
You can do this on pretty much anything, it's just that Landscape Materials (and maybe ControlRig) are the place where it's most handy. Any time you basically need a copy a whack of inputs or references tied into a logic bundle, and paste it pointing at some other equivalent set of data? This is your tool. Will save literal days of your life by the end of a project.
