Okay! Now that we know what we’re up against, let’s have a look at ways to reduce how much time the engine will need to spend in shader compilation. For large worlds this alone can easily make the amount of shaders climb into the tens of thousands. Landscapes can be especially cumbersome, as each component (a square section on the grid) will generate unique permutations as well. You can find some of the common ones in the ‘Usage’ section of your settings panel within the Material Editor. This is because for each material, Unreal will compile a shader for each potential usage case – and there can be a lot of those. It won’t have escaped your notice, however, that Unreal compiles far more shaders than there exists materials in your project. ![]() It’s not as simple as that of course, but that’s the general idea. When Unreal compiles a shader, it takes the combined set of modular instructions you have set up in the Material Editor and generates an HLSL shader that the engine can use to render your frame. Compiling shaders – Why are there so many? These are called ‘permutations’, and we’ll go into them in more detail in the next section. The most important thing to remember for our purposes is that one material will generate multiple shaders. This is why you’ll see developers using terms like ‘material’ and ‘shader’ to mean the same thing. It both defines the shader instructions, and sets the parameters it will use. In the editor, each node represents a module of HLSL shader code that can be linked together to create a custom material/shader combination. In Unreal it gets a little muddy, because when you’re using its node-based Material Editor you’re making both at once. Assigning a texture, setting a color value – defining the parameters that the shader then uses to generate the output. You can think of a material as the input a developer feeds into a shader to get their desired result. This can sometimes be a cause for confusion as although they are definitely not the same thing, in Unreal the line is somewhat blurred. This is especially prevalent in Unreal-engine centered forums and message boards. ![]() In your adventures online you may come across the term ‘shader’ being used interchangeably with the term ‘material’. Side note: Shaders are (technically) not materials
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