Understanding Material Instances

In this section we will learn what a Material Instance is and why it is so important to use a material creation workflow based on them.

Material instancing is a method to create a material that you can use as a base to generate infinite variations of it. This process creates a parent material (Master Material) and allows you to create infinitely different looking children (Material Instances) for use in your project.

To do that, the proprieties (parameters) of the Master Material are passed to all the Material Instances generated from it. This concept process is called inheritance. The parameters that are created as a node in the Master Material are exposed as values inside the Material Instance Editor (as we will see shortly).

To create a Material Instance, click the right-mouse button on the material you want to use as a parent and select Create Material Instance.

Figure 5.29 – The Create Material Instance...