Installation

Material Smith is a C++ editor plugin for Unreal Engine 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8 (Win64, Mac and Linux editor).

Install from Fab

Install manually

Close the Unreal Editor.
Copy the TAMaterialSmith folder into your project’s Plugins folder. Create the Plugins folder next to your .uproject file if it doesn’t exist yet. The result should look like this:
```
MyGame/
  MyGame.uproject
  Plugins/
    TAMaterialSmith/
      TAMaterialSmith.uplugin
      Source/
      Resources/
```
Open the project. If the plugin hasn’t been compiled for your engine version yet, see Build from source below.
Open Edit > Plugins, search for Material Smith and make sure ta Material Smith is enabled. If you had to enable it, restart the editor when prompted.
Open Tools > ta Material Smith (in the tridiART section of the Tools menu).

Build from source

The plugin ships with its source code. If the copy you installed doesn’t contain compiled binaries for your engine version, the plugin has to be built:

C++ projects: build the project in your IDE (for example Visual Studio 2022 on Windows), or let the editor rebuild the missing modules when it asks on startup.
Blueprint-only projects: the editor can’t compile plugin code for you. Either add a C++ class to the project (which turns it into a C++ project) and build it, or build the plugin once with Unreal Automation Tool and copy the packaged result into your Plugins folder:
Terminal window
```
"C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.6\Engine\Build\BatchFiles\RunUAT.bat" BuildPlugin -Plugin="C:\Path\TAMaterialSmith\TAMaterialSmith.uplugin" -Package="C:\Build\TAMaterialSmith" -TargetPlatforms=Win64
```
Use the RunUAT script of the engine version you want to build for.

Your first material instances

Select a few textures of one material in the Content Browser, for example T_Rock_BaseColor, T_Rock_Normal and T_Rock_ORM, or select the folder that contains them.
In the Material Smith panel, click Use selection. The list shows one row per texture set, for example Rock with the target MI_Rock.
Select the row and read What will happen on the right. Before the first run it says that the master material M_Smith_Standard will be created in /Game/MaterialSmith.
Click Create 1 material instance.

On the first run Material Smith creates the master material M_Smith_Standard in /Game/MaterialSmith and the small default textures it needs in /Game/MaterialSmith/Textures. Both are saved right away. If every map of a set is a virtual texture, the variant M_Smith_Standard_VT is created instead. See Master material.

The new material instance goes into a Materials folder next to a Textures folder (Rock/Textures → Rock/Materials), otherwise into the folder of the textures. The new instances are selected in the Content Browser when the run finishes.

From here you can:

Read the Texture sets panel guide for search, filters, per-set details and options.
Check how names are detected in Texture set naming.
Change output folders, prefixes and defaults in Edit > Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith. See Settings.

Updating and removing

To update, close the editor and replace the TAMaterialSmith folder with the new version. Your settings live in the project’s Config/DefaultEditor.ini, not in the plugin folder, so they are kept.

To remove the plugin, disable it in Edit > Plugins or delete the TAMaterialSmith folder while the editor is closed. The master material, its default textures, your material instances and packed textures are regular assets of your project and keep working without the plugin. If you changed its settings, they stay in the [/Script/TAMaterialSmith.TAMaterialSmithSettings] section of Config/DefaultEditor.ini, which you can delete if you no longer need it.