Texture sets panel

The Material Smith panel finds texture sets in the textures you give it, shows what it will do with each one and creates or updates the material instances. Its Texture sets page is described here; the Channel packer page has its own guide, Channel packer.

Open the panel

There are several ways to open the panel:

Tools menu: Tools > ta Material Smith (in the tridiART section). Then select textures or folders in the Content Browser and click Use selection.
Textures in the Content Browser: right-click one or more textures and choose Create Material Instances. Other selected assets are ignored.
Folders in the Content Browser: right-click one or more folders and choose Create Material Instances. The folders and their subfolders are searched.
After an import: when you import textures that form a texture set, a notification says ta Material Smith found a texture set in the imported textures. Click Create material instances to open the panel with those sets, or Dismiss. See Import suggestion.
Python: open_panel_with_folders and open_panel_with_assets. See Python.

The header shows the title, the subtitle Texture sets to material instances, in one click and three buttons:

Button	What it does
Use selection	Finds texture sets in the Content Browser selection. If assets are selected, only those are used (non-texture assets are ignored). If no assets but folders are selected, the folders and their subfolders are searched. With nothing selected, the status line says Nothing is selected in the Content Browser.
Create N material instances	Creates or updates one material instance for every checked set. Disabled while no set is checked or the Channel packer page is open. See Create.
Settings	Opens Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith.

Summary

The strip under the header counts the loaded sets:

Tile	Meaning
Texture sets	Sets found. The tooltip says how many textures were searched.
New	Sets whose material instance does not exist yet.
Updates	Sets whose material instance exists and will be updated.
Texture fixes	Textures whose sRGB, compression, Flip Green or virtual texturing settings will change. Counted only while Fix texture settings is on. Shows `…` after the number while the sets are still being analysed.
Mesh slots	Static and skeletal mesh slots that get an instance.
Not recognized	Textures whose names do not end with a known map name.

The panel analyses every set in the background (the same check as What will happen), so the fixes count, the warning icons and the Warnings filter fill in shortly after the list appears.

Texture set list

The list on the left has one row per texture set, sorted by folder and then by set name.

Header, search and filters

The check box in the header checks or unchecks every visible set.
Texture sets with the number of sets, and Source: where the textures came from, for example /Game/Props · 24 textures, 3 folders · 40 textures or 5 selected textures.
Search texture sets… matches the set name, the instance name and the names of the set’s textures. Case is ignored.
Filters: All, New (no instance yet), Update (instance exists) and Warnings (sets with at least one warning).

Rows

Each row shows, from left to right:

A check box. Unchecked sets are skipped by Create.
A preview: the material instance if it exists, otherwise the base color texture (or the first used map).
The set name, and below it the target: MI_Rock · /Game/Props/Rock/Materials · SM_Rock. Mesh names get the slot name in parentheses when a set goes to more than one slot or to a slot other than the first, for example SM_Chair (Wood).
Map thumbnails with a badge: BC base color, N normal, R roughness, M metallic, AO ambient occlusion, E emissive, OP opacity, H height. Packed textures show their channel layout: ORM, MRA, RMA, ORD. Textures that are recognized but not used (for example _Spec) have no thumbnail here; they appear in the details.
A warning icon if the set has problems. Its tooltip lists them.
New or Update.

If nothing was found, the list says No texture sets yet. If the search or filter hides every set, it says No texture sets match the search or filter.

Not recognized

When some textures did not match any name ending, a bar under the list says, for example, 2 textures not recognized: T_RandomThing, T_Grunge01. It names up to six textures and adds and N more. Click the bar to select those textures in the Content Browser.

To include them, rename the textures or add their endings to the name table in Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith > Detection. See Texture set naming.

Details

Select a row to see and change that set on the right. The set name and the texture folder are shown at the top. When the list loads, the first set (or the set you had selected before) is selected.

Material instance

Field	Meaning
Name	Name of the instance, by default the Instance Prefix plus the set name (`MI_Rock`).
Folder	Folder of the instance. Type a path or click the folder button to pick one.
Blend mode	Auto (Masked when the set has an opacity map, otherwise the blend mode of the master material), Opaque, Masked or Translucent. Anything but Auto overrides the blend mode in the instance.
Two-sided	Turns on the instance’s Two Sided override. Checked by default for sets with an opacity map (setting Two Sided when Masked). Unchecking it does not remove a Two Sided override that the instance already has.

Changing the name or folder updates New / Update for the set.

Meshes

The mesh slots that get the instance, one check box per slot, for example SM_Chair · slot 1 Wood · now M_Chair_Old. Uncheck a slot to leave it alone. The check boxes are disabled while Assign to meshes is off.

Without a matching mesh, the section says, for example, No matching mesh. A mesh named SM_Rock gets the instance automatically. See Meshes for how meshes are matched.

Maps

Every texture of the set with its thumbnail, its name and how it was identified: matched: BaseColor for a detected name ending, set by hand after you changed the map type. Textures that are not used by the material are dimmed.

Map type: Base Color, Normal, Packed (ORM …), Roughness, Metallic, Ambient Occlusion, Emissive, Opacity, Height or Not Used. When you switch a texture to Packed and it has no channel layout yet, it gets ORM.
OpenGL (green up) (normal maps): the normal map uses the OpenGL convention. Flip Green Channel is turned on for it.
Glossiness (invert) (roughness maps): the map stores glossiness or smoothness (white = smooth). The material inverts it.
R, G, B, A (packed textures): the content of each channel: Empty, Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, Metallic, Height or Opacity.

If a set has two textures for the same map, the first one in the list is used.

What will happen

A preview of everything Create would do for this set, updated whenever you change the set or an option. Warnings come first, then one line per step, for example:

2 Base Color maps found, T_Rock_BaseColor is used.
The master material M_Smith_Standard will be created in /Game/MaterialSmith.
T_Box_AO, T_Box_R, T_Box_M will be packed into T_Box_ORM (ORM).
T_Rock_Spec is not used (Spec).
T_OldPaint_Gloss stores glossiness and is inverted.
T_Rock_ORM: compression …, sRGB off. (one line per texture whose settings change)
MI_Rock will be created in /Game/Props/Rock/Materials. or MI_Rock exists and will be updated.
Assigned to SM_Rock, slot 0 (Rock).

Nothing is changed while the preview runs; the master material, for example, is only created by Create.

When there is nothing to report the section says Ready.

Options

The Options card applies to every set. The options start with the defaults from Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith when the panel opens; changes here are not saved back. Changing an option updates the preview of every set.

Option	Default	Meaning
Master	Empty	Parent of the material instances. Empty uses the Material Smith master, created in the Master Material Folder on first use. Pick any material or material instance to use your own; see Custom master materials.
Fix texture settings	On	Change sRGB, compression, Flip Green and virtual texturing so every texture fits its parameter. See Texture settings.
Pack channels	Off	Combine separate roughness, metallic and AO maps into one packed texture (`T_Name_ORM`). See Channel packer.
Assign to meshes	On	Put each instance into the mesh slots found for its set.
Update existing	On	Update material instances that already exist. Otherwise those sets are skipped.
Parallax for height maps	Off	Turn on bump offset parallax (the Use Height Map (Parallax) switch of the Material Smith master) when a set has a height map.
Save assets	On	Save every created or changed asset right away.

Under the Master picker a line describes the selected master:

Material Smith master, created in /Game/MaterialSmith on first use. when the field is empty.
A Material Smith master: every map type is supported. for M_Smith_Standard, a copy of it or an instance of it.
For other materials, the texture parameters and switches Material Smith guessed or loaded from Master Profiles, for example Guessed inputs: Base Color: Albedo, Normal: NormalTex (switch UseNormal), …

Create

Click Create N material instances. N is the number of checked sets, including sets hidden by the search or a filter.

If a custom master without a saved profile is picked, its guessed inputs are saved to Master Profiles in Project Settings.
Every checked set is processed: master material, channel packing, texture settings, the material instance and the mesh slots, as listed in What will happen. If two sets would create the same instance, the second one is skipped with a warning.
With Save assets on, every created or changed asset is saved. The master material and its default textures are always saved when they are created.
A notification sums up the run, for example ta Material Smith: 2 created, 1 updated, 1 packed textures, 3 textures fixed, 2 meshes assigned. Problems are added to it; warnings point to the Output Log (category LogTAMaterialSmith).
The newly created instances are selected in the Content Browser, and the list is loaded again, so those sets now show Update.

What an update changes

When an instance already exists and Update existing is on:

Its parent is set to the master of this run if it was different.
The texture parameters of the detected maps are set. Texture overrides of maps the set no longer has are removed.
The map switches are set again to match the set.
The blend mode and Two Sided overrides are set as described in Material instance.
Other parameters you changed by hand, such as tint, tiling or roughness range, stay as they are.

Import suggestion

With Suggest After Import on (the default), Material Smith watches texture imports in the editor. About 1.5 seconds after the last texture of an import, it looks for texture sets in the folders of the imported textures (without subfolders and without searching meshes). Sets that contain at least one new texture are offered in a notification; such a set can also include textures that were already in the folder.

The notification stays for 12 seconds. Create material instances opens the panel with the textures of those sets. Turn the suggestion off in Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith > Import.

Status line

The line at the bottom of the panel shows the last result, for example Found 4 texture sets. Check the details, then click Create., No texture sets found. Check the name endings in Project Settings > Plugins > ta Material Smith. or the summary of the last Create. It also has links to the tridiART website and support, and the plugin version.