Developer Shows How to Make Advanced Material Shaders & Mesh Passes in Unreal Engine without Modifying It

Unreal Engine 5 is a very powerful tool that can make your games look extremely realistic. However, you can unlock even more capabilities if you know where to look.

Developer William Mishra-Manning graciously decided to share his knowledge in a series of articles on advanced graphics programming, explaining how to create HLSL and material shaders and custom mesh passes without modifying the engine.

The creator wants to provide 3 things with the project: a reference for all the information he has, a reusable Unreal plugin that greatly simplifies screen-space/compute passes, 3D mesh passes, and Material integration, and a demo of these features in action.

There are 3 parts out of 7 ready at the moment, discussing rendering abstractions (RHI, RDG), threading, scenes, views, and the SceneViewExtension system. Mishra-Manning goes over the code, offering examples and helpful illustrations.

The developer says he's spent a very long time researching Unreal's renderer code, and this allowed him to make this impressive guide, which should be completed in the next several days.

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