Check out UE4 Environment Prop Master Materials developed by Lincoln Hughes that will save you time in the material editor.
Shader features:
After looking online to see what was out there for materials in UE4, I came to the conclusion that there just isn’t really that much. You can buy textures, you can buy material functions that help you make your own materials, you can buy packs of assets that have their own master materials (with next to no explanation as to how to properly use them), but you can’t just buy a Master Shader that has all of the functions you want to be built into it, all in a tight little bundle that’s easy to use, and quick to set-up.
Using the material editor in UE4 can be really complicated. Especially for those that are just getting started with the program, or those without a background in tech-art, or programming. I’d imagine that trying to decipher some of those spaghetti noodles can seem as daunting as translating ancient hieroglyphics!
The whole purpose of the Master Material pack was to remove that element of complication; to empower the average user with the same shader functions as any AAA game-studio.
In short, a Master Material is the ultimate parent material for your scene, the one that every child material instance in your world references and uses to determine what functionality it will have.
For example, let’s say you have a new rock mesh that you’re making material for. Typically, you’d just create a new material and plug in your textures in UE4. Done, right? Now let’s say you have to make 5 rocks, a house, and some barrels, and each one needs snow to procedurally spawn on top of it. You could manually make 50 unique materials that all procedurally blend snow, or you could make a Master Material and use it to create “Material Instances” (Children of the Master Material) for each material in your scene. If you were to add the function of “procedural snow” into the Master Material, you’d also be adding it as an option into every child Material Instance in your world that references that Master Shader!
It’s the most time-saving, optimized way of creating materials, and if any issues happen to crop up in your materials (they’re too expensive, they have broken functionality, or they need global tweaks), all you have to do to fix them across every mesh in your world, is fix them once in that one Master Material.