Shader Development Mode

AuthorAlessa "Codekitten" Baker Page StatusWIP Unreal Version5.2

Workflow

There are a couple of paths that Unreal Engine’s render pipeline can be extended - Scene View Extensions, Virtual Shader Paths to externally write shaders and include them in material Custom Nodes, or modifying the existing ush/usf files of the engine as an Engine Modification.

I have spent quite a lot of time attempting to figure out the best general workflow when extending Unreal Engine’s rendering pipeline, but all of them benefit from some additional parameters that can be enabled in ini files.

Compiling Shaders

In any of the three mentioned paths, shaders can be compiled by running recompileshaders all as a command in the console. Recompile shaders command works by invalidating the render cache by changing a GUID stored in Engine/Shaders/Public/ShaderVersion.ush.

The All command will force the entire DDC to be invalidated and recompiled and can take quite some time to recompile everything, a better command I use instead is recompileshaders changed which instead only recompiles shaders that Unreal has recognized as a modified usf/ush.