Editor Tooling Breakdown

Editor Tooling Breakdown

UI Foundry’s animation and material tools work on different parts of the same asset workflow.

• Animation Studio edits native Widget Blueprint keyframes and curves.
• Animation Workbench reviews hierarchy and clip coverage, comparisons, and scoped repairs.

The following review surfaces handle targeted diagnostics and material assets:

• Anim Tools audits and repairs Widget Blueprint animation data.
• Material Library helps teams find, document, filter, and review project materials.
• Material Tools inspect and clean up the material graph inside the Material Editor.

These tools are separate because they work at different levels of the UI pipeline. Anim Tools owns animation-track health, the Material Library owns project-wide material organization, and Material Tools own the current material graph. Together they make it easier to follow a UI issue from an animated widget, to the material asset it drives, to the graph nodes and metadata that should be corrected.

When To Use Each Tool

Tool surface	Open it from	Use it for
Anim Tools	Widget Blueprint editor	Auditing animation health, repairing stale bindings, cleaning keyframes, remapping material parameter tracks, checking state-machine compatibility, and exporting reports.
Material Library	Top-level UI Foundry editor menu	Finding materials, managing catalog metadata, reviewing thumbnails, filtering by issue/status/owner/version, building collections, and repairing catalog storage.
Material Tools	Material Editor UI Foundry -> Material menu	Editing catalog metadata for the open material, reviewing common nodes, organizing parameters, inspecting reroutes, auditing texture usage, checking material functions, reviewing advisory Custom node and graph findings, and running UI compliance checks.

Anim Tools

Anim Tools is scoped to a live Widget Blueprint editor. It reads standard UWidgetAnimation and MovieScene data and reports what needs review before a team ships or migrates a widget.

Use Anim Tools when you need to:

• find stale widget animation bindings after a widget rename or deletion
• remove redundant keys, empty tracks, unsupported keyed data, or stray MovieScene bindings
• review event/function-like animation tracks and state-machine callback references
• compare animation coverage, key volume, timing, and value drift across clips
• detect out-of-range keys, sections, and events
• inspect loop-like animations for first/last value drift
• purge selected track or channel types through an explicit destructive workflow
• run state-machine compatibility checks against the current Widget Blueprint
• check material-parameter-like animation tracks and remap stale parameter names

Anim Tools uses a conservative fix-risk model. Findings are grouped as safe fixes, confirmation-required fixes, manual review items, dangerous/destructive actions, or inspect-only notes. Mutating actions use undo transactions and the shared backup settings before they change the Widget Blueprint.

The tool catalog contains 18 focused panels. Some are inspection-only, and general FPS conversion and automatic project-wide animation migration are not implemented.

Material Handoff

Anim Tools is the right place to fix an animation track that points at the wrong widget, event, property, or material parameter name. It is not the right place to edit the material graph.

When Anim Tools finds a material-parameter issue, use this split:

• If the animation track is stale, use Material Parameter Remapper.
• If the material should expose or rename the parameter, open the material and use Parameter Organizer.
• If the material needs ownership, preview, catalog, or compliance context, use the Material Library and Material Tools.

Material Library

The Material Library is the project-wide material catalog. It is the best place to answer, “What materials do we have, who owns them, and which ones need attention?”

Use the library when you need to:

• scan supported material domains, including User Interface, Surface, Post Process, Deferred Decal, Light Function, and Volume
• browse materials as a table or responsive card grid
• search, sort, and filter by domain, tag, favorite state, recently used state, collection, issue state, status, owner, or version
• select a material and review its summary, details, metadata fields, history, and references
• edit display name, description, category, tags, status, owner, version, favorite state, and custom metadata fields
• assign custom thumbnails while keeping native Unreal thumbnails available
• create, duplicate, rename, describe, and delete collections
• create collections from the selected material or the currently visible filtered result
• repair catalog storage issues such as stale index entries, missing record files, orphaned records, missing preview assets, legacy records, or removed schema-field values

The library stores human-facing catalog metadata in sidecar project files. The material asset remains a normal Unreal material or material instance, and disabling UI Foundry does not make the asset unusable.

Inspector Tabs

The selected-material inspector turns catalog review into a focused material review:

• Details shows the core material facts and catalog metadata.
• Metadata Fields shows custom fields defined by the active domain schema.
• History shows metadata file state, legacy metadata paths, modified timestamps, and source-control context.
• References summarizes parameters, named reroutes, function calls, texture usage, and issue groups with Go To actions where graph references are still valid.

Material Tools

Material Tools are per-Material Editor panels. They follow the currently open Material Editor instance, so two open materials can have independent UI Foundry panel contexts.

Use Material Tools when you need to inspect or change the open material itself:

• Catalog Metadata: edit the same catalog fields available in the library, without leaving the Material Editor.
• Common Nodes: review frequent expression classes in the graph and add common nodes.
• Named Reroutes: rename declarations, edit colors, navigate to declarations, place usages, and select child outputs.
• Parameter Organizer: rename supported parameters, edit groups, set defaults, duplicate/delete parameters, move parameters, reorder groups, and auto-index sort priority.
• Texture Usage: inspect texture samples and texture object usage, including size, format, sampler type, usage, sRGB state, and UI-risk severity.
• Function Dependencies: review material function calls and navigate to source expressions where available.
• Custom Node Validator: review Custom node HLSL issues, node names, locations, severities, empty-code findings, portability risks, and unused inputs.
• Graph Heuristics: review advisory graph findings and limited repairs. Findings do not establish shader compilation success or GPU cost.
• UI Compliance: check UI material rules with pass/warn/fail summaries and project-configured severity.

Custom Node Validator and Graph Heuristics are advisory. Neither establishes shader compilation success or GPU cost. Common Nodes and Node Bindings+ provide configurable palettes, shortcuts, and a held-key chooser; Particle Preview supplies synthetic particle data for material testing.

These panels point back to graph objects using weak references at click time. If a graph expression is deleted or renamed while a panel is open, navigation actions fail safely instead of keeping stale raw pointers.

Review Flow

A common production pass looks like this:

1. Open a Widget Blueprint and run Anim Tools.
2. Fix safe animation data issues first, such as stale bindings, redundant keys, empty tracks, or out-of-range keys.
3. Review material-parameter findings and decide whether the animation track or the material graph owns the change.
4. Open the Material Library to find the affected material, check owner/status/version, and inspect references.
5. Open the material and use Material Tools to organize parameters, inspect texture usage, review advisory Custom node and graph findings, or run UI compliance.
6. Return to Anim Tools and rescan the Widget Blueprint to confirm the animation side is clean.

This keeps each edit in the tool that owns it: Widget Blueprint animation changes in Anim Tools, project catalog changes in the Material Library, and material graph changes in Material Tools.

Related Docs

• Anim Tools
• Anim Tools Test Cases
• WBP Materials
• WBP Materials Walkthroughs