I'm mostly concerned about my programmers. They're concerned about the performance impact of node-generated code. But if I can give them something that's like 90% of the way there, that's definitely workable. About the Autodesk thing, you're not talking about Slate are you? At least I hope not. Or do you just mean that…
We do it with education and profiling. Education meaning we talk to anyone who's going to touch materials and give an overview of what's going to slow down the system (so in Unreal material terms, what instruction count and material dependency mean, and how they're calculated). Then we let them go crazy. Profiling comes in…
I remember not too long ago a bunch of peeps on some tech forums where talking about creating a unified shader system via Python (I think?), with a user interface but coded. So basically, instead of having nodes, you would have editor under which you could put up words and what they all mean and have the engine load it…