I want to delete materials and update the references to another material. It works totally fine if I replace it with another material, but somehow material instances won’t show up (which is exactly what I want to do).
Is it a bug or is there a workaround? Because else I have to open up every single referenced static mesh and replace the old material with the new material instance manually.
Thanks for your help!
Hi angine -
If you click on the Material you want to replace and the Material Instance you want to replace it with then right click Asset Actions >> Replace References.
You will then get a window like this one:
The Message can be a little confusing but you want to select the asset (of the 2) that you want to still exist when this is all over. In my example I want all Material.M_TestC to be replaced with Material Instance.MI_TestA. (Note the balls in the background all have M_TestC applied.
Click Consolidate Assets and you will get this:
Thank You
Eric Ketchum
Very nice, thanks a lot! 
I’d say it’s hard to believe that Epic has not fixed this issue after 8+ years, but I think we all know how little they care about fixing quality of life stuff like this… Here we are, 2023, UE 5.2.1 and we STILL can not replace references to Materials with Material Instances. PLEASE FIX!
The solution to use the “replace reference” UI (which is a HORRIBLE UI/UX) is also a pain if you have a large project and your materials are not in the same browser window.
Epic, PLEASE start fixing this stuff. There are so many forum posts like this for issues that are slowing down/holding back users that go completely ignored for MANY years. This has to stop at some point.
Hey @VexFX , I shared a workaround here: Easy way to replace all references of a material? - #9 by filibis
It’s quite weird that in the older versions of UE it was possible as @Lovecraft_K showcased above. Did Epic simply just step back this feature? 
