so i officially started my dig into unreal today... and it's about as challenging as expected.

trying to write my own shader file proved immediately difficult. the material editor doesn't have the access to passing in mesh data and storing some kind of buffer, so it'll have to be written in HLSL as is. but all of the documentation i tried to find ended up being in Unity! so now i'm feeling like, for this particular project, it might've been faster to get the concepts down in Unity.