❀ DoN's Dynamic Mesh Effects ❀

http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Ratings-Blurb-19th-November-2018.jpg

Get it here!
Marketplace Link
Per-Pixel FX and Gameplay

Runtime Mesh Painting, Pixel Collision API & more…

Now Released on UE4 Marketplace :slight_smile:](DoN's Dynamic Mesh Effects in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace)

Video Overview:

Marketplace Link

Boost your Visual FX & Gameplay with a rapid mesh painting solution that works on any mesh, provides custom collision and provides, Saving/Loading and Multiplayer out-of-the-box.

Here’s how your game can benefit:

1. Paint Per-Pixel, Collidable Visual FX for Characters / Landscapes / Props

The Background:-

  • Traditional Hit-based effects (collision uvs) only work for static meshes and are not seamless.
  • Your physx collision is often out of sync with your visual effects; Eg: Bullet holes effects on walls, etc
  • Multiplayer, Saving & Loading to disk is another complexity most users will need to solve.

DoN’s Solution:-

A single BP/C++ node that handles all this complexity for you, works on any Mesh, and provides pixel collisions for your gameplay needs (via the “paint blob collision” API).

Saving & Loading and Multiplayer supported out-of-the-box!

Choose from several UV workflows including Mesh UVs, World space UVs or Local space UVs along any axes

Advanced features like unlimited number of dynamically spawned actors, landscape replication, performance throttling for positions recapture (think about fast moving animations for characters), multiple effect layers, decals, brushes, UMG Text, Saving and Loading support and more!

GIF:
[spoiler]
http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Paint-on-Animating-Meshes-med.gif
[/spoiler]

2. Paint Decals - lots of them! (no decal actors involved)
Now stamp an unlimited number of decals on any mesh with the performance cost of a single texture sampler in your material - no decal actors involved.

This works even for skeletal meshes, something that isn’t easy to achieve in a regular positions-texture workflow.

GIF:
[spoiler]
http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Stamp-Decals-on-Skeletal-Meshes-med.gif
[/spoiler]

3. UMG Text Tattoos for characters
Your players can now tattoo your characters with not just decals (see above), but also with UMG text!

Create custom shirts with names, numbers, or paint text tattoos on arbitrary locations chosen by your player.

Note:- Text/Decal projection is not seamless! Results are UV layout dependent. Unlike painting effects, text projection will not work across separate UV islands. Remember that while UV-ing your characters :slight_smile:

GIF:
[spoiler]
http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UMG-Text-Tattoos-med.gif
[/spoiler]

and finally, drumroll

4. DoN’s Paint Blob Collisions

  • Create portals in walls or floors
  • Fire projectiles through holes painted by players in-game
  • Create painted lava traps, obstacles, etc for A.I with full multiplayer support!

Using paint strokes as collision data you can generate endless gameplay possibilities, for practically any genre.

Buyer’s Note:-
This is not a physical solution, custom collision API is used. On the bright side, you don’t pay the performance cost of runtime collision cooking or voxels which are inevitable in physical solutions and in many cases your players will have far more control with “paint blob collisions” than they would with physx collision bodies!

GIF:
[spoiler]
http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Paint-Blob-Collisions-med.gif
[/spoiler]

5. Global Effects
Rapidly implement global FX like Fog-Of-War systems with just a few nodes!

A new context-free world-space painting node was implemented for this. Check out this post for a sample material for an FoW system like the one below:

GIF:
[spoiler]
http://www.drunkonnectar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Fog-Of-War-Via-Paint-.gif
[/spoiler]

**~ My Previous Works ~ **
For reference, you can check out my previous plugin - DoN’s 3D pathfinding which has been well received on the Unreal Marketplace. You can expect the same level of quality and commitment to excellence with this plugin as well :slight_smile:

You can also check out Drunk On Nectar, my game on Steam whose technology stack features many other neat systems which may be of interest to you!


This plugin has been now submitted to the Unreal marketplace and I hope to bring it out to everyone soon.

Feel free to ask any questions!

- Venugopalan Sreedharan

Hi

So weird when fabulously great and ingenious

Do You could to think in implementing painting guides, using splines.
Is it capable of interacting with landscape and foliage, for creating a road or a river for example, or is it specifically to be used at runtime?

Oh wow, this could be great for a game with a focus on player customization.

Hey :slight_smile: Feeding spline components from paint strokes shouldn’t be that hard, I’ll take a look after primary functionality has been polished up for show time. Creative idea though!

For In-Editor use on foliage/roads, I feel Unreal already has the tools needed, is there any specific usecase you have in mind? Of course, painting rivers that feed into spline components on-the-fly (instead of being rendered as a texture) is a lovely use-case, whether in-game, or in-editor. Right now the system is purely in-game/runtime though.

Yes! The ability to paint effects or decals or UMG text via user input can be used for all kinds of customizations.

Also great for hit-impact effects on characters/meshes. Multiple paint layers are supported inside the material editor, so you can blend in several effects where each effect layer can be painted independently of the other.

Here’s a GIF of a portal made with paint-blob-collisions that works in multiplayer!

[spoiler]

[/spoiler]

Here the Server (left-side) is creating a portal while the client player (right-side) is passing through it.

Of course, this is not physical collision so it needs careful setup on your character, but it’s not that hard to achieve.

This example was put together entirely in blueprints.

I bumped into a thread started by @Maximum-Dev about…

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?135367-Spline-Decals

Then suddenly I also saw right after your DoN Mesh Paint with Paint Blob Collisions and saw one very cool possibility using your Mesh Paint feature

With painting decals on characters, is it possible to paint more than just the diffuse? If you wanted to do roughness, metallic, AO, world position offset, etc. are there any limitations? Can you paint all those inputs at once?

Absolutely! You receive a decal mask along with the decal itself, so any Material Editor functionality can be instantly used. Make your decals metallic, add WPO, anything that your material supports.

No decal actors are used here; it’s all texture/material based so you can stamp an unlimited number of decals with the performance cost of a single texture sampler in your material. Much, much cheaper than decal actors.

You can even use decals as an “alpha brush” and ignore the diffuse completely, which yields things like this:

In the image above the decal’s alpha is use to punch holes through a wooden floor. Butterfly shaped portals, literally :slight_smile:

Sample material:

Ah, now I see. It’s possible to generate splines, but for your usecase the real challenge is in feeding that spline to Unreal’s landscape, foliage tools, etc and making them use the spline data in the way you describe. That would be beyond the scope of this plugin I’m afraid. Still, I see great promise in generating splines from paint so I’ll investigate that and maybe leave it to end-users to figure out how they want to use the spline. If this spline-generation feature is confirmed I’ll post here about it.

That’s great! Any idea what you’ll be charging for this?

UPDATE:- This price of this plugin has now been fixed at $75 and is releasing on the UE4 marketplace tomorrow! (28th July 2017)

[FONT=Arial Black]Now create Fog-of-war and other effects with ease!

This fog-of-war system was put together in just a few minutes for the plugin’s sample project.

A single texture is being shared across the whole world (XY) and painted on the fly. Done in a jiffy :slight_smile:

This is the material. Very simple: The alpha channel contains the unfogged areas which the bots “paint” as they move around.

So the usecases go beyond just mesh painting or portal collisions :slight_smile:

Practically any world-space, local-space or mesh-UV-space effect can be rapidly executed with this system. It’s been built to be versatile and cover as many usecases for your games as possible.

Let me know if you have any questions!

When this is on the market place (I’m assuming this week ish if it’s already submitted?) I’m getting it. This is super cool! Great work!

I’m going to use it for portals in my current project, any pointers on getting that setup would be fantastic.

Thank you :slight_smile: The submission process has only gotten underway, it’s probably a bit early for ETA on public availability. I’ll be sure to let you know though :smiley:

For those who haven’t seen the “100,000 decals at 60 FPS” video yet, this was made earlier today!

Oops, I edited my post without refreshing and you had indeed responded. I’m curious if you can give any pointers in regards to using this for portals. That’s my main goal with making the purchase presently, though with other projects I’m sure that’ll change.

Will this be a paid plugin or will it be free?

This time it will be a paid plugin :slight_smile: Provisional price is listed in this post.

Portals:
Once the sample project is polished up, we can take a much closer look at this, but here’s the workflow for now:

Visuals: You’ll add a “Don Local Space Paint” node into your material and use the alpha as an opacity mask to create the portal. Choose from XY, XZ or YZ paint depending on how the mesh is modeled. Because it’s local space you can rotate your asset any way you like, non-uniform scaling is supported too.

Gameplay:
For characters, you’ll need logic in your blueprint to check for portals (the plugin will tell you) and to execute portal travel (you’ll need to handle that).
For projectiles, just reparent your existing projectile component to the one provided by the plugin and set your portal name. It’s derived from Unreal’s projectile component so you retain all your existing functionality. The portal name is something you set while creating (painting) the portal.

Worth noting that things like portals/fog-of-war are *applications *of the plugin that end-users will need to develop as per their needs. The core product is a mesh painting solution with a custom collision API. Of course the sample project will have plenty of references for you though :slight_smile:

Let me know if you have any questions!

Added a quick GIF trailer to the OP that covers various features and examples :slight_smile:

[spoiler]

[/spoiler]

Eager to answer any questions you may have!

when will this be on the MarketPlace?

@晓晓浣熊

Hey, the marketplace team is evaluating the product currently, no date yet. Hopefully it will arrive soon :slight_smile: