Light Beams - SM_GodRay_Plane not scaling?

Hi all,

I have posted a question on the answers hub but felt I should post it here as the forums are seen more frequently.

Original question: Light Beams - SM_GodRay_Plane not scaling? - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums
Once I can get the answer I will post it there unless someone else does.


I am trying to replicate in my own project the light beams from the Blueprint Office example. I have run into what feels like an infamous ‘bounds’ issue, where an object (my light beams in particular) flicker and disappear when the camera angle is changed, even though they should be on screen as my beam planes are still within the viewing frustum.

After some research this led me to the bounds and a sort of solution - but it highlights the real problem.

I am changing my ‘Sm_GodRay_Plane’ size to a scale of 10000, which increases the bounds and suddenly I can see the light beams stay on screen, they dont flicker and they behave similar to the office blueprint ones -> which tells me the mesh scaling is not happening when I render my light beams

To be honest, I cannot see where this is even being done in the blueprint office example. As such I am quite certain, my SM_GodRay_Plane is not scaling up correctly, which creates my flickering. So as soon as my object’s location is out of the view, the whole light beam dissappears.

See my pictures for the example.

Can anyone show me where in the BluePrint Office example the SM_GodRay_plane applies the light beam width and length settings? This would then correctly set the width and length of my plane and I would see it’s outline in the editor window. It is the only thing missing as everything else seems to work as expected.

Cheers

Goodaye again,

After some reading, I am certainly convinced I have set up something incorrect along the way when creating the light beams in my project.

I expect someone has had similar problems to this when starting out or creating the light beams?
What are some reasons why my plane would be showing as entirely out of bounds pixels? How could I fix it?

‘use of world position offset or displacement in a shader’…displacement in a shader?
‘component setup to inherit owner bounds’ - how do I check this? does it happen by default?

I have read Occlusion Culling Issue - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums
Static mesh visibility flicker - Asset Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums

and many other similar issues but I am still stuck. My last resort could be to export the original as some kind of asset, but that just seems harder then I expected and it’s not solving the problem.

Is there a setting on one of the materials (ANIMATED or MASTER) ? I have checked and double checked.
I’m almost ready to rebuild the blueprint but I have checked it 4 times.

I need to figure this out so I don’t get stuck on such a painful problem.
Cheers


For anyone interested and who may experience the same problem, I verified the problem is the mesh bounds not expanding. When tinkering with them the light indeed disappeared of screen.

Since we plug in the length and width into the the blueprint I solved my bounds issue by setting the x scale of the SM_GodRay_Plane mesh to the length.
Upon checking bounds, I get what I expected. Now the pixels are within the bounds, I do not get flickering either.

I feel like the biggest noob after years in unity, but I am glad I persisted with such an everyday problem!

See images.

Cheers