Character Doll Feature

Our game has a feature where you can customize your character with equipment and appearance options. We use a scene capture component to grab a snapshot of a stage we have setup for this, and then draw it on the UI. This is a pretty common thing that games do.

We have a couple of big issues with this:

  1. Our “stage” for doing the capture needs to be in the level data to do the capture, and needs to be duplicated into every level in our game.
  2. Scene captures don’t support temporal AA, as far as we understand. So our hair doesn’t look great in the character doll view.

Is there some recommended way to implement this? Or do we need to fallback to using an in world camera when editing/viewing the appearance instead of using a character doll + stage?

The character doll approach has some nice advantages, like always being sure the lighting will be good and that there won’t be obstructions around, etc. Would be a shame to give up.

Hi Stefan,
Temporal AA should work with scene capture. In the SceneCapture2D, you’ll need to ensure that the capture source is set to “Final Color (LDR) is RGB” in order for postprocessing to be applied (otherwise the output will be the raw HDR frame without postprocessing). In the postprocess settings for the capture component, you’ll also want to check that TemporalAA is enabled (Misc->AA method).

You should be able to avoid duplicating the stage geometry by using level streaming. You can create a separate streaming level for your stage and stream it from any of your game’s persistent levels as required. There’s some more info on level streaming in the Level Streaming section in the docs.

Cool thanks, clearly I have some misconceptions about this. We’ll try this out.