Could anyone point me to a tutorial or guide me to painting in the FPS template?

Particularly with the balls that you shoot. How could I go about painting the wall as I shoot it? As each yellow ball hits the wall, I imagine a ball leaving a paintball like “splat”. I’m not so much worried about the ball exploding, I know how to destroy the actor.

Any help much appreciated!

I can think of a couple of ways, off the top of my head.

  1. If you want to do it on every surface, you could add a oncollision event in the ball’s blueprint. When it collides with something, it spawns a decal at the location. With the decals rotation set to the direction of the balls velocity.
    The big problems with this would be that it won’t work very well on skeletal meshes or movers. And, that the visibility of decals is dependent on the amount of direct light on a surface (unless this has been fixed. If not, decals are almost useless at the moment).

  2. Have the ball check if the mesh is static or movable on collision. If it’s static, do as point 1. If it’s moveable, have it paint some sort of mask on the meshes material. This would involve you customizing each meshes material. Alternatively, have a decal spawn from withing the blueprint of all movable meshes (this does not sound like a good idea to me though).

Again though, there may still be the major problem of decals relying on being under direct light to even see them.

There might be a simpler way. But I don’t think so.

Well hey that’s a starting point, something I didn’t have before, so thanks! I’ll get cracking on that today to see what I come up with.

So this is what I ended up with.

You were right about it not transferring to the boxes / meshes well.

One thing I noticed was how finiky things were with the “Set Decal Transform Size” option. So I was attempting to get world / local / whatever transform, convert it to a vector and plug it in to no avail (I had some really weird results, such as a 10 y 150 x scaled texture painted on the wall) before I just ended up going with the 15 x 15 x 15. But regardless, I can still tweak around and try and get it working, thanks for the starting point.