Custom Depth on Player Character? How?

[tmek]

Edit #2: In this video by Tesla he demonstrates setting Render Custom Depth in a blueprint. He does it on a static mesh but you should be able to do it on any skeletal mesh the same way.

Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Basic Object Outline (Interaction)

Edit: I reread your question and I misunderstood it initially. He does say in C++ you can toggle Render Custom Depth but I’m not sure how to do it in a blueprint either, nor how you would change the outline color per actor.

This question on the answer hub may have what you are looking for…

How can I create an outline highlight similar to the one used in the editor?

Hi,

You can use custom depth rendering to create outline effect as a post process.

First you need to create a post process material that will compare backbuffer depth and custom depth. If difference is greater than a given threshold, then you should draw outline.

A sample material can be found here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/896861/dev/PP_Outliner_M.rar Just add it to blendables list in postprocess volume in your level.

Now you can toggle outline in editor by checking “Render Custom Depth” option in actor properties.

Unfortunately toggling outline in-game, requires a bit of coding in c++. Basically you need to use this for each primitive component in actor:

comp->bRenderCustomDepth = true;
comp->MarkRenderStateDirty();

Cheers!

ps. The material is just for test and doesn’t always work as good as the one available in Editor.

I downloaded the material and followed the steps. I increased SampleRangeX and SampleRangeY parameters to 3.0 to get a thicker outline. I also set edge threshold to 1.0 (lower values were causing faces to highlight when viewed at glancing angles).

I’m not sure what changes you would do to this to provide things like different colors for different characters though.