I feel like I need to make a complaint at this point.
I don’t really get how simple things like applying different custom post process effect to objects in a scene is that much underdevelopped (custom stencil) and barely works. By that I mean you can use it, but you have to figure out through various nodes how it operates instead of it just having a drop-down menu to select which post process you want to apply. and when you do figure it out through the only bits of documentation available, you just put it in your graph and suddenly it changes other parts of the effect.
Even if you manage to make it work as intended, it’s tedious and should be much more simple.
Another thing is how can you not use Custom Depth with nanite? That’s like the big thing with UE 5 and you cannot tell me nobody uses both custom depth and nanite, these two things are super important and I don’t get why you still cannot use them together. Like you want nanited foliage? and you also want them to have a post process material that only shows on this foliage? too bad i guess
this seems basic and really important for anything shading related but somehow it just… feels left out from the engine
Because getting Nanite working was a major rewrite of the way the render pipeline worked, it’s hardly surprising it doesn’t work with custom depth yet.
It didn’t work with foliage until a few months ago.
Epic are probably doing their best in this respect.
Maybe, doesn’t seem they do much of anything “best” since 6 or more years ago.
I’d say 3rd best, but its more likely 20th at best…
Nanite merges the meshes into a different mesh, so the instances are no longer isolated - this doesn’t mean it can’t keep track of a stencil value too, eventually.
But it does not yet so you can work around it by creatively defining UVs for objects if you really wanted to.
In reality, no professional is using an unstable Beta engine with Alpha versions of key parts to bring a product to market…
I don’t really know how you can get more simple than putting a node in a material that isolates the stencil and running whatever operation you want on said stencil.
It’s about as Basic as it can get, and it allows for pretty much anything to be done with it.
What would you rather have?
A system that limits what you can do because you can only “drop select” something, or an open system that allows you to do anything at all within any shader? (This includes being able to change stencil numbers on the fly via parameters to throw things in/out of a PP at runtime).
