I made some major improvements to my personal decal generator. I’m actually thinking of making this publicly available for FREE as a gift to the community. It’ll take a bit more work to package and clean it up (and create a tutorial video) but I am tempted if enough people are interested. If you are please let me know in the comments here or directly in the youtube video.
In summary, this tool is designed to create almost any type of decal from a simple albedo and normal map (even then you don’t always need both). I created this as I often couldn’t find the decal I needed but there are so many textures and materials available online.
Key features are:
Uses a single blueprint for any type of decal
Focused on performance - simple decals will use cheaper materials
Only uses Albedo, Normal and Greyscale masks to keep cheap, but can be easily modified to work with additional texture maps
Runs in construction script so no additional runtime cost
Can be altered in runtime though if desired as it uses material dynamic instance (i.e. could fade out a stain over time)
Comes with a bunch of prebuilt profiles to easily start and tweak. New profiles are super simple to add.
Has procedural mask options which allows for infinite configurations i.e. you could have thousands of puddles all using the same texture masks that look completely different.
Limitations (at least for now):
Doesn’t currently use Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) as it’s expensive
Doesn’t use Triplanar as it’s also expensive
I wouldn’t be able to offer ongoing support if I share this (but it’s pretty easy to use and modify)
Per above there are some good paid decal creators on the Unreal Marketplace if you want some more advanced features (always good to support our community of local content creators!)
Built in UE5.0 so while you could copy/paste it all into 4.X and it should work, unfortunately Unreal doesn’t let you easily migrate to earlier versions
Additional Notes:
I’ve noticed a bug in UE5 where moving decals can cause the engine to crash. This is not specific to DecalMaster as it does it with Unreal’s Actor Decals.
The music editing in the video is pretty bad. Sorry!
Thank you for the tag! I can really appreciate the dynamic and flexible options that Decal Master provides! This makes creating environments simple and reduces that copy/paste look that I’ve seen in a few projects. In addition to that, it seems very simple to implement!
Making the tool available to the community for free is a wonderful idea, especially if you can get some feedback on possible improvements over time!
Thank you for including an example of your decals within an environment! That went from clean scene to crime scene! LOL!
If there was one thing that makes Decal Master stand out from other decals, what would that thing be?
Thanks very much for the comments. I think what makes it stand out isn’t one thing but the combo of:
It would be FREE
It’s very easy to use
It’s as performant as required (if you just want something basic, it will only use a cheap material)
The procedural masking options are fairly unique (a lot of alternatives I’ve seen have basic masking options or require specific masks)
It does a good job (IMHO) without using a lot of textures (just needs albedo and normal), although can be modified as needed
The profiles make it easy to start with something and tweak rather than have to remember the specific textures and parameters needed to make a particular type of decal
But, really I’m just a humble hobbiest so I don’t want to oversell it - it works well for me and it may or may not benefit others but if the interest is there I’m happy to share it.
I’m still using UE4, making maps for UT4 and this tool is freaking awesome. Sadly, even free I wouldn’t ba able to use it since the UT4 editor is stuck at 4.15.1.
Hey Guys - As early supporters of my work, I wanted to share the links here so you can download this tool directly for free (should you want it). Note - I changed the name to Decal Champ as there was an old Unity Decal tool called Decal Master.
I’ll create a new post for Decal Champ later, but wanted to notify you fine people as a courtesy of your kind comments. It’s completely free so if you know other great ways to share it please let me know. I put it on Gumroad rather than the Unreal Marketplace as I a) prefer not to cannibalize existing paid tools and b) I’m not offering formal support.
The thing is, even free, I won’t be able to use it since I’m using UE 4.15.1. This is the version of the Unreal Tournament 4 editor so I have no choice of using 4.15.1. Unless you make it compatible with 4.14.4 and up so I could import it without changing anything in the editor or else, it would be completely useless. Even 4.15.2 won’t work in the UT4 editor, it must be 4.15.1.
If it’s not to much to ask, I’ll be very grateful for this unattended gift!
Not currently, but it isn’t too hard to change the texture parameters to use virtual textures instead.
That said, I’m not sure it’s worth it. I use Virtual Textures on my landscape as it’s always visible so it helps to not load the whole thing in memory, but for decals they should get occluded when not on screen or visible anyway. The challenge with virtual textures is that they can “pop” from low res to actual res so I think any performance saving is minimal and you risk the ugly popping that can occur. There might be other benefits I’m not thinking of though.
I can really appreciate the dynamic and flexible options that Decal Master provides! This makes creating environments simple and reduces that copy/paste look that I’ve seen in a few projects. In addition to that, it seems very simple to implement!
