Hey VSZ! So glad to see you are back!
I tried using the plugin a while back before you had made many of these optimizations and bug fixes, so I am happy to re-introduce it to my project again. I have question though, which perhaps may be rather fundamental but yet I still need some help or clarification on this:
As I understand it, the physics asset must be close to the skeletal mesh itself, or else the paint won’t apply properly, or at all.
My characters have physics assets that are reasonably close to their meshes, but they are made using primitives like cylinders and boxes. So is only possible to get these pieces generally close to the shape of the character. Some places will always be closer, some farther away. They will almost never be perfectly aligned with the mesh, of course.
As a result, of course, I’m only able to paint on some of my character. (We are doing small strokes for bullet holes) Certain areas do not receive a paint stroke at all, some areas need the brush to be much bigger, and some areas work perfectly. I have looked at my physics asset and I cannot find a rhyme or reason to which areas get the paint stroke in accordance with the physics asset. Some areas where it protrudes greatly get a paint stroke. Some areas where the physics asset hides inside the mesh also get a paint stroke. And some areas where it is close to the mesh do not get paint strokes, though usually it does. But seemingly not always. Anyway in all, it seems I can get about 60-70% of my character to receive paint strokes.
I have also tried creating a new physics asset where its mesh hulls are generated from the skeletal mesh itself. This results in a much more accurate physics asset (just like the one in your demo level) but even this still only gets me partial coverage on the character when painting on him. (I also worry that using this high density physics asset could hurt my game’s performance). Some places where it looks like the physics asset is very close to the mesh can result in no paint stroke. Seems sort of random, but also seems consistent, which feels like an important detail to add.
I should add that we have characters using modular clothing meshes. So the clothes, while they do sit close to the character mesh, are looser-fitting in other areas. (They are NOT cloth physics assets though!) Clothes of course, typically do not have their own physics assets, so we have to direct the paint stroke to the clothing components to draw holes in them, but it also doesn’t work everywhere.
Is there a way I can force the paint stroke to happen even 100% of the time if it is not perfectly accurate to the location of my shot? The visual feedback is more important than the accuracy in my case.
Thank you!!
UPDATE EDIT: I have remade my physics asset once more, with more careful use of certain types of shapes and it is much closer to my character’s shape while saving on polygons. I still can’t paint exactly everywhere but it is much better now.
Also, is there a way to paint to more than one component at once? Can one paint stroke be applied to both my character and his clothing?
