[Feature Request] DepthPriorityGroups

Development Character & Animation
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1

I have posted about this before, but haven’t posted a ticket specifically making this a feature request, so I suppose here goes.

I know that DepthPriorityGroups have been removed, and the feedback from developers so far has been that it’s gone for good. Now, I’m not specifically asking for DepthPriorityGroups, but the problem that I would like to solve is forcing a skeletal mesh (and other meshes which might be attached to it) to render in front of other elements (like world geometry and particles (in some cases)), whilst allowing vertices on the same mesh to occlude other vertices further away from the camera. In my case, this is for weapons and arms attached to the camera, especially for melee weapons.

I’ve looked at workarounds, but none have solved the issue so far:

  1. Scaling down the models so they fit in the Character’s collision capsule.
    This is not a viable workaround for melee weapons which use traces between socket locations, or any other form of collision detection which is dependent on the mesh’s real world coordinates.

  2. Using animations to prevent the mesh from clipping into geometry. This is a very time-consuming and unstable approach, and again, is not viable for melee weapons.

  3. Using postprocess effects on the mesh materials.
    I have managed to get the meshes to render in front by using translucency, but the results are bad. E.g. the player can see sides of the mesh that should be occluded by parts of that same mesh which are closer to the camera, as well as e.g. an attached sword which sometimes render in front of the arm, which obviously does not work.

If I need to post in a different section, please let me know.

Thanks very much!

2

Bumping this one.

3

Bumping this one, as it would make life much easier for managing melee weapons.

However, I’ve found a hacky workaround for melee weapons:

  1. When idling, ensure the scale of the weapon is tiny so that it doesn’t extend outside the character’s collision component.

  2. When attacking, scale up the weapon to the required real-world scale so that traces work as expected.

  3. After attack is finished, scale down the weapon again to fit inside the character’s collision component.

This workaround mitigates most of the clipping problems.