Good evening!
The title might be a little click-bait though but my brain hurts. I have some past with doing UI´s for DVD´s and a lot of After Effects related Post-FX work back in the days.
I don´t even know where to start to talk about UMG “Designer” without getting into trouble because for some of you it must sound like a newbie is ranting about how to create a sphere in 3dsmax.
Don´t just kill me yet - I will explain a couple of things that I don´t understand. First and foremost, I am quite old to UE4 but pretty new to UI Widget creation.
Let´s start with the background blur: I am aware this was a weekend-project, according to one of the Epic Games YouTube sessions. I am dealing with blurred backgrounds a lot in After Effects, adding FX and masks to shape them till I am happy with the result. UE4s background blur seems like it was created once and never touched again. It does not seem to be possible to do a lot with it. I am using it above a main menu box which is actually a SizeBox with a lot of buttons inside. Its not possible to make it a child of it and within I can´t have it as part of my setup. When I am wrapping it with a retainer box, its not visible in the game. Actually I have not found a way to:
a) give it any visibility treatment in the graph
b) inherit / make it a child of my little menu as background blur addition
c) adding masks to give it a fitting shape like round borders. This was asked so many times on Answer-Hub and other places on the net, every time with a dead end.
All in all, I would love to see some overhaul for the Background blur.
Next, the treatment of buttons, boxes, images and other things when moving these in and out of size/retainer/scale boxes. Why do they reset to their default settings when I move them in and out of any parent objects.
I am taking the background blur again as example. I made one, I gave him a middle anchor, 0.5 Alignment, Size of 300 by 450 and position 0,0. Once I wrap it with a retainer, it keeps all the things I set but once I am moving it out, it just resets to like it was fresh created.
I have stopped counting how much this happens on every single box with buttons just for testing how it may behave in different containers. I don´t know if I explained it correctly but I would love to see a much more non-destructive workflow when working with a lot of UI items. It feels for me like being an elephant in a glasshouse where each “test” may end up destructing the whole UI setup.
Last stop for today: 2.5D. Crazy it sounds but how could I actually rotate something on the Z-Axis or even moving it back and forth on the Z-Axis? (Yes we can scale it, but that´s not the way I think when working on layers that should spark some creativity.) I know there might be workarounds adding it to 3D planes in space but overall I am missing these tools a lot here on the 2D side of creation.
Its my first week with UMG Design and bet I just missed a lot of things that might make this thread obsolete.
But deep from my heart, I would love to see a leap forward on UI creation like we already got on many other topics like landmass, water, hair and co.
Cheers, take care and have a good rest of the week,