So I have built a 2 systems. One is a building system, the other is a weather system. Now the parts of the building system each get their material from a master material that has the ability to look wet/snowed on. I do have a bit of blueprint I can plug into the actors so they know to get wet/snowed or get dry. The issue i am running into is how to make sure the actor knows what parts to get wet and what parts not to. when I was testing this the test block shot a ray trace into the air to check for coverage, if it hit something it would stay dry, if it didn’t hit anything it would start being affected by weather. the ray trace would go off every ten seconds in case the was a change in the coverage of the object. This worked great but now i am running into an issue with more complex shapes that have more materials.
lets take my foundation piece for example. it has 2 materials, exterior wood and interior wood. here you can see what the solution I’m currently working on is. Using the data table that each build piece has i can put start locations for five line trace to check if it has coverage on the sides as well as the top. once it determines if it has coverage or not it will shoot a second line trace at the build piece and tell the material of the face it hits to start changing based on weather and coverage.
My question is, is there a better way of doing this? the blueprinting is going to be rather complex and that’s a lot of line traces to be shooting off all the time. Is there a different method that is more efficient or will have to use this method and optimize elsewhere? or is there an easier way to do this method? really any leads would help even if its, “it sucks but the method you described is how you’ll do it”