I’m trying to make a 3D menu kind of thing for a game prototype. The only problem is that when I use a 3D widget (as shown here Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - 3D Widget (UMG 4.6) - YouTube), the content looks a little too dark. I wanted the content to be emissive, even glowing. I tried to do it by using both emissive, unlit and additive materials for the widget content, but that doesn’t work. Does anyone know how to add glow to a widget? Is this possible at all?
Here’s a screencap of how my widget is looking in game right now:
Currently all 3d widgets are composited onto an offscreen render target. So they’re resolved without any of the engines standard post processing, hence no glow. In the future we’re interested in supporting both, but for now, you will probably want to make sure the UI material is unlit, and you’ll need to get the glow by baking it into a texture you swap with the images you’re using on the widget.
This isn’t a very complex piece of UI though, using UMG for it might be overkill. You could achieve the same thing with a text component and a single quad with a material on it that has the energy bar and does all the masking and glowing. Would be much cheaper to render, and you’ll get all the post processing effects you want. Downside though from having it in the world is you’ll get all the motion blur, post processing as well. Though that’s true of the 3d widget component as well.
Hi Nick, thanks for answering.
This is just a small part of the UI, the idea is to have a lot more stuff on screen, and they have to look like a projection in 3d space, like a hologram. I’ll consider doing what you said and using a masked material instead of UMG.
Considering that the UMG is rendered onto an offscreen render target, wouldn’t it be possible to use that data as an input on a material and then applying this material to a 3d object?
Yeah, though I don’t think the slate material allow for over saturated colors right now. Also I don’t think we resolve to a render target that has a floating point color buffer, so you wont be able to encode more color for glow purposes.
Hi [USER=“2522”]Nick Darnell[/USER] … has anything changed as of 4.20? I love UMG, but without cranking the bloom, I can’t get the brightness from the 3D widgets that I’m looking for. Any ideas? Or will it ever be possible to apply a post process effect to ONLY UMG objects?
Find In Engine Content\EngineMaterials\Widget3DPassThrough.mat
Copy to project folder
Enter to material and add multiply and Constraint (emission power) to emission branch.
Voala! you have widget material with glowing effect.
extra!
If you are using texture and want add glow color to texture use widget blueprint texture settings.