GPU Sprites Always Square

Development Rendering
1

Hi, so I worked out how to make a huge fake starfield with GPU sprites. I’ve been messing around with the material for quite a while and can’t work out how to make the black part transparent. The sprites are always coming out square.

I’ve been trying to use the GlowSphere material to make something star-like, but now I’d settle for just knowing how to make it not a square. What settings should I be looking at?

Thanks.

2

You need to feed a value into the opacity or mask field on the material output to get transparency.
HTH

3

Thanks, I’m kind of an amateur when it comes to blueprints…but this shouldn’t be a hard thing to accomplish, since I’m not feeble-minded…
this is what it looks like now:

Just the modified properties are shown.

4

I would say that should work as the preview shows a circle.
An alternative to using a fresnel would be a node called “circle gradient” or something similar.

I recommend going the docs section as they have some useful and interesting tutorials, There is also a UE channel on youtube called “Unreal Engine” where they upload there archived livestreams and tutorials to.

HTH

5

Thanks again. Yea I’m not trying to get deep into this stuff or spend a lot of time on it. I’m a musician/sound designer working on a space game, but no one on the team is currently working on getting particle effects in space and it bugs me to have no feeling of movement when flying, so I took a crack. If it’s not something straightforward, I’ll just stick with the squares; better than nothing. Does seem like it should work though; doesn’t.

6

Check out this node, That is what I am using to get a dot(circle) particle.
The depth fade should just fade the particle based on how close it is to objects.

If you don’t come right, I can post a picture of my dot particle material.

HTH

7

I gave up and just used an existing particle system, adding the tweaks I needed, and somehow managed to achieve my stardust effect.