Hiding parts of a skeletal mesh at runtime in the material

Development Rendering
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1

So I have a character mesh that has pre-modeled cut points on the arms and legs that I’d like to use for dismemberment. My current system switches materials to a 0-opacity material when I need to hide a limb, however because there’s 4 pre-defined “chunks” in each limb and each chunk has its own material, that’s 17 materials that are being used per character which I’m not happy about.

If my entire character was only using 1 material, is there a way to dynamically hide different parts using some property in the material? I was thinking something like vertex colors or texture masks that change based on which body part I need to hide, but I haven’t wrapped my heard around using these in real-time.

2

You can just hide the bone in the skeleton hierarcy that way you don’t have to make additional materials. Depending on the bone hidden, you can assign a socket to create blood/flesh effect or even a decal to show results of dismemberment.

Since you will want to shot the chopped part you can just spawn a seperate mesh with other parts hidden or sliced in engine with again a decal applied/procedural geometry applied to it. That way you don’t have to deal with multiple materials that will deal damage to your development.

3

yeah.

nice .that’s insane