How do you spawn blood decals on enemies?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

I’ve been searching for quite a while now, and I haven’t found an answer.
What I basically wanna do is that when a single line tracer hits my enemy, I want to spawn a decal of an injury at the hit point, but the problem is that if I just spawn a decal, when I kill my enemy and he’s on ragdoll mode, the decal is able to project not only on the enemy’s body but also on the ground and other objects.
I’ve found that I could disable an option in the objects that i didn’t want to receive the decal, but it just doesn’t work, because if I want to spawn another decal that needs to project on the ground like a blood splatter or something else, it wouldn’t work.

So i’m basically asking you guys, how would you spawn blood decals on enemies?

2

You could switch textures in blueprints but then you’d wind up with a ton of textures. Or you could use a decal but that could end up calling just as many textures as the switch.

3

Thanks for the answer kennyrosenyc, but I think you didn’t get my question, the problem is not decals/texture overload, the problem is that when i spawn a decal at my enemy and attach it to a hit bone, what happens is that the decal is able to project anywhere it gets near and not only on my enemy’s body, so when it hits the ground or even when my enemy gets near my player, both the ground and the player also receive the decal’s projection.

4

You try adjusting the size of the decal? Decals are 3 dimensional so think of it as a box and anything the box overlaps the decal will be projected. When you spawn decal try messing around with size and rotation when its placed. You can try it out by putting it in level somewhere on uneven ground to see what I’m talking about

5

I had exactly same problem, switched to textures (I used 1 texture for each mesh, you’ve got 4 channels there, red, green, blue, alpha - so using 1 texture I could project decals for 4 bodyparts. Hands, body and head)

There’s a checkbox in rendering somewhere “recieve decals”. I wish there was some grouping or tagging - maybe there is, but I haven’t found it yet.

6

DJ-INSERT thanks for the answer, I’ve already tried to adjust the size of the box, but unfortunatelly there’s always a place where the decal can touch the ground, and also if I changed its size too much the blood would look so small.

Z-enzyme thanks for the answer, I’ll take a look at using textures, but I didn’t understand it that well, like, you can add a texture on top of the enemy’s skin material exactly where you hit the enemy?I also haven’t found a place where I could group or tag the decals either.

7

The decals are at this very moment quite limited. Let me quote"

So, limited masking. This:

Should help you a bit. That’s because they are deferred decals. They are rendered somewhere in the G-Buffer and not actual world object.

As it comes to fake decals on textures. I didn’t put the texture decal exaclty where the bullet hit. Nope, I had blends for bodyparts. So, if a character was hit somewhere in the arm the blood decal on the arm appeared. Like an old Rune game, maybe you remember. They had the textures switched on Ragnar when he got hit. But for whole bodypart.

8

Thanks for the answer Z-enzyme, it isn’t the best solution but should work for now, I’ll try to spawn the decals not where it hits but at the bone’s location or maybe even a socket.