Hello
I am trying to use the particle emitter system in unreal for a school project. The basic idea is to be able to paint on the surroundings to reveal their texture. The surroundings would already be textured but would not be visible till we paint on them. ( i did this using a lerp node and a sphere mask / absolute world position ). What i also have is a basic particle with an emitter system which would shoot these particles on left mouse button click. They would then collide with the actors in the scene and stay there for a while.
What I want to do is to be able to reveal the texture of an actor when the particles hit the actor. From my understanding, for this to happen, the sphere mask radius of the material should match that of the particle radius ( which is just setting the radius ) and then the blueprint itself should either spawn at the location where every particle hits the actor or just follow them as they go hit the actor. Thus, it would look as if we particles can reveal the texture of our surroundings upon collision. This is one of the core game mechanics of our game and I am having a tough time trying to crack this.
I tried getting the particle location, but all i got was the location of the emitter which is parented to the third person camera. Is it even possible to access the location of the individual particles of an emitter? If we can, could we possibly change the blueprint to either spawn at the hit location of the particle or follow it?
As a side note, any other way to toggle between a solid color and texture underneath in unreal would be really helpful to me. I tried implementing the Dynamic Mesh Painting approach taught here : https://www.raywenderlich.com/6817-dynamic-mesh-painting-in-unreal-engine-4 . Although this kinda worked for my needs, I have a lot of actors to be painted on and this method would add a lot of render targets, one for each actor. I could still maybe make it work. I also looked at splatoon style painting in unity : Real Time VFX Mike: Splatoon in Unity . I could maybe spend a lot of time to try to convert this from unity CS to blueprint. But ideally, the particle method seems to be easier and look aesthetically more pleasing.
This is my first post in unreal forum and I have recently started using it. Any kind of help is greatly appreciated! Thank you!