Hello. I’m trying to make the player character visible to the character at all times without having to move the camera. My attempted solution is to make objects that come between the player character and the third person camera transparent. I am having a particularly hard time with this in Unreal because it seems that making objects transparent requires changing their materials. The problem with that is that there are many possible objects that could obscure the camera view and changing all of their materials is a huge and unrealistic task. I have been looking into dynamic materials, but not all materials have consistent parameter names. It seems I can’t change their color unless I know the specific name. Ultimately, I am looking for a way to make any object partially transparent through a line trace from the camera inside the player character’s blueprint. Is there a way to do this or a reasonable workaround?
This blog will give you a step by step (albeit older) guide to doing what you want. Just follow the steps and you should be fine. Good luck! If this answered your question, please upvote and mark as Answered to properly close this.
I ran across this earlier. This technique seems to be dependent on a specific material. The author makes one material that all of the white walls switch to. I am trying to make any object transparent, regardless of the material. For example, there could be many different types of walls, not just white ones.
… then change the material to whatever color you want? The guide is exactly what you want, you have to customize it to suit your needs.
I’ll look more closely, but I think this disclaimer in the tutorial confirms my suspicion:
“Note that we are switching between two materials on the mesh by using our custom actor component and avoiding any multiple meshes. However, I am still investigating better ways to accomplish the actual fade without requiring two separate materials per unique mesh.”
I have a lot of unique meshes with unique materials. If I can’t avoid making a separate material for each of them, I will have to cut the feature I was planning.
Uh huh…and you’ll need to make a separate translucent one so you can see through it. There’s no magic button, unless you wanted to make the meshes “not visible” ? I guess you could do that, even better, you could make those not visible, but add some highlight around the mesh…but that would require another material anyway. And it would hide along with mesh, unless you superimposed it I guess.
I’m aware of the set visibility option, but I think that would be too extreme. I would like the player to be aware of the object’s presence and location but still be able to see through it if it is too close to the camera. There are so many possible materials. Setting all of them individually is just overkill.