Hello all! I want to learn what I can about the emissive feature in materials but I’m having difficulty finding them.
I would like to create an emission around a UI element (masked, rounded avatar) but when I try, it doesn’t work. I’m guessing the mask prevents the emission from showing unless the emission were going inwards but I’d like to learn how to do out outwardly because who knows, maybe one day I’ll need to add flames to something
Point being, I have no idea where to look for this. Any advice or document / video links would be greatly appreciated! TY!
There’s at least a few videos on youtube about UMG to create UI, and about emissive materials. Search for “create UI in UE4” and “UE4 UMG” and “UE4 emissive”.
I appreciate the links you have provided but I have read over them and also seen a few videos on Youtube regarding it. Unfortunately they don’t teach something more akin to what I’m trying to achieve.
A| UMG Button with material >
B| Material contains Avatar (Square) with a (rounded) mask to give the circular avatar shape >
C| Somehow use emissive material to emit light around said avatar with mask.
I can get the emission working fine without a mask, but once I apply it, it disappears. So essentially I probably need a material within a material which is not something I can find information about. I hope this makes more sense.
Look up material layers and material attributes in the docs. It’s the system for building multiple materials into one final material. I wasn’t sure where you were at with learning about emissive, so sorry. One thing I don’t understand so far in your description is the avatar. At first you said it’s square, and then in the same sentence said it’s circular. Is the avatar a character avatar, or more like a frame around an avatar?
Hi, AFAIK you can’t have emissive inside UI. So you could either
(1) Bake the emissive effect you want into the image. If you just want a circular glow, then you could put another image with a radial gradient exponent (to fake the glow) below it.
(2) Put the widget into the world instead of on the screen (will introduce other problems though)
Thanks for your responses! I will keep playing around and I’m sure it will become evident be it in a week or months from now (not like there’s a deadline for random study projects). Of course the alternative is to just overlay an image over top which gives it the impression that there’s a border around the image, but you know, adding it programmatically seemed the most proper to learn.
Yeah, I consider it a basic feature for UI. Why isn’t it a more obvious thing? I don’t know. But I haven’t done much in the UI design realm of UE. I was simply aware of the emissive input in the material editor, and that there’s a number of capabilities it has. So, I’m in a similar situation in terms of learning how to use emissive in UI, and making an emissive border is not a really difficult thing in programs like Photoshop / Inkscape / etc. I’ve done it in Inkscape. It’s different in UE, at least somewhat.
