So one of the things I am trying to do is set up a player hud using 3d components for my first person shooter project.
The basic results look pretty awesome but I am running into some showstoppers.
1: The 3d widgets are effected by anti aliasing and motion blur.
2. The widgets are pretty blurry when it comes to displaying text.
3. The widgets are effected by the transform of the parent component.
I currently scale the size of the player for going into crouch mode. I also plan to have characters of different sizes in general like. (Like a heavy class vs a scout.)
I need a way to literally just disable this. I know its possible to disable scaling and that works out ok but it doesn’t matter because when the players scale does change it also changes the position of the widgets so they end up overlapping or moving to a different part of the screen.
I really like the results of having 3d widgets for HUD elements. I see this in other games all the time like in the Division. And I know its something we will have to consider for VR support. Not only that but the workflow is much simpler too!
But these problems make me hesitant to really try to do this right now. Which is very sad honestly.
Is anyone working with this right now? What advice can you offer?
Unfortunately I don’t think you can avoid the anti-aliasing problems with Temporal AA (TAA)… it is what it is… you can switch to FXAA of course but then you will have to deal with another set of problems.
There has been literally hundreds if not thousands of posts about the various problems with TAA and to be fair sure, it has improved just a bit over the years but unless Epic decides to implement a proper AA solution there will always be blurring problems one way or the other.
I’m sure the 3d widget problem will be fixed eventually but for now I would say you (we) are out of luck.
Now, about your scaling problem… I would say it depends on your setup, you can always counter-scale the widget for example
I am noticing that the anti aliasing is not only problem with the blurring. It seems like the widget itself lowers its own resolution making text look very blocky. At first I thought maybe the problem was that I need to make the widget larger.
But it seems like no matter what I do the widget becomes very blocky and low res. I can live with the anti aliasing and such but there just does not seem to be a way to get a crisp hud widget without setting it to screen space.
Okay world vs screen widget is a different story
The “world” widget is not going to look as sharp as the screen one because they are being displayed differently.
The world one is basically rendered in a render target texture so it will look pixelated when the camera is too close since there simply isn’t enough resolution.
There are some (inconvenient) ways to fix that by increasing the resolution… you can enlarge the widget in the UMG editor and then scale down the 3d widget.
If you ask me there should be a way to automatically increase the resolution without having to do things like that but yeah
Yeah if my 3d widget can look like that then problem solved.
How big do I need to make the widget size wise to get that effect? And will there be performance issues in a game that makes fairly heavy use of 3d widgets?
You are gonna have to experiment with that to really know for sure
It’s generally speaking not a good idea to have too many 3d widgets on screen but perhaps you can get away with it, it all depends.
In the example above I had to scale it quite a bit, like 5 or so times in UMG and 0.1 scale in the widget component but again that all depends on your specific widgets and viewing distances.
I would try to avoid it as much as possible, maybe leave a few 3d widgets only like the player’s inventory (it’s only going to be visible by the owner anyway right?).
But again, you are gonna have to experiment with it
Ok so I have played around with this a bit and even though I want to push really hard to do the HUD as 3d components I am thinking that the blurriness is just too much of a buzzkill.
If the blurryness can be fixed then I will prefer doing my HUD this way but ultimately what I am experiencing right now is a system that produces sub par results. Its looking like I am going to be forced to do the hud the same way I have already been doing with the Quake Template project. Its a shame honestly because if the blur was not a problem then this would be mega kick ***. As it stands, this is useless.
