Hello, I come from Unity, where I have experience creating custom render passes with their own buffers & draw calls (specifically, I implemented screen space reflection in URP myself, including a custom shader pass to draw metallic & roughness for whichever materials have that pass into a separate buffer).
I’ve been looking into how to do similar things with Unreal and I am getting desperate.
The documentation for things like the render dependency graph are made largely of code snippets with no context or information on where to use them, and are seemingly made with the assumption you already know a lot about unreal engine’s rendering code.
Peoples have also told me to just read the source code, which is pretty grating since it involves reading functions that are sometimes hundreds of lines long without knowing if the information I am looking for is even there (and most of the time it isn’t). On top of that I have ADHD, which makes the whole thing even worse.
Basically what I want to know is :
- How to create a custom pass
- How to create a buffer / render target in that pass (with depth & color)
- How to draw specific meshes to that buffer
- How to composite that buffer back over the screen buffer
- Where to put all this code
The end goal being to replicate Sea of Thieves’s cloud rendering tech from this talk The Technical Art of Sea of Thieves - YouTube and to generally better understand how to modify and extend Unreal’s render pipeline
