Hello. I wasn’t sure which category this question falls under. I’m working on a Doom-esque shooter and I’m trying to simulate how sprites work in Doom, a flat image that changes depending on the player’s viewing angle. I have looked at blueprint solutions, but they’re taxing on performance, as they constantly calculate the vector between the player and the actor.
So, my idea was to add several billboards to the actor and make it so the billboards only render if viewed from a particular angle. Is there a way to do it without blueprints?
Yeah you can do this without blueprints, Unreal actually has a built in material function for this called ImposterUVs, it’s primarily used for foliage.
You’ll most likely need to roll your own solution for this in order to get animated characters though.
You’d do it pretty similar to how you would do it in Blueprint, you can get the camera vector and the forward vector of the actor from the material editor, from there you have to decide on how you’re going to use that to look up the appropriate UV coordinates for the frame you need. You’re in for a lot of work tbh…
Oh, that’s really neat actually. It might be a huge amount of work, but it can’t be any worse than the blueprints solution. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.