Is there no way to implement physical materials in RVT? Color information can be referenced from the RVT, and physics materials can also be separated from the color information. But doing both at the same time doesn’t work.
Why doesn’t this work? And why isn’t it supported? Without physics materials, RVT becomes much less useful. Has anyone gotten this to work?
I’ve gotten this working before but it always involved rebuilding the RVT, then the landscape/physics.
In 5.7 there is no rebuild physics as a standalone option. While I have had it working (my traces trace correctly), it usually does NOT owing to something I updated, but then didn’t update the RVT, etc, etc.
I’m with you on color-information, not even that, it’s just information. So if it COULD work in some cases, why not all?
Well, at least it doesn’t seem impossible…
RVT can be sampled, so it must have been designed with the assumption that it would be used for blending. There’s even a mask channel only option. But in practice, Physical Material blending works when masked directly from the Landscape Material, but breaks when passed through an RVT Sample node.
It’s strange why this doesn’t work properly, but whatever the reason, there is no documentation or tutorials on this, so it doesn’t appear to be the official intended use at this time.
I’ve been working on this for a long time and have made some discoveries. It came close to being realized, but for irrational reason it ultimately failed.
First of all, RVT cannot be used to directly specify Physics Materials. This is probably because the timing of specifying the physics material is done earlier than writing the results to the RVT. It always fails because it tries to assign a physics material by referencing empty RVT data.
To avoid this, the RVT must be pre-populated with data. That means a good old “bake” is needed.
The RVT volume has an item called “Streaming Texture” that allows you to bake (build) the RVT to an SVT. From there, you can create and assign a Virtual Texture Builder asset, then bake the RVT using the Build button.
This will eliminate all real-time capabilities, but it “should” allow you to assign physical materials in RVT.
So far it’s going well and I have almost everything I need.
The reason it still failed is simply because there is no way to reference the baked SVT data from a material. I’m really disappointed. I’m having trouble understanding why this isn’t possible. SVT generates textures automatically, but we can’t even reference this.
I hope someone finds a way to reference the SVT in materials. I am tired.