Hi, first off, thank you so much for making this tool, and for being so active on this forum. The plugin has a lot of potential for an interactive experience I’m starting work on.
I’d like to apply opacity to my point cloud. I brought them in as PLY objects and set the display as lit sprites. However, when I add a material to the “custom material” slot and “rebuild cloud” the cloud disappears from the viewport. My hope was to plug vertex color into the opacity slot so that the darker points disappear, but right now I am stuck on that front. Any guidance?
Can you send me a screenshot of how the material is setup?
Also, did you change the material type to Translucent? It is using Masked by default, which simply acts as an on-off threshold.
Awesome - thanks for the advice - testing out the optimisations you suggested now. Didn’t stop to think that maybe those point clouds were casting shadows themselves in the scene. Some optimisation presets would be awesome to allow for starting point for people to build upon if it wasn’t tremendously hard to implement, eg with a drop down at the top of the point cloud object that would change the parameter values on the actor accordingly.
I already had “blend mode” to translucent, assuming that’s what you meant by “type.” I did try others, but nothing showed up.
I have included a screenshot of the material, as well as the setting for the cloud itself for good measure. (I’m pretty new to mats in UE4 but this is how I set up a point cloud material to render in V-ray.)
The plugin scales Sprites inside the material - this is to allow people to override the default behavior if needed. The reason why everything disappears when using your custom material is you didn’t link the node responsible for the scaling process, hence you end up rendering infinitely small sprites - essentially invisible.
Once I get a handle on this system, the hope is to make sprite scale dynamic on my clouds. For examples, increase the radius/opacity of individual sprites when in proximity to specific actors. Is that something within the realm of possibility?
Hi,
All options should already be changeable at runtime, and almost all via Blueprints.
Are you having issues accessing / modifying any parameter in particular?
First off, the material suggestion (opacity map with vertex color) did work! Thanks so much! I had indeed bee on an earlier version of point cloud plugin. However, the entire thing won’t receive light and cast shadows at all once the opacity map was added.
However, I have just fallen into a new problem. I installed the new version of the plugin you just posted. After that, UE4 crashes each time I try to open the cloud file in the content browser, or when I try to open a level containing an asset made with the plugin. Any insights as to why this is happening?
BTW I am very excited about the new version, looks like some serious performance enhancements.
Regarding shadow casting:
Make sure to adjust Lighting Mode of the translucent material.
Regarding crash:
Depending on how old your plugin version was, the assets may no longer be compatible. Probably the best course of action now is to open the project folder and delete the asset files, then reimporting them again.
hi, i’m trying to deploy on oculus quest, but the shader assigned when I import a point cloud is not compatible. I’m kinda lost. Here’s the log, can anyone help with it?
Hi there!
First, my apologies for not replying sooner, but the notifications do not always come through.
The plugin is currently only compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. As I understand it, Quest is powered by a mobile chip so, unfortunately, it will not be supported just yet.
Thanks for the feedback.
Not quite sure what’s going on there - a few questions:
Did you notice it on just this one cloud?
Any pattern to the locations where it happens?
Can you replicate the same issue in a fresh project as well?
Is it just spotlight? Or do point lights and directional lights produce the same result?
If possible, could you zip the project and send it to me for testing? Only the bare minimum of files, which still results in the said issue
Thanks for the quick reply @. This is all on 4.22 by the way.
Tested with a second point cloud, same issue
No pattern to the location, but the cut off angle seems to be the same when it does happen
Replicated in fresh project, with just plugin enabled and point cloud imported, dynamic shadows on
Spotlights and pointlights have the issue so far, sun/direction appears OK
Please PM me your email address I can use to wetransfer the fresh project, just please do not share the point cloud data in any way. I can attach the original .pts as well if you want.
Hey @ , did you get some files from Janitorus to help you look at the issue?
Because I’ve got it popping up on a couple large pointclouds I’ve tried. (Only tried with directional-light.) but at a lot of angles the shadowcasting just stops working.
(Setting the directional light at an angle, and spinning it around a mesh clockwise leaves it only working for maybe ~1/3rd of the angles, for example.)
Sometimes it’ll work fine when it’s just basically top-down, almost. It’s rather strange. A lower-angled directional light only seems to work from some directions.
Is this part of the same issue? ( 4.22. And tried in a completely new/clean project as well. ) I also noticed the same kind of strange cutoff from spotlights as Janitorus.
I had indeed bee on an earlier version of point cloud plugin. However, the entire thing won’t receive light and cast shadows at all once the opacity map was added.