Problems with attaching decals to a skeletal mesh.

Development Rendering
1

I have a problem where simply attaching decals to a skeletal mesh does not work, and the decals themselves do not stay fixed on the mesh, and was also was not projecting correctly, and also was not attached to the mesh but the location in the world for some reason.
i tried using a custom stencil from a community tutorial -

which worked to some extent, fixed some problems:
(this is the blood splatter decal material)

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the decals are staying attached to the mesh, but when the mesh plays an animation, the decals on the mesh are not fixed, the stretch and move:
(look at the stomach around 0:19)

i did some research and found out there are preskinned nodes, that are used for this problems specifically (correct me if i’m wrong).
but i want to use them in the decal material, not in the mesh’s material, the reason is that there is already a use of a SceneCaptureComponent2D in the mesh’s blueprint.
its used for creating holes in the mesh using the unwrapping method (with extra functionality in the mesh’s material), mesh’s material.

i don’t want to add another SceneCaptureComponent2D as it is already very much expensive.
I went back and fourth with searching a lot for solutions, but it seems that the preskinned nodes are what i need.
i want to use a deferred decal - translucent material, and project blood splatter and holes textures before he is animated.
can i do that in the decal material ?

2

I’m part of the project as well and would basically like to ask if anyone has found an efficient solution to the decal sliding problem a lot of people in the community have been having for years that is also not too performance consuming. The Spawn Decal Attached node works by binding the decals to the skeleton’s bones, and projects them accordingly, so is there an actual way to project them on the mesh space itself regardless of the bone weights etc…?

3

You’re dealing with a very specific problem here, I think short of a custom destruction system you’re going to have issues. That said, I’m wondering if you could assign a virtual texture channel over the character texture and splat decals to that channel? You’d have to solve a few different distortion problems, but if you could make it work then you could have persistent damage in texture space. I’m not a character artist, but it might work?