I was just hoping to get some more exposure and answers to this.
TL:DR;
scene capture component from top of the world downwards looking into the landscape.
Captures OK, the texture gets shown apparently fine.
Adding a simple plane with black causes the capture to go nuts. Assuming it’s an LOD level issue.
Extra info:
At this point there is no post-process material, or any particular setting except a disabling everything from the scenecapture2d components except Landscape and Static Meshes.
Also, the component is set to use the ShowOnly list, which is handled in BP constructor to link in only the 2 elements I want - landscape and Static Mesh.
After getting this to display in color, I would be interested in learning how to apply a PostProcess material that can allow me to isolate the immediate change of distance between the plane and the landscape.
I think the reason no post-process materials are working on this is that I can’t get the initial image to render right at all…
Right so, I didnt have time to update here as well.
The issue is most definitely starting with landscape LOD.
bumping the lod settings up on the map lessens the issue but does not remove it entirely.
A couple ideas that I’m looking into.
because it’s easily available off the editor. the Landscape Height field.
maybe I can read or isolate the exact color I need based on landscape z offset.
The working theory being that landscape min bound z is #000 in the heightfield, but I don’t think this is true.
the math would be something like 256/landscape bound max * Z I need - since it should be proportional.
no idea how to isolate the exact shade yet, but I think a lerp using a mask on the color as a basis would do it neatly.
The challange becomes finding or producing the landscape heightfiled without extra steps. I really want the setup to be minimal. I simply cant go and manually export Heightfield for all the tiles that will be used eventually.
The other downside is that this isn’t on a tile by tile basis. The heightfield is often just one file…
2) getting custom scene depth on the landscape to work without LODs by isolating just the landscape.
it’s a shot in the dark really.
Affected by LOD (and the post process visibility issue detailed below.)
calculate how many landscape tiles.
pass the camera in ortho at the exact area of 2 tiles^2 with x/y mid tiles.
Pan through and scan the landscape with a render target additive. so the landscape is periodically built to the render target with a forced LOD0 by the camera location.
I have 0 idea of how fast the camera can pan without creating artifacts… this may be near impossible to adjust to any landscape depending if the component sizes can be accessed or not…
Other issues:
scene capture 2d just doesn’t work right.
for one, final color is not always using the post process material if I disable the parameters that always keep it active.
What I’m creating is editor side for now. I do not need it to be always active.
Current work around is to toggle visibility to activate the capture and stop it right after.
that however doesn’t seem to be 100% reliable either.
Perspective view is ignoring the camera Z position, not that it matters, I need Ortho.
In Ortho you get the LOD issue.
New Note:
Manage Lanscape - Selection Tool - Select needed sectors -
Landscape Component > Force LOD 0
This gets a scene depth map or a print out possible - finally. But there is no way to automate it in BP for Forced LOD is read only by default.
Oh man…
The most promising one was the panning of the camera, until that too blew up in my face because render-target additive just doesn’t work.
The work around to that would be to read the render target into another render target as a tile… maybe at this point i’m better off reverting to some custom GD C++ code in library input function.
The capture works. I need a procedure to tile the capture image…
Ok… in theory… no GD needed…
Material with RenderTargetTile into emissive.
Render-Target Composite setup
On pan, write to render target with the tile material.
Well, that sort of works. I need to sort out the array col/row, but it’s promising.
I love how I just crated one of those tile sliding puzzles without wanting to The worse part is that the LOD issue doesn’t seem to be resolved either but I can’t figure it out until I know why it’s scrambled…
Well, that was a nice waste of brain power.
In the end even after sorting the ortho camera was pushing bad LODs. This was resolved by scripting r.forcelod 0 and r.forcelod 1 into it.
Finally getting this result - and it could have been gotten in 10 minutes from the start…
For anyone wondering, here is the node in question:
