I have splines which serve as paths, along which several objects move.
I was successful, in principle, in visualizing the splines, which is important in my game. This visualization doesn’t work as desired, however. The paths of object is information that the player ideally sees in the HUD: i.e. in a layer above the 3D-world in which there are no shadows and no distant-dependent sizes, just lines at fixed width.
Now I have two ways to go about this:
First, projection to screen coordinates and custom lines in UMyHUDWidget::NativePaint. This is something I already implement successfully for an arrow in the HUD that points to an object inside the 3D-world, even when that object is off screen.
Second, leave the spline visualization in the 3D-world only strip all effects: no shadows (neither throw nor show), correct for the distant-dependent size (how?), have it drawn on an extra layer on top of all object disregarding there z-order.
The first option is weird because of the additional complexity: NativePaint means manually redrawing stuff and there is no easy way to apply ProjectWorldLocationToScreen on entire objects. A spline, in particular, is defined by its SplinePoints and I potentially have to re-calculate the bezier curve between them.
The second option seems logical at first, only that I haven’t found out how unreal helps with that. I have to find a way how to make a 3D-object look flat. A simple sphere gets a lot of shadows, reflections and shades - I have to get rid of all and no success so far. I can only deactivate shadows. And the more distant the spline, the smaller it gets in the viewport - until it disappears. I don’t want that either, but I don’t even know what to google.
This picture shows my problem. The path and the spheres are illuminated just like the astronaut, the path passes through the astronaut instead of in front of him (obviously) and the rendered path disappears in the back where it gets too distant and too small instead of continuing at fixed width.