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SPLATOON - Optimization of Deferred Decals??

Development Discussion Rendering
#1

Hey all.

I’m prototyping out a game inspired by Splatoon and I’m wondering if there’s any way to optimize decals that are placed in the world? I’ve already lowered the resolution of the textures down to 128x128 though the resolution alone barely seems to have affected performance. I need the game to be able to spawn thousands of decals in the world without lagging to heck so if anyone has any ideas on how you could do this it would be greatly appreciated. Currently I’m spawning the decals at the collision point of a particle system and the world. I’ve noticed that decals will often be placed almost completely on top of each other and therefore not really increasing the coverage in the world, but definitely affecting performance. Is there some way I could set up a system to delete decals directly below others?
Maybe there’s a better way to approach this? From what I’ve seen of Splatoon in the videos, it doesn’t even look like it’s covering the world in decals, more like there’s a second version of the world geo that they’re dynamically revealing with the decals.

TLDR; How does one optimize the placement of thousands of decals in a multiplayer match?

I should mention I’m doing everything in blueprint as I’m not a programmer.

Thanks for the help!

#2

Thousands of decals will always be super heavy even when they are deferred.

Instead I would use a render target as a mask. The ability to directly draw to a rendertarget from blueprints was added in 4.13. Use this to add new splats to the mask, potentially processed to create more interesting shapes and flow. Finally you sample this mask from your floor material to blend between the regular material and the paint.

Check the BlueprintRenderToTarget content example for examples on how to use this.

#3

Sweet! Thanks Arnage I’ll definitely look into that.

#4

Actually, after looking into it more, according to the live stream that introduced the feature (Blueprint Drawing to Render Targets Overview | Live Tra) They think that it’s too system intensive to use in such a way. It does seem like Splatoon uses a feature more similar to this though as it certainly doesn’t look like they’re using decals alone. I wonder if they’re only saying it’s system intensive because they’re also deforming the geometry with it?