This is a blood/paint/splatter decal pack which consists of 112 masked textures and 2 parent materials.
There’s a material instance for each decal so you can change parameters such as the hue, transparency, contrast, normals strength, etc. and change a blood looking decal in to a paint splatter if you wish.
In order to get fully opaque decals (as in the screenshots below) you need to enable DBuffer decals in your Project Settings->Rendering->Lighting. Also, in Settings->Rendering->Optimizations you should check “Movables in early Z-pass” and change the “Early Z-pass” option to “Opaque and masked meshes”.
You can then use the Decal Blend Mode “DBuffer Translucent Color,Normal,Roughness” in the parent material (the DBuffer blend modes show up regardless but don’t work unless you make the changes above in your project settings).
You may of course use these with the default “Translucent” decal blend mode, or as standard materials on a flat static mesh plane or BSP, but that would only work well on flat surfaces.
Just in case, I’ve included 2 separate parent materials to be used in this manner (non decal masked material). I didn’t make copies of all the material instances for the non decal masked parents since I didn’t want a thousand files in the folder, but you can create material instances of these parents and change the texture parameters in the material instances to the textures of your choice.
I was going for thick blood to show that they can be made to look like puddles, but you can tone down the normals very easily per material instance or change it on all the instances in the master material.
It took me about 10 seconds to change the 3 red ones in the middle; similar view as the screenshot above:
Hey, I just bought your pack for a personal project I’m working on. Loving all the options, but how can I change the colors with a color picker? I’ve only seen hue, saturation, etc options when making a new instance.
Also, is there any way to make it so if I over layed a yellow and blue decal, it would make green?
I’ve used a Vector Parameter instead of the “Base Color Hue” Scalar Parameter in the material instance to save colors in the picker, but it still works in 0-1 space. It helped a bit since I only needed a few specific colors, and you can save the colors in themes in the color picker (although since it’s still 0-1 space, it’s just grayscale values in the theme previews). I just knew the first color in the theme was red, the second was blue, etc.
As far as mixing decal colors, I’m not sure you can do that and get accurate results with just with the material editor. You can copy all the nodes, rename all the parameters so they aren’t the same for both textures, change the copied texture, and then use add or lerp nodes to combine the base colors, normals, and opacity together in order to get 2 decals “mixing” with each other rather than the default where one is completely over top of the other. It doesn’t mix colors accurately though, and this would only create a new material, it wouldn’t work dynamically in something like a particle emitter.
You could maybe use particle instance parameters to change the colors, but I’ve never attempted to mix colors dynamically. Would be interesting to get something like this working.
I got this response on a similar question from a VFX artist at Epic
I love messing around with UE4 and trying to find the results I want, and I think now I have the resources to give it a shot. So far I was able to mix colors in the content examples (with decals). I found that if I switched them to Stain I believe it was, they could overlap and make appropriate colors.
And no worries on the color picker, the 0-1 space just got me a bit confused but as I scale it I see there are plenty of options in the color spectrum.
Hopefully with some messing around I can get something working.
Here’s a picture of the content examples (Decals level, 1.6). I modified the translucent blend mode to stain, and then applied an opacity of .9 to the master material (red), and made a copy of one of the instances to get yellow. You can see that it mixed the basic Green, Red, Yellow, and Blue decals to get appropriate colors (orange in particular is easier to see, but I think that’s either because of my light or the material on the wall).
Obviously your pack has a lot more going on in terms of functionality over these squares, but hopefully it’s a step in the right direction.
Epic never gave me access to this pack so I can’t actually tell, but I was told a couple weeks ago that they would update it.