Still its not in UE4… you can build whole levels faster and better than a simple road.
Tbh… my whole game project is almost coming to a standstill, because there is no good way of placing roads… even painting them needs you to create a forest of nodes…
What level designer wants to place nodes?.. mine can’t and does not want to, because he is not a programmer… he is a level designer and needs the tools to have his freedom to work completly on his own without being dependent on other people who need to create the material so he can work. lol
O lord almighty i Need/Love/Want this feature. O dear santa what i want for Christmas is spline decal plz plz plz. Even if it clogs up a layer in my landscape material or how ever else it would be possible to implement. Thee wise engineers of the magical Unreal Engine please heed our requests plz plz plz.
Guys guys! I think i found something for Z fighting! Some genius (ErnieDingo) did something like this in unity and he did some explanation in the link.
I’m gonna quote his reply here:
"Having no background in the rendering pipeline for Unreal, I cant comment. But the technique you might be able to adapt.
Basically, you need to render your decals into a separate rendertarget, using the Z from the target scene (im assuming you are using deferred here) to do rough z testing. Basically, severe bias on the decal Z test (to avoid any Z fighting). What you really are trying to do is exclude decals that are genuinely obscured by geometry. This pass is all about approximation. when rendering the decals you can add extra stuff like masks etc, baking more information into the rendertarget as you like.
What this then gives you is a view of all visible decals in the scene. Now, on the final render pass, you need to sample from this rendertarget (shader resource of course), blending in the decal onto the terrain. What this does is, Z fighting is completely avoided at any distance.
Let me know if this helps. I’ve made a few posts on this, including a step by step process I went through to get to my result. You will need to trawl through late to mid 2016 to find it. I couldnt.
This one was also where I posted"
Can someone more able bodied and suited for implementing this feature follow up on this and have talk with this ErnieDingo dude?! He might be the holder of holy grail here but i wouldn’t know cause i’m not a programmer. I’m just a simpleton level designer.
I’m not sure that would work in the context of unreal, specially given how deferred decals work
first of all, unreal doesn’t have a way to just render stuff into a separate rendertarget. there’s a few ways (draw a material to render to texture, use a scenecapture actor, use customdepth) but AFAIK none allow you to render stuff from the same view as the camera with the full featureset (i.e. customdepth only renders depth. I guess the closest is to make a scenecapture2d that follows the camera each frame and trick it to render things that are hidden on the view)
secondly, decals can’t be just told to render into a separate rendertarget. if we’d make the scenecapture2d that follows the camera we still wouldn’t be able to tell it to just render decals and nothing else. UE4’s deferred decals are already on a separate pass by themselves, so they aren’t set up in a way that you can render them all without the underlying geometry
I guess with some engine modifications one would be able to access the deferred decals’ buffer to composite it into the scene with some rough Z-testing… but I’m sure unreal is already doing that
Just a bump. There’s been plenty of good discussion here to receive an updated official response.
Spline decals have been used in some great games in the past, including OW, which is one of the most optimized games for how good it look. Spline decals would help push stylized art so much further in unreal
I want to bump this Thread as well. At the moment we’re looking for certain solutions like spline-decals. This is one of the little features that would speed up the daily routines in UE4, especially for environment based tasks.
Aside all of that “set something free, 12 mill assets, etc”, i would love to see Epic creating some sort of intern task-force that is building “plugins” for their own engine, maybe based on quarterly voted feature requests and then selling these on the marketplace. I don’t see a problem paying, lets say ~$30 for an official supported spline-decal system.
I’m sad, we can do anything with Unreal, but when I try to make splines decals, I’m coming here !!!
I can not believe that this useful thing does not exist in Unreal Engine?
Just popping my head in here to express how much of a nightmare I’m having populating my cargo warehouse visualisation scene with unique path and road markings.
I’m using decals pre-made to specific angles. Shame Its taken me a week to build up a destructive mass of materials. I could have completed this whole task in an hour with bendy spline decals…
Dropping by to mention, that the whole change, requested for more than a year in this thread is defined as follows:
Spline render mesh needs to be constructed in a such way, to contain vertices and edges from both splinemesh and landscape LOD0 beneath it.
A project spline to landscape button should be added.
When the button is pressed, for every spline render mesh vertex, determine the corresponding landscape triangle, get Z positions of its 3 vertices, interpolate, depending on where render mesh vertex is located in relation to landscape triangle, considering XY only, and move spline render mesh vertex to the resulting height plus constant bias.
Translucent sort priority is already there.
Dealing with with pushing landscape splines upwards in the distance, to account for for landscape LOD morph should be done by users in decal material.
That is pretty much it. Not that much of a work for one of the top requested features.
actually I think just mimicking the landscape topology could be enough, and skipping the cuts related to the spline shape. you’d end up with more than you need but you could still get rid of it via material opacity based on UVs (distance from the center of the spline). it would simplify the process a lot I think, because guessing the vertex positions at the cuts gets tricky
I don’t think Epic would ever go for something like this though
You need those vertices to support splinemesh UVs. Distance to the center of the spline, encoded in landscape only topology will not give UVs you’d want.
Determining which landscape edges splinemesh triangle overlaps, and cutting triangle with every edge is not exactly the basic stuff, but isn’t something far advanced either.
oh you would still calculate UVs with distance to the center of the spline. by skipping the cutting you’d just have ‘pieces’ of polygons that would have the U coord lower than 0 and higher than 1 at each side.
it’s just a small suggestion in case anyone ventures into making this.
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requiring additional material nodes that push vertices towards the camera isn’t the most friendly thing ever. emphasis on the -requiring- here.
an example is how mesh decals get pushed towards the camera in the shader files (and has no manual control anywhere, unless you modify the shader yourself or add material nodes that counter this behavior). it’s kinda obvious that Epic decided to just put it in the shader in order to have the feature working out of the box without requiring extra material nodes that wouldn’t be artist-friendly
:(
