I did get the point of your suggestion, but you did not get a point of mine.
You will not have sufficiently good interpolation, if your UVs are defined only at landscape topology vertices. Interpolation is linear.
Well, what you would call good enough then? One way or another, you need to do that. Not sure what would be not friendly in having WPO doing this for you. Even more to that, I would prefer this to anything hardcoded.
You can calculate the exact amount you need to push the vertices up with distance, to account for vertical error of landscape and always stay sufficiently, but not more than enough above the landscape at each lod level and transition regions.
Surely you can add a ton of code to tie together landscape LODs and special category of mesh decal material, that would be automatically fed information about landscape LOD settings.
That can be done and would be welcome, but bothering with that is never worth the effort just to make it artist friendly, considering that anyone several months familiar with the editor can do it and especially if you consider, that you can just eyeball the distance required.
oh I prefer this to anything hardcoded any day but it’s not what is friendly for me (as a tech artist), I just mean artist-friendly in a level designer sort of way.
if the setup requires just copy-pasting a few nodes then there’s no reason to not have it under the hood, but if those nodes need tweaking then it’s likely that a level designer won’t understand what needs to be done because a level designer doesn’t necessarily know how to create complex materials or what even is WPO (and their materials might consist of an and a normalmap hooked and that’s it). in the end it’s the level designer that will use the feature, and not every team has tech artist to set things up for them.
I’m just going here by what I see as Epic’s usual behavior in terms of tools usability. usually they try to go for something that “just works” or comes close to it (as with mesh decals’ WPO) and ignore when the flawed use cases are uncovered (again as with mesh decals), in other cases where finetuning is more necessary they usually try to go further with editor-exposed variables.
in this particular case I think they’d need to expose a variable in the “spline decal actor” that is passed into the shader, or maybe a variable in the material properties, but again I really don’t expect Epic to make a specific WPO material node setup to be -required- for a feature like spline decals.
of course this is all just speculation from me, but think I’ve seen enough of how Epic thinks around their tools to have an educated guess
if the vertical error can be figured out in 95+% of the cases, I would think they would just hardcode it in the shader. this is the “just works” case I mention above
No doubt, automatic is nice.
But I’m not sharing a philosophy of If it can’t be implemented universally and for every possible case, it should not be implemented at all.
Seems like even if you move the spline below landscape surface in cryengine it still projects to landscape surface above it. Cant we just have a spline decal projecting all along Z direction while affecting landscape only?
Well it’s pretty similar to using the Ddecals already in the engine. While I haven’t checked or paid attention, they have a box of influence to them, so it would make sense for them to work from above or below the surface.
Spline decals need to follow the same “box of influence” principle.
I don’t know if i understood the question correctly but If this is something that you want to achieve then here is the actor i created and the source that jump started me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJyWSzfwEk8 the video i saw when i was looking into splines. I needed to be able to create a path but not with mesh. Hope this helps.
P.S Rotate the spline actor -90 at Y and assign your decal. The actor is a bit of a patch work but it works.
Texture doesn’t seem to be following the spline direction. Seems like it’s rather spawning individual decals along the path which is something that wouldn’t work with road textures that have continuous details (i.e tire tracks).
I have disabled rotation cause i got some bad results but it’s doable. You just need to connect the proper nodes and do some math. You can rotate the Deacal per splinePoint. I simply didn’t need the rotation, that’s why i didn’t bother.
My bad you said Direction… Still i guess you could affect rotation based on tangents of each point? Dunno for sure…
My point is it has to be continuous, because road textures do tile but dropping decals along a path wouldn’t do that. Still, I’m kinda noob at BP in general so I’m looking to hear others opinions on this.
Thanks for sharing.
Oh my god, I just stumbled over this thread and I admit this is ****ing horrible!
EPIC, get your **** together! I can’t believe that paying customers get treated like that! And yes, royalties is payment for you too EPIC!
[USER=“4894”][/USER] do you even read what people say before replying?? Sorry but your answers are borderline ignoring everything people are saying and it makes you sound like a bad politician trying to dodge peoples heat! Just be ****ing honest with us and say something that actually is respectful to our complaints and makes sense!
Also, let me tell you something: there is a difference between fancy shmency **** and general Editor functionality. I think as a user of your engine you can expect things like: the landscape system, particle rendering, PHYSICAL LIGHT VALUES, projecting splines to landscape etc. to just be there and work. Thats basic functionality!
Dinstance field lighting? Fancy stuff of very limited use for very specific games (yeah right, Epic only implements features that can be used across all games)
FFT bloom instead of a lens Flare Editor? Who decides these priorities? This is honestly speaking nuts and as you can read, I am very angry (but thats also because of the physical lights dilemma)
Get out there! Talk to people! Don’t hide their request and make them hard to track! Be open and honest with the community that also pays part of YOUR salary!
Jeeez…why do I even have to write this ****!!!
PS: How would the Environment Artists working on Fortnite like such a feature? Just a thought
PPS: Sorry for writing in such an agitated way, full of words the forum doesn’t like to display^^ I really needed to vent a bit and honestly, I still think such behavior is a no go and makes me quite frustrated!
Hi there,
+1 for this awesome feature! I just read the 10 pages and it’s sadly to see after all these months there is still no serious comments from Epic on this…
I may be wrong but among all the benefits describes previously in this thread I think there is also a performance gain using projected textures against more geometries…
Hope one day it will come, any ETA on it ?
Been checking up on spline decal functionality even prior to the request & I’m surprised to see nothing’s come of it still. Similarly for the support/merging of texture arrays… features that can be essential, yet seem eternally brushed off to the side
