I need some advice on how mesh spline can be used to deform the mesh. I know there are a lot of tutorials on the subject, but none of them quite tackle what I want to achieve. Most of the tutorials explain how to replicate meshes along spline, but what I need is - use spline to deform a single solid mesh. If you’ve ever used 3dmax, it would be like using PathDeform modifier. Here’s an image from max showing this in action:
So how to make this work in Unreal? I’ve followed this tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgANV-VTJrw, which sort of does this, but the problem is that adding more points has very little influence on mesh deformation. If you look at my screenshot, you can see that mesh sticks precisely to the spline, but in unreal it seems that tangent influence of any point other than endpoints it pretty weak.
Please, if you have any ideas how to do this, would be great to hear them.
Looks like what you want is to actually deform one mesh using more than one spline. I don’t think there is an easy way to do that at the moment, mesh splines are assumed to exist on sequential spline points and be bounded by them.
You can do it using vertex shaders but it will require some pre-setup work. If you are interested in that I can help. The first thing you need us a planar UV channel looking “down the barrel” so to speak to establish a local spline coordinate basis. The cost of such a shader will rise with each point you add since in effect it will have to calculate several splines for each vertex even though only one final segment will be used for each vertex.
(I am asking Golding for sure since he is probably the only person who can say this is impossible with certainty).
It’s unfortunate that this cannot be achieved with ease at the moment. The setup with uvs sounds like an interesting option, but probably not too practical for what I need, plus you mentioned the cost of it.
As of now, even manipulating two endpoint tangents can actually be utilized to a degree (though a bit limiting). But maybe you guys should consider implementing something like that in the future, as there are tons of uses for this kind of functionality (custom pipes, wire bundles, maybe even roads/curbs).
