I am currently playing around with the SplineMeshe Components for things like creating Cave Floors and things like cables… what I found out while doing that is that no Mesh DistanceFields are generated for the resulting SplineMesh.
I checked the base StaticMesh, and sure enough, all the needed settings are activated, and when I drag the StaticMesh into the scene instead of the SplineMesh Blueprint Actor with the Construction script, I see that for the static mesh distance fields are generated and are visible. I checked the construction script and also cannot see anything going wrong.
Now, is there a setting somewhere I missed? Or are SplineMeshes at the moment just not generating distance fields? Is this a feature postponed to a future release or flatout not possible?
Just trying to gauge if Splinemeshes are worth investing more time into when I could instead construct the scene from static meshes without splines with some changed design.
Any chance it will be supported anytime soon? or is it a technical limitation?
EDIT: Well, I found the option to “Merge Actors”, which can be used to replace the Spline with a static mesh. I guess that does the trick. Am I right to assume converting to a static Mesh is advisable anyway for performance reasons?
Technical limitation; the visible spline mesh is deformed in the shader, so what you see isn’t what’s actually there when it comes to generating distance fields.
It’s a reasonable thing to do; the catch is that if you do this often, you run the risk of using an inordinate amount of unique meshes.