Thanks for the lead TimeSpirit. The warning line reading “will cause the textures to “swim” along the surface” in what you linked me sounds promising, but every time I hook anything up to it I end up with errors. I’ve been poking at this for the past several hours, running down various threads and trying to figure out what the language is communicating. I know what the XYZ values are, but things like scalar don’t really pop any light bulbs, I’m assuming it’s the XYZ scale transformation info for the material, but that gap in understanding puts the breaks on a lot of my momentum. I’m not having much luck here but I’m going to keep trying!
I did get a brief win in a 3D environment by linking the World Offset Position directly to a camera actor’s reference in the material, but I don’t know if that will translate into a 2D environment, and can’t test it because I don’t yet have a mobile camera. I tried it in the 2DPaper starter kit, but the camera isnt technically it’s own thing to reference to. Hell the player object isn’t either, which makes it kind of hard to reference as something to link a world position to without way more knowledge than I have currently. I can’t even test the mobile transparency effect until I have a camera that can even move at the player’s direction anyway, but that’s going to require getting further out in the water where your legs can’t touch the bottom. I know a lot of this stuff is probably dirt simple but without the ability to understand what I’m reading, or what it can or cannot link to, or the nature of the effects when it is hooked up, leaves me feeling like I’m assembling IKEA furniture.
I been looking into reference mat and am thinking about using those to project into an alpha space of another object, and then using the world position of the original object for the texture coordinates of the projection. If I ever manage to get the camera moving and the original reference texture linked to it then it should technically propagate it’s position down the daisy chain. I mean that’s what my head says will happen, but then again my head said it should just couple the BG image to the camera by parenting it’s sprite to the camera which wasn’t even allowed as a searchable option, so my gut clearly can’t be trusted.
If I manage to figure this out I’ll let you know.