Hello everyone! This is the support thread for Surface Trails system.
Marketplace
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…mation-example
Video
Surface trails system allows you to capture trails from characters or any other objects on a surface by attaching spherical components to them. As main usage example there is snow landscape demo with walking character and physics objects leaving deformation trails after them. 100% Blueprints.
Features
- Trails are captured and stored in some area (configurable) around player’s camera, so this system is independent from map size.
- Attenuation of old trails can be configured (can be set to zero so the trails stay forever inside defined area around camera).
- Trail shape is defined by spherical components with configurable hardness. So for definition of a box, for example, you need to attach several components to it (components count depends on required accuracity, in example scene there are 8 components per box and 2 components per character foot).
- Actors are marked as trails receivers by applying special Tag to them.
- System can be used for big variety of cases (trails on water, grass crumpling, any other surface VFX) by draging one material function into material.
- Snow landscape example includes photogrammetry based dirt material appearing under the snow.
Performance notes
System uses rendering to render targets, so it will affect GPU performance. This can be optimized for low performance platforms by decreasing render target resolution. By default resolution is 2048x2048 and all render targets will cost 24 MB of GPU memory.
If you are going to use snow deformation from example for your project, make sure that landscape tessellation also fits your performance budget.
Additional info
- Asset is distributed as a complete project (because of necessity to handle user input for demo purpose), however system itself doesn’t require any additional project configuration and can be easily migrated.
- No network replication support
- Tested platform: Windows
- Engine version: 4.19 and higher
- Documentation is on ExampleMap and in tutorial video: Surface Trails tutorial - YouTube
Screenshots
