Hello UE community,
I don’t post on here too often and I rarely ever share my work, but I figured that now is a pretty good time to share some tools that I built for a game called Lunacy: Saint Rhodes.
Here’s a link to a Markiplier play-through:
And the original UE thread: Lunacy: Saint Rhodes - Game Development - Epic Developer Community Forums
I did a lot of tech art/environmental work (not everything, but a good bit) and have decided that I’d like to show some of the tools I built and how I built them. Not all of the tools will be in this post due to limited time, but I will update it until all of what I built (that I deem good enough for this post) is here.
A few members (myself included) didn’t have build access until right near the end of production on the demo, which resulted in a lot of these tools being built as sort of a catch-all type deal so that the designers who did have access could work without having to ask me to rebuild the tools.
Tool #1: Dynamic Decals
So this one is pretty neat, I think. The decal system allows the designer to pick between 2 atlas textures: dirt or damage. The damage decals are aligned to the world (along with whatever wall/material it’s being projected to) so that it will seamlessly blend at the edges with the wall/floor/ceiling. The exposed areas of the damage (and the dirt, if necessary) are also world aligned and have their own parameters. These atlases contain a full set of textures and can be changed at run time as they were made entirely in Substance Designer, which allowed the designers to further tweak the decals in case my preferences didn’t align with theirs.
Dirt Atlas:
Damage Atlas:
The damage decal atlas in that photo is a little different because it’s a packed texture that contains certain masks required to provide the illusion of depth seen in the video.
The dirt atlas contains a black and white mask, normals and a roughness texture while the damage atlas contains a packed mask, AO and normal texture.
Only one material handles both sets of textures and is linked to the blueprint actor itself:
If we go down to the very basic level, the material provides us the sub uv coordinates of the atlas that are passed to the blueprint and then exposed for the designers to shift through at will. There’s also a feature that will pick/rotate the dirt decals at random.
The blueprints also provide some much needed ease of use when it comes to working with decals, such as handling rotation and also handles the world aligned aspects of the materials.
As you can see in the video and these screenshots, the dynamic decals can be altered in very significant ways.
The reason I went with the combination of Substance materials and material instances is so that every single detail could be different via material instance dynamics.
If there are any questions about the specifics of the decal system, just feel free to ask.
