[Tutorial] Deforming snow (and potentially mud) in Unreal Engine 4

[andrekek]

@BoredEngineer;553339

To be honest, it’s not working too well on the landscape which is not covered with snow but rather sand What I mean by this is that I can’t render decals without landscape but with landscape they are mixing with landscape albedo color and then I can’t cleanly get prints out of SceneCapture.
I’m just doing a prototyping now as proof of concept and most likely I’ll have to make a copy of the landscape, with a completely black material, under the main landscape, just to place white decals as a mask.

Did you used content of alpha channel of Scene Capture? Cause for me it’s all black, nothing is getting rendered into it.

The better approach is a custom shader to render both landscape and decals, on demand into a different render target, outside of the main render pass but that requires some C++ code so won’t work with just a native version of the engine.

So I used the alpha channel mainly. But I found with that I needed to make the decals emissive, then make the output 4 channels to include the alpha. As in the WorldAlignedTexture in the material. I think it should be in the tutorial. Then just mask out the alpha only. And in the scenecapture turn off all the other things except Decals, Landscapes and Static Meshes (well static mesh if you need it). Then the emissive should work well. But if you find another way to make the alpha channel work, then that would be great. But yea it needs to capture the landscape to capture the decals on top which sucks a bit.