Hello, I was wondering if it was possible to use a video or an image sequence to displace a plane as it is possible in Blender. If this is not possible in Unreal, is it possible to bake the displacement animation on a plane in Blender and import it into Unreal?
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Yes it is possible with images I think… Well it was in Unreal Engine 4 when Tessellation was supported. In the material editor there should be a flipbook node which can be used for these types of animations.
You can also look at this: Paper 2D Flipbooks | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation
Yeah it is probably possible in UE4 with flipbooks as you said but I am currently developing my game in UE5 and i don’t think it’s possible in material editor… I heard about Geometry Scripts which seems to be the equivalent of Blender’s Geometry Node and I tried it. Unfortunately you can’t displace using media textures as far as i know.
Here is an example of what I wish to achieve in Unreal. This is currently a Blender Render.
I wonder if it is possible to fake the displacement using Niagara FX ? But i never used it.
You can try this for the effect, but I am not sure how performant it would be:
Edit: Seems that you could import a video as well then use a MediaPlayer and MediaTexture. Simply replace the the current normal texture with the MediaTexture, and it should work as well. I haven’t tried it, but I managed to get the texture into the material editor with a simple drag and drop.
I think this is more optimized to use a video than using multiple textures and flipbooks.
Thank you! I hadn’t thought of that, it’s not quite the effect I wanted but it should do the trick for now
Hey there @Vanhendrix! Have you looking into media textures? This may work out for your needs. Let me know how it works out!
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I’m actually using media texture but i couldn’t find a way to use it to displace geometry. May be it’s just impossible in UE5 idk
No, use my method I showed, just replace the texture with the media texture and you will be able to displace the mesh.
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Yes but i get an error when i plug my media texture to the FlipBook node’s texture input : [SM6] Function FlipBook: Cannot cast from TextureExternal to texture2D.
I try to change the sampler type of the texture object but it only work with “external”, if i try to change it i get this error : [SM6] (Node TextureObject) Operation not supported on an external texture. Am i missing something ?
You likely have to “break” the Flipbook. Simply double click on the Flipbook node to open it up, then you can copy and paste its contents into the grid. This will allow you to probably use the texture properly, allowing you to skip using the Texture Object, which could be the main issue here.
Edit: If you are using a video (Media Texture), you can skip the Flipbook entirely and just plug it straight into the Multiply node that is multiplied by 25.
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It works thnak you !
Awesome!