Similar to the how The Division’s UI works, I was wondering if it is possible to take a full UI panel with several buttons and individually animate their hover state’s to animate outwards, on the z-axis? Since UMG at it’s core is 3d, even after its placed in 3d space, I don’t know how it would be possible, but maybe there is a way I’m not thinking of. Any help is appreciate, thanks!
PS: I have a suspicion that The Divisions UI isn’t actually doing this, rather it’s just clever camera tricks, but I wanted to ask anyway.
Nope, not currently possible for multiple reasons. UMG/Slate are not 3d at the core, it is 2D vertex buffers and the UI is built entirely out of 2D transforms. Second, we do not have a way to render slate directly into the 3D world. The Widget Component is just a render target holding the single surface of the Slate UI rendered onto it. You could fake it with multiple widget components - it would be incredibly expensive to do it that way.
They’re not using a clever camera trick - they are actually offsetting their UI, which is composed of 3D geometry rendered directly into the world, along with several clever materials that when some UI passes through objects in the world, you see a ghost layer of some of the UI - similar to the dashed lines in the editor when part of a selected object passes behind another mesh.
Ah well that’s a bit of a bummer, but confirms my suspicions. I appreciate the thorough reply.
Are you certain that the divisions main UI panels are done in 3D? I question because if you watch some video, it looks like any given UI element that is popping out doesn’t actually cover any other UI elements. It just sort of slides down and to the left, giving the illusion of Z depth. I wonder if this would be a comparable solution to do in UMG. But I would have to agree that it would be a very silly choice to make if they already have the opportunity to do it all in real 3d space.