Hi guys,
I hope this is the right section to post this in.
I have been the Cryengine user for many years. I’ve tried to switch to Unreal now and love so many aspects of it, mostly the flexibility. However, there’s one thing, that may seem minor, but in my opinion it limits Unreal’s functionality drastically when it comes to environment art. And that is - geometry decals. I will try to explain what I mean here.
So, in this example I’ve setup a simple curved surface. Let’s suppose, I want to apply text decal to its corner. Using a simple decal actor is not an option, since it will just stretch too much. Well, in Cryengine we solve this by using geometry overlays with decal shader on them. The limiting factor in Unreal right now is that Dbuffer decals shader can ONLY be used with actors and not geometry. Below is an image to help demonstrate the power of this approach, screenshot from CryEngine:
Here’s setup in 3d package:
As you can see, the options here are almost limitless - I can vary the transluscency by using vertex alpha, I can have hue variations by using vertex color, and I can use the same texture sheet and combine/crop it as I wish.
At the moment, in Unreal I’m able to do something similar only with Masked materials. I’ve tried using DitherTemporalAA node, but that works only to a degree and doesn’t yield quite the same results.
I was wondering if such functionality is planned to be added to Unreal any time soon? You already have the DBuffer Decals working, all that’s needed is to make this technique working with custom geometry.
Hope this reaches the Epic guys and maybe even convinces them of the power that this approach can add to your already powerful engine.
Cheers!