Vertex Paint on Packed Level Actors or similar?

Sob Cryalot
Wed, 13 Nov 2024 20:19:04 +0000
World Creation

Is it possible to somehow paint across Packed Level Actors, in the scene? Like for instance, a series of “ground tiles” like in this^ video?

This might be a strange question and not really an intended worfklow, but let me explain what we are trying to achieve;

So we are creating a game for a student project, and the way we have our environment setup everything is made out of “Packed Level Actors”. These PLAs are made for all fundemental environment building blocks, such as a 1x1 floor pieces, wall pieces, stair segments, etc. Then again with these pieces, we kitbash together larger assemblies such as buildings, and save that together again, as another PLA.

What this achieves for us is that when I as the environment artist needs to update all the houses or whatever in the level, all I need to do is update those fundemental building blocks, such as the floor or wall tiles, regardless of how many houses the other team members have built with them, thus saving an extreme amount of time and making it so that when the other team members make more assets, as long as they use these base-pieces to build stuff there will never be any more work for me.

The issue now however, is that a fundemental part of our games art direction depends on vertex painting parts of the environment to be “corrupted”, and I made everything for that work perfectly before realizing 1. I cant paint onto PLA’s without going into them, and 2. if I paint on anything inside a PLA, if I then save and exit it does not show on the instanced meshes.

So now I am wondering, what exactly should we do here? The level will be massive, composed of thousands upon thousands of pieces, so if I “break” stuff out of being PLA’s or merge sections into static meshes, I will have to do an extreme amount of work whenever a “piece” needs updating.

Is there a better way to do what I want to achieve, or is there any way to just allow each PLA “instance” to be its own mesh, thus allowing for vertex paint? I dont care for the other uses of PLAs such as optimization or whatever else its used for, all I need is a way to have assemblies of objects within eachother so changes on the base parts cascade through everything. I also love the fact that the pivot is a physical object inside a PLA so whenever I update the meshes inside all I need to do is place the new meshes ontop of the old ones and nothing will get “shifted” in the scene.

Forgive me if this is a silly question / problem, I am new to unreal and am mostly concerned with the “art” part of being an environment artist, so I dont really understand the intended use of stuff like PLAs, or basic workflow stuff that allows for changes on assets to be cascaded through the level without issues.

4 posts - 2 participants