Spline Decals?

[Chosker]

Isn't this something that can already be done with Mesh Decals that was added in 4.11?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]132258[/ATTACH]

This is using just the BP_Spline asset form Content Examples and duplicating the mesh. One is the original base, the second is using DBuffer Decal with a simple brick material with a mask of the UE4 logo. These materials can even work with Landscape Splines.

how would you use that to project into a landscape though? without using a landscape spline to flatten the landscape, that is. just respecting the topology.

also mesh decals cause some bad artifacts at great view distances, since based on distance they push themselves towards the camera to avoid z-fighting. yes I've seen the code, it's MeshDecals.usf line 104 (on UE4 4.15), which is this:

// todo: tweak or expose (cvar or per mesh/material setting), if needed the artist always can create a WorldPositionOffset adjustment in the shader (e.g. -0.1*CameraDirectionVector )
Output.Position.z += 0.0001f * Output.Position.w;

this results in mesh decals ending up wrongly being drawn on top of more and more stuff, the more you zoom out

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=4894]Tim Hobson[/MENTION], Spline decals are intended to "project" a material on the surface. Without projection it's only like a masked mesh overlayed on other surface with lots of clipping specially on the landscape surface.

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

Hey guys. Woud love an update on this. Our game needs good roads.

[Tim Hobson]

Hey guys. Woud love an update on this. Our game needs good roads.

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-13142

A ticket has been in for a while. It's backlogged and marked as minor at the moment. This could change in the future, but if the feature is direly important to your project you may want to implement it yourself or hire a programmer to do so. There is also no guarantee that any feature request in our system will be implemented. That's the unfortunate reality of things. :/

[jonimake]

It would improve working with landscape quite a bit tbh, shame that's it's not a priority for you :\

[Maximum-Dev]

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-13142

A ticket has been in for a while. It's backlogged and marked as minor at the moment. This could change in the future, but if the feature is direly important to your project you may want to implement it yourself or hire a programmer to do so. There is also no guarantee that any feature request in our system will be implemented. That's the unfortunate reality of things. :/

Under what circumstances a backlogged feature request or bug gets back on the to-do list?

[Gunschlinger]

Under what circumstances a backlogged feature request or bug gets back on the to-do list?

What ? How can it be 2017 and we STILL have no decals on spline

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

You have to keep in mind Tim that open world games like Ark and Squad are among the best selling games using UE4 and such a feature would go a long way in helping development for games like those. We're doing a large open world game as well and the time costs just for getting proper roads in without destroying our world is absurd. I get that it's more interesting to incorporate cool new tech into your engine, but the truth of the matter is that for us down in the trenches making the games themselves, we need this incorporated so we can do our jobs properly. Fix the fundamentals first, I beg you.

[Drav]

I think Battlegrounds probably takes that title now, but I can say as someone who works on Squad, a decal based road system on a spline would be a very welcome addition to ue4 indeed!

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

I think Battlegrounds probably takes that title now, but I can say as someone who works on Squad, a decal based road system on a spline would be a very welcome addition to ue4 indeed!

See! And these are among the most purchased UE4 games out there. It's strange that instead of doubling down on seeing more projects like these get off the ground, we're being told that we're on our own.

Help us, Tim.

[Tim Hobson]

[MENTION=29721]PixelPerfectPolygons[/MENTION]

Sorry, I don't think I can be of any direct help. We have a ticket in for it as a feature request and beyond that it's up to the priorities of the Engineers with their planning. Not every feature request will get implemented which is an unfortunate truth.

I've posted this a couple of times before, but Max wrote a really good article for his site titled "Why your idea might not make it into UE4" that gives some insight into why this might be. Everyone always says "oh, Epic can do it really quick and easily!" However, that's really not the case if something needs to be done right and be well tested.

One alternative is to also code the feature yourself (not being you specifically, but anyone with programming experience) and submit it as a pull request through GitHub where it can be reviewed and implemented for everyone if it meets Epic's criteria.

[Maximum-Dev]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the link, but truth to be told,

Opportunity Cost
Impact
Quality
Reach
Maintenance
Support
Alignment
Summary

Are all what they have to deal with for every new feature, including what they are working on right now. So I don't think that not implementing x feature which is easier to implement than y has to do with anything mentioned above. Say, putting a decal on a spline was any harder than implementing forward shading or vulkan? definitely would have taken a fraction of that effort. So it mostly comes down to this:

Every time we decide to implement a particular feature, it means that we won’t be able to work on some other. We are also working on several games internally...

If it happened Paragon needed Spline Decals I'm sure we'd have had it by now. Sometimes some love for community interest solves a lot of issues. And in this instance, everyone using UE4 needs that feature unless they're still creating projects like this where roads are not a thing:

[Envieous]

^ ^ ^

[PixelPerfectPolygons]

[MENTION=29721]PixelPerfectPolygons[/MENTION]

Sorry, I don't think I can be of any direct help. We have a ticket in for it as a feature request and beyond that it's up to the priorities of the Engineers with their planning. Not every feature request will get implemented which is an unfortunate truth.

I've posted this a couple of times before, but Max wrote a really good article for his site titled "Why your idea might not make it into UE4" that gives some insight into why this might be. Everyone always says "oh, Epic can do it really quick and easily!" However, that's really not the case if something needs to be done right and be well tested.

One alternative is to also code the feature yourself (not being you specifically, but anyone with programming experience) and submit it as a pull request through GitHub where it can be reviewed and implemented for everyone if it meets Epic's criteria.

Sorry if I come across as angry. But it's genuinely frustrating that the community has been told twice to do it ourselves...

Look, Tim. Lets be reasonable. I might be speaking the loudest but I'm clearly not the only one in saying this is an issue. This is a feature that works natively on other engines and should have come working out of the box with UE4. That's not hyperbole. It's a fact. Talk to your engineers, your boss, or whoever you have to get it on the agenda. If you're not the person to talk to, link this thread to the person who is and lets get this worked on. The forum exists for a reason. Lets get a dialog going.

But when you suggest that we invest the time and money to it ourselves and then give our work to you in the form of a pull request, it would be akin to us asking to only pay Epic 4% royalty from sales of our game for giving you proper working spline decals. We pay you the 5% for reasonable tools and features in your engine. This is true of Ark, Squad, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, and a multitude of other games are paying Epic a lot of money. The fact that you don't have spline decals is flat out unreasonable in 2017.

[JoeWintergreen]

Yeah, this would be extremely useful. It's on my (shortening) list of Source Engine features that UE4 doesn't have (Source doesn't technically have splines, but it has overlays, which are like decals where you can manipulate the verts).