visual-fx

[fervent lily]

Gonna have another crack it through the night tonight, 12 more hours should do it. If I figure it out I'm going to create a big thread about it

[crisp spruce]

good luck

[fervent lily]

Solved it. I'll make a thread about it soon but I think it's a bug in ue5.4.3.

Also the shadows flicker in my left lens for seemingly no reason whether I use post processing or not.

Anyway to solve it I combined both post process materials into one and used a lerp to blend them together instead. Somehow this just worked fine having both outlines and hatching patterned shadow replacements.

[crisp spruce]

Interesting. Vr may have an artificial post process limit?

[open hull]

anyone know why my particles dont show in editor but show in play?

[fervent lily]

I'm not sure. I managed to rever back to my old version and port over all the new work I did. The post process materials are separate in the old version and they work perfectly fine. So I think it's a serious VR bug with 5.4.3

[split hawk]

Is this a Niagara system?

[open hull]

@split hawk no, its cascade

[split hawk]

I probably won't be any help then, sorry.

[upper hemlock]

Hey all. Pretty stuck here. I've been trying to recreate an interactive seaweed system similar to Abzu, but with a bit more fidelity and control.
I've been able to put together some nice physics chains, but they tend to brake. I can't for the life of me figure out how to get a niagara particle chain to interact with player collisions. So my biggest question is what do you think the best way to approach this problem would be? Especially when it comes to performance? I'd like to create a scene where the player has to swim through a section of kelp forest and have it all collide in a somewhat believable way.

Would a good ol fashioned physics enabled bone chain be the best here? I'm not sure which way would be the best way to go in 5.4 What do you think?

[undone hemlock]

Hello Everyone> I have A QUERY> can u plz tell how to emit NIAGARA PARTICLES FROM A GREEN SCREEN VIDEO of Human or Use Movie Source To emit niagara particles only from Viewable Section of the movie clip> and not from the Alpha Channel (may be using media as material on plane with media player enabled) then emitting particles from the plane and not from the Alpha channel of material or plane> can u plz make dedicated video on this

[subtle wing]

Are you assuming people suddenly became your personal chatgpt? Because obviously no LLM could possibly hallucinate enough to help you with this query.

Reformulate, don't assume people are machines, and possibly come up with an alternative solution in case you are not up to the challenge.

[quasi wolf]

idk whats going on, Im trying to learn actual lighting for once but enabling shadows on the directional light completely disables it

and yes its the same after building

same thing in the default map so its not that Im missing anything here

in fact, exact same thing with regular lights too, except their lighting preview works completely fine, but once again building lighting disables it

[quasi wolf]

[split crane]

Are they set to Static, the lights? Before you rebuild the lighting.

Can you perhaps show the light settings?

[quasi wolf]

pretty much just trying with default spawned lights

although something I noticed is it works to some degree on default cubes spawned from the menu. the rest of the map is mostly one model that I built outside of unreal, so I assume thats the problem but as I said even compiling the default starter map doesnt work

[split crane]

Does your mesh and meshes have lightmap UVs?

[quasi wolf]

it has a uv set up to work with its tiling textures, but I dont know if that would be different to how a lightmap uv would work, maybe thats the problem? you can see the light affects the couch prop, but idk if maybe the uv for this map model is so horrible that it just cant manage it idk

[quasi wolf]

oh yeah

oh dear...

[split crane]

Thats... no UV at all, or barely any UV room.

You might need to regenerate the lightmap UVs for that big mesh.

[quasi wolf]

wait no it is, I think I just need a huge resolution for how big it is

[split crane]

Or increase lightmap resolution indeed.

Keep increasing till you see the checkerpattern like the couch.

Blue is okay, green is a bit better.

Red is nogo.

[quasi wolf]

damn, this is maximum

[split crane]

Ah, please show the other viewmode.

[quasi wolf]

but thanks, thats definitely the root of the problem, I have a feeling I may have to make my maps in a bit of a different way

all blue

[split crane]

Nicce!

Also, you dont need to manually make lightmap UVs, you can have UE generate them for you. Also, maybe do break up the building mesh into multiple building parts.

[quasi wolf]

yeah, I was thinking I may have to do that for one reason or another, I was expecting something to come up

[split crane]

Also, keep tweaking the World Settings their lightmap settings. Like GI bounces and boosts and such.

[quasi wolf]

although all things considered this resolution isnt actually that bad, its just that Ive been testing with such a specific thing as this window

[quasi wolf]

yeah one thing I was wondering is for outdoor/daytime maps, how can I make the shadows not completely black? I assume thats global illumination but Ive never been able to get it working properly

[split crane]

You can add a skylight and bake that right?

A static skylight.

But yeah, please also read up into the UE docs for more tricks. Its gonna take you some trial and error, just tweaking settings and rebaking all the time, but worth it.

[quasi wolf]

placing a skylight alone doesnt do anything, dont you need atmosphere too?

also, I still have the problem that directional light does nothing with shadows enabled

[split crane]

Im opening the editor, one sec.

For skylight, add a cubemap, can be default editor ones.

Then rebake.

Left skylight and rebuild with cubemap. Right no skylight and rebuild.

[quasi wolf]

oooohh cool that works thanks, never would have guessed cubemap honestly

[quasi wolf]

but yeah I still cant figure this out

[split crane]

Default settings might also work instead of cubemap, the scenecapture, but you might need to tweak lighting more.

[split crane]

Hmmm... nothing is blocking the light?

[quasi wolf]

no its like as if the light just gets completely disabled when shadows are enabled, although it does show the preview text everywhere, even where it couldnt reach. after building it does nothing

[split crane]

Can you change to Static for a sec and rebake lighting? Just for a test.

Also, when its build, can you also make a screenshot in unlit mode?

[quasi wolf]

oh yeah, forgot it does affect my windows, but Ill try static now

[quasi wolf]

heres static and unlit

[split crane]

So that static image, you just cant see the directional light, but the shadowscasting is enabled?

[quasi wolf]

although interestingly now its darker inside? even though the skylight was lighting it up everywhere

yeah basically

[split crane]

Hmmmmm...

Breaking my head :D.

Do make sure all meshes that do not need to move are set to static.

You can spot them by going into wireframe mode and look for anything purple.

Just a sidenote.

On the directional light side, I have no clue. Try increasing the intensity and rebake.

[quasi wolf]

oh man, Im a bloody fool

my skybox mesh was casting shadows...

[split crane]

😏

So it was blocked, just waaayyyyy further away :D.

Madness :D.

[quasi wolf]

yeah, its always something like this lol

but thanks, that should be everything now, still wouldnt have figured out the other things without the help

[split crane]

Glad to hear this is fixed.

Thats what were all here for. Helping!

https://tenor.com/view/mystery-solved-gif-24041199

[quasi wolf]

also just noticing something, does the resolution override not affect the preview?

[split crane]

Ah, the override should change in Lightmap Density viewmode.

Or do you mean something else?

[quasi wolf]

I mean like when I can see the shape of the window lit onto the ground, changing the lightmap resolution doesnt affect it, it looks great in preview regardless

oh man now its just doing nothing again what even happened

[split crane]

Ah, preview is not something you need to look at when baking lights, just focus on the final baked result.

[quasi wolf]

this is in preview, so directional works fine now, but after a bake its just black again

[split crane]

Yeah, that might be because the light bets blocked by the glass geometry I suspect.

[quasi wolf]

nah its the whole map

[split crane]

😮

[quasi wolf]

didnt screenshot very well there but you can slightly see the outside

[split crane]

Wow...

No clue atm.

Maybe you accidentally CTRLZ the skybox shadows checkbox.

Got to go for the night. Pleas keep us all updated :).

💪

[quasi wolf]

ah goodnight

[quasi wolf]

nah lol I checked, and thats what was preventing even the preview from working

also setting it to Movable works fine, but what difference does that make for directional? as far as I know they cant really move

[split crane]

Ah, movable makes the lights not bake. Only Static and Stationary do.

Static is all meshes are baked. Stationary bakes all static meshes and keeps movable meshes with dynamic lights and shadows. Movable is so nothing gets baked.

[quasi wolf]

yeah I know its to do with baking and I know dynamic lights are bad for performance but how much difference does that make with the one directional light? probably wouldnt need shadows for anything else so

[split crane]

I would assume your whole environment woudnt bake nicely or at all, but thats a Q for #lighting I assume. It depends on your wishes and final platform. Sometimes dynamic lights work well, just keep the cascases to low and maybe use distancefields for futher shadowing then like Fortnite.

[quasi wolf]

Im so sorry I pressed hide instead of delete but heres with it completely gone, now I get this squiggly effect when baking. again though this is probably fine outside of this specific window effect

[quasi wolf]

dammit, I missed the lighting channel

[split crane]

Maybe you need more resolution on the floor surfaces. But yeah, it looked like the glass meshes were blocking lights and casting big shadows inside before. Nice to see thats fixed. For the inside floors, do split them out of your mesh and add them separately with more resolution and mich better flat uninterupted lightmap UVs. I think the blocky might be broken lightmap UVs or just lowres ones? No idea atm.

[split crane]

No worries, maybe move the convo there then before we get punished by our beloved moderators.

Ill head off for today... maybe chat soon!

[quasi wolf]

bye, and thanks again

[native briar]

your skybox

or the direction is just bad looks like a simple issue

[quasi wolf]

I already figured out it was the skybox blocking it

which was my bad but I needed some help with the other problems

[finite frigate]

Is there any way to utilize "user parameters" in a curve for Niagara Systems?

I want to be able to use a "height" user parameter for the value in the 0.5 value in the center

[keen stream]

I'm having a similar issue, hoping someone knows a way to expose these two values as parameters (this is from a 'color over life' module)

[karmic juniper]

Problem: Attempting to Set a Color parameter via blueprint is not actually changing the color. Also not working when trying to change it in an instanced version. What am I doing wrong?

[karmic juniper]

You can't... See this: https://youtu.be/Oed7pjMx0MM?si=RQ5t6PwETttDc26T
I wanted to do the same, but video a a sort of work around.

[wanton juniper]

Hey guys, just wondering if anyone here has tried using DLSS or FSR in UE5? Does it replace TSR or does it work alongside it and if it does replace TSR, do they run better? Thanks in advance for the help!

[golden umbra]

DLSS works great in Unreal, and replaces TSR. DLSS main benefit IMO is that render resolution gets reduced so GPU runs faster for similar visuals.

[wanton juniper]

Ok nice, I think I'll give it a look then thanks!

[fading cave]

Are there any ways to make bright elements which looks the same despite the lighting? I want to have have some "meta" elements in my world but I cannot make them look consistently the same both in day and night. Adding emissive color makes the material break auto exposure, so i either have to tweak it, or attempt to use something else

One way to handle this is to use widget components in screen space, but it is not possible in all cases

e.g. I have this grid which is either too bleak in daylight, or breaks exposure too much at night

It is unlit material with emissive color = 10000

What I want is to have this material either be exempt or affect auto exposure in such a way that it would still allow me to do some night landscape

[neon bloom]

is there a decent way to show a preview of a niagara effect? say like a bullet or something thats triggered. I kindve want to be able to see the effect at a certain point without having to constantly play through individual assets in the viewport, outside of the niagara editor.

[split crane]

The guys at Epic said to use a InverseExposure node on your material to fix this.

[violet jungle]

Hi guys.
I want create a Rain VFX.
Theoretical question - who knows any technic how to do high quality but optimized Rain?
Mb somebody knows how its doing usually in AAA-games?

And also - raindrop impact effect - I want 2 different impact particles when raindrops colliding with surfaces: when it collides with hard surface it spawns only splash, when it collide with puddle it also has a ripple effect.

Any ideas?

[fading cave]

Thanks! it works fairly well and resolves the most issues

[split crane]

You can go for Niagara, small sprites. Then I would let them fall in worldspace in a radius around your character. Just attach the Niagara system on your character pawn. You could also make it a static mesh and animate the rain drops in worldpositionoffset. It is tougher to get the timing right for impact splashes. Impact splashes and ripples I would just not do that per dropplet, just make the ripples a premade looping flipbook or shader approach in the material. The splashes alone when colliding would cause performance hits, so be careful. The most optimized way is imho a Niagara effect around your pawn, then make ripples as flipbook playing on a loop in the water surfaces. For impact splashes go through Niagara too with colliding.

[violet jungle]

Thank you much
Looks like its the only way to make it not expensive.
And yeah, i'll not do collisions - its not good for fps

[split crane]

One other cheap way is to make the impact splashes with pivot paint and make the move in Z based on distance fields. That way you only have to spawn one static mesh in niagara and not having to rely on collisions. Its a tricky one, but with some good trickery managable.

[woeful estuary]

Level sequence and blueprints question:
I have a blueprint of these rotating lights -- they rotate at the start of the sequence but I'd like for them to rotate at the start of another sequence as well -- is there a way to "reset" the blueprint from the beginning upon the second level sequence running?
The blueprint acts as this: rotating for the duration of the sequence using a delay (both sequences are the same length) and stops at the end. It has several lights within the BP and a mesh.
Sequence 1 activates and works well -- sequence two needs to activate the blueprint again, from the beginning, upon it's start.

[coarse karma]

this is more of a general UE question, but you need to include an event in your blueprint that you can call that runs whatever rotate logic you want

[ocean patrol]

hello everyone,
I just purchased the Niagara Realistic Starter VFX Pack, and I'm facing a problem when changing the translucency to raytracing the effects seem not to be working (disappearing) but when the translucency is set to Raster the effects work fine but I lose all the reflection. any thoughts? I would be super appreciative!

[lavish trail]

Hi good morning,im so sorry if this notification bothering your day
I am a first graduate and I am very new in the unreal engine. is it necessary for a VFX position in the game industry for a VFX artist to master houdini softwarte as well as mastering niagara VFX?.thank you 😇

[split crane]

For VFX yes, you dont need to fully master it, but you do need to know the most intermediate levels of them. Maybe start off by searching for some FX work people have been showing off on ArtStation and the tools they used. Also learning Embergen or Liquigen isnt a bad thing to do. But, a strong portfolio should bring you along way.

Also, depends on the style youd like to go. Not much Houdini is needed for a stylized game, while next gen FX is needed for a AAA game these days.

[lavish trail]

thank you very much for the answer and advice, I really appreciate it, may your kindness make your day blessed with goodness😁 @split crane

[dapper dawn]

Hello. How can I get particle collision to work with mesh data in cascade? Whatever I try I can't seem to get the collision working. 😦

[lofty jacinth]

Hey, little bit of a longshot here but was curious if anyone has any advice on how to troubleshoot this.

I have a trailing effect that is supposed to follow my character's sword when they swing it. This trailing effect notify is a custom notify I created which uses a Niagara module script I also made. Everything works great when I PIE.

When I package the game, this trailing effect disappears. I can however still print to screen that the custom notify is being active and receiving the correct data (such as location to spawn the effect).

What could be causing this?

[short aspen]

does anyone know of any sensible solutions for distance fog while developing for quest 2?

[tight basin]

Hey guys hope u all doing great
So in my game which is set at night time the shadows are really impacting my preformance so the thing is when i set the quality of shadows to either epic high medium i dont really get any difference maybe only 2 to 4 fps but if i set them to low all the shadows disappear and i get a massive boost
Im using the engine scalability settings

[split crane]

Whats the Q?

Can you screenshot a "profile GPU" window or a "Ctrl+Shift+," screenshot of your performance?

[split crane]

Whats the issue atm? Maybe use a post process material with SceneDepth?

[tight basin]

is it normal for shadows to fully vanish on low settings
i mean it would make sense to make it super ugly but not vanish all

hold on ill fire up ue

[split crane]

Yeah, some settings might be disabled in lower scalability.

[tight basin]

also why i dont see any diffrence on all settings like epic or high or meduim
i dont see any fps diffrence maybe 2 or 3
only on low settings where i get like 30 fps or 50 fps

[split crane]

Settings really. You can see what changes in scalability when you change editor scalability and open up the output log.

[tight basin]

this is medium

and this is low

doesnt matter if i use high or epic or even cinematics the fps stays the same

only on low where i get massiver fps

[split crane]

Just screenshot with profile gpu open ;).

[tight basin]

ahhhhh

ok

[split crane]

In UE, all that matters is stats and numbers :).

[tight basin]

make sense

here u go

[split crane]

And one other on the other scalability for comparison :).

[tight basin]

im sry but i didnt understand

i dont know what to open as well

[split crane]

Just change scalability and reopen profile gpu :).

[tight basin]

ahh ok

[split crane]

Is the above image on low or high scalability?

[tight basin]

high

and this one the last one i mean on low

[split crane]

Hmmm please make a new one, this is now showing much but the engine windows and tasks.

[tight basin]

on low settings i got the same one

[split crane]

But you can clearly see the light green bar being much smaller in the second screenshot. Light and shadows are off or heavily reduced in quality.

[tight basin]

yeah i didnt notice that at all

[split crane]

If you want high settings, then do look into optimising shadows and possibly light complexity and shadow cull distances.

Also, the last bar on the right might be post process, make a look there too.

[tight basin]

just a q
does using screen space rather than lumen cause this issue or not ?

[split crane]

Lumen has its own bar and yes, scalability of Lumen is tweakable in the post process volume settings.

Just lower the settings to bare basics.

[tight basin]

okay
ill try and see
thanks for the help tho

much appreciated

🙏

[split crane]

Happy to guide.

Also, maybe continue these convos in #profiling perhaps?

[tight basin]

yeah i will

thanks man

ur a G

lol

[split crane]

Good luck in your endeavours :).

[cedar horizon]

I need help figuring out how to add dynamic collision to my particle actor blueprints. Niagara has a collision module that I think needs to be used as reference.(Lighting Strikes)

[fresh quiver]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1258367316450607105/1274308628953960541/20240817-1006-15.5693090.mp4?ex=66c1c7e4&is=66c07664&hm=e84e1259cf689bdd75145280c5202f8690145afd75af195d24a3ea941778045c&

hi does anyone know what effect is this when hit the enemy with spiral blade

like the whole body is shaking

[split crane]

Maybe some WorldPositionOffset shader on the character? Then perhaps driven as MaterialParameterCollection?

[fresh quiver]

tq

[clever hearth]

How Can I make smooth transition between post process volume and outside of the volume?

[split crane]

Isnt there a distance setting in the volume settings?

[quasi wolf]

is unreals depth of field just... bad? to fix the problem on the left I had to look it up and saw other people having the same thing, but someone mentioned the r.DOF.Kernel.MaxBackgroundRadius command, which, sure it fixed it, but only by just making the whole thing less blurred?

since this is 2d surely there some material or something I can use to just blur everything behind a background plane

[crisp shard]

@lavish trail now more and more games use niagara

[lavish trail]

Is that another VFX software? 😅 @crisp shard

[crisp shard]

@lavish trail niagara is the new vfx system inside unreal engine

[lavish trail]

ah alright i will learn that to,thank you !!!! by the way,do you have paid VFX course??

[plucky moss]

Courses are great, I recommend them to start, but in an intermediate-mid level I recommend you to pay to someone that teach you

Start understanding the Niagara system

Always that you can try to make your own textures

To start you can use them without make or draw them

VFX isnt just Niagara system

Try to learn the next softwares:

Substance 3D Designer, Photoshop, Houdini,("If you can some of basic animation in Maya")

in Unreal Engine "Materials"('Basic Blueprint')

In Niagara systems "Scrath Pad"('This is to understand Niagara better')

When you can try to take a course of (VEX in Houdini)

If you understand vex you wont need to keep studying scrath because you will understand it really easy

just a few things in Scrath like the name, after you can understand vex you will able to understand a lot of things in scrath pad

and learn "RedShift"

its the render system inside Houdini

After that you can start with Nuke

before nuke you should understand the bridge between Houdini and Unreal Engine

I think those are all the steps, you can learn hlsl if you want

I recommend it

Post process is important too

With HLSL it will helps a lot

in Houdini try to keep something called(Vertex Texture Animation)

Flipbooks etc

I hope I dont forget anything

And yeah, with that you should be able to do the vfx that you can imagine ("If you can imagine it you can create it")

@lavish trail Try to take any screenshot or save it in a .txt file, this is basically all the steps that you should give

[lavish trail]

WOW I didn't think I would get such a detailed answer thank you so much!!!, may your kindness bring you good fortune, I really thank you !!!!!! @plucky moss

[rocky vapor]

Hey VFX artists! I’m looking to actually learn Niagara (watch tutorials/guides, take notes, practice, etc.) but I can’t seem to find anything very useful… Most videos on youtube are way too specific, like "How to make this specific stylized fire" or "How to do this specific smoke", while I’m looking to actually learn the general techniques and ideas

I’d really appreciate it if some of y’all can link me whatever they used to learn! Thank you

[lavish trail]

hii im newbie in VFX I just browsed udemy, this is the course I bought, I hope you can take it into consideration 😄 @rocky vapor

https://www.udemy.com/course/unleashfx-unreal-engine-niagara-fx-and-sequencer/?couponCode=SKILLS4SALEA

https://www.udemy.com/course/ue4-vfx-for-games-beginner-to-intermediate/?couponCode=SKILLS4SALEA

[rocky vapor]

Thank you for sharing!

[plucky moss]

You are welcome dude, feel free to dm, some people when start with vfx gets some problems, I'll try to solve them if you need help))

I was doing some tests

with volumetrics

between Houdini and Unreal

if you use the fluid system of unreal engine it will be expensive

but if you use one of Houdini and import it there you can get a 3D volume

x,y,z, yk

like here:

If you learn Houdini you can make custom volumes

For example, this shot that I'm doing, I can export those volumes and particles from Houdini, and control them by the time inside Unreal Engine, or change the density of them there

A muzzle Smoke is something that can be done as you say too) @celest birch

actually you can use a trick if you want to use flip books

you can add two planes

and render the smoke muzzle in both sides

and let x and z angle inside unreal engine

you can add a depth and control opacity with a dot product between it and the player

to make with less intensity the plane 1 or the plane 2

to get something like a volumetric looking

or you can just use a volumetric from Houdini and have it in 3D

[opaque skiff]

idk if this is the right place to ask but can someone explain why fog suddenly disappears when looking up at the sky through water?

[tough basin]

i can't quite tell what i'm looking at in this screenshot, but are we looking at a reflection? if so the most likely explanation is screen space reflections

[opaque skiff]

my fault, so I am under the map looking at the sky top half is normal sky color and bottom half is the water. there are mountains in the background shown in bottom half

the sky is being shown because all of a sudden there is no fog

[plucky moss]

No, I’ve never heard about it

[plucky moss]

Hehe, good luck with that))

[stiff fable]

How would I go about making something in a certain custom stencil invisible. ie. I want a IR camera and something only visible when the IR material is active and not when its the normal one

[tough basin]

post process materials can look at a pixel's stencil value when drawing it. but you can't just erase it; you have to replace it with something else

the information required to just draw what's behind it has been lost

alternative options:

• when the camera setting changes, get the hideable actors and toggle their visibility
• (the opposite) actors subject to hiding check the camera setting on tick and hide themselves
• give hideable actors masked materials. set the opacity based on a material parameter collection which indicates whether the IR camera is active

[rocky vapor]

Hey chat, I have a very simple niagara system, and I was just wondering why is glow not showing up? Does the default material just not have any emissive/glow?

Compared to an actually glowing one (taken from a youtube vid)

[stoic zenith]

Any VDB-SVT experts?
How useful are temperature and vel fields for imported vdb sequences?
Or should I only keep density?
Trying to reduce the size of my vdb exports!

[rocky vapor]

Update: Glow was disabled by default in the project's settings... for some reason

[rocky vapor]

Update 2: Actually that's a workaround not a fix... Please someone help me enable glow on my particles without enabling boom 😭

[old thicket]

After applying a post processing material with Blendable Location set to "translucency after dof" the Particles (cascade) effects are not visible any more. Niagara on the other hand seems to work fine.
Any idea if this is a know thing? I can't find much information

[tough basin]

bloom is the main way you would achieve glow. i would not consider it a workaround

you could fake bloom in a translucent material by using a fresnel function to control opacity, with a sharp step-up in the middle values, creating a solid interior and a glowy exterior

but bloom is a very common and usually nice looking effect

[rocky vapor]

Hmm.. Interesting. So there’s no way to make glowing objects/materials without enabling bloom for the whole scene/world?

I just wanted to see if compositing bloom in post-process worked better in my workflow rather than enabling UE’s bloom
But it seems it’s not possible…?

[tough basin]

when there's a will there's usually a way, but there's not an intended method besides bloom

[rocky vapor]

Ah okay, I just thought there was a native way of having that

Thank you for the answers

[tough basin]

if you're compositing HDR video you could achieve the bloom yourself

(does UE5 emit HDR video? i have no idea)

[rocky vapor]

Well I just wanted to disable glow on everything except glowing (emissive) materials, basically

[tough basin]

you could also make a post process material that selectively blooms

[rocky vapor]

Is that difficult to do?

[tough basin]

• assign a custom stencil to your effects that need bloom
• perform a blur in post process for pixels that match the stencil

[rocky vapor]

I assume a stencil is some sort of tag?

[tough basin]

it's not difficult if you're used to making custom materials and writing a bit of HLSL. but you do need that

[rocky vapor]

I'm not LOL

Very new to UE

Coming from Blender, as an animator

[tough basin]

yes, meshes (and i assume particles, but i've never tried TBH) can assign a custom stencil, which basically writes a number (a tag) on a scene texture which you can access in post process

[rocky vapor]

That's amazing, can you do render passes using this??

I mean I think I got the name of the concept wrong lol, tired

[tough basin]

Render pass has a technical definition which this does not strictly meet, but yes, you can do those kinds of things in post process materials

a post process material basically treats your scene as a static image -- with other images containing information like depth, or stencils -- and process it like photoshop does

[rocky vapor]

I meant rendering different meshes on their own (for example rendering foreground objects on their own, then middle ground, then background...)

[rocky vapor]

Ahh makes sense!

[plucky moss]

This is the yours right?

[rocky vapor]

I thought UE's post process worked differently for some reason lol

[rocky vapor]

What?

[plucky moss]

And this is the glow that you want to get, right?

[tough basin]

You can't in games but possibly you can for cinematics. outside my expertise

[rocky vapor]

Ah yeah

[rocky vapor]

I fixed it by enabling bloom, but I thought I could fix it without enabling bloom..

[plucky moss]

Bloom isnt the correct option

[rocky vapor]

Yeah I'm using UE for cinematics only, animating in blender then rendering + particle/vfx in UE

[plucky moss]

Look

The default particle material is additive

[rocky vapor]

Yes

[plucky moss]

you should change it to translucent

and use the emissive channel

[rocky vapor]

Using the emissive chanel with an additive mode material doesn't work? (with bloom disabled)

[plucky moss]

Show me the material that you're using

[rocky vapor]

I can't right now, I was about to go sleep lol
But I was using the default material
I think I can find a screenshot I took earlier, give me a sec

It was this one

The glow worked with bloom enabled, but didn't without it

[tough basin]

blend mode: translucent
emissive: whatever you want
opacity: fresnel function -> if (input > 0.5, 1, otherwise input) -> opacity

[plucky moss]

Additive is the problem

use translucent and it will be fixed

[rocky vapor]

So additive blend materials cannot glow without bloom enabled?

[plucky moss]

The bloom is optional

Its basically post process

[rocky vapor]

Yes

But if I disable it

[plucky moss]

This glow

is just an Emissive

[plucky moss]

That doesnt matter

you can disable it

[rocky vapor]

There is no way to make glow work with an additive material?

This is my question lol

[plucky moss]

There isnt

[rocky vapor]

Okay
Thanks to you two, I'll try what you suggested tomorrow

[plucky moss]

Good night dude

[rocky vapor]

Thanks! (y'all too depending on the timezone lmao)

[worldly solstice]

hi I'm a beginner with vfx and niagara. I've been following a couple of tutorials this past week and I know the general concepts and modules but with this stylized smoke I can't figure out how to replicate. Any ideas how to achieve initial bulging smoke?

oh it didn't upload as a gif

[rocky whale]

is there a way to create a specular map if my PBR does not have it?

[open pine]

Anyone know if masking a decal to be excluded from post process w/ a stencil is possible? I can set just about everything else to use a stencil to exclude it from my PPM but decals dont have a render pass and stencil option and they simply ignore there parents options as well example if I parent the decal to a static mesh etc ... IDK what to do because the blood decals need to be excluded at all times and appear red while the world is black white using the PPM

[rocky bison]

Sure. Desaturate the diffuse and start from there

[dusky ruin]

@left raptor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uapad3pVxBY

[zinc mica]

Hmm.. I could be wrong here but I'd guess that decals cannot use stencil since they are transparent and applied over top of a different rendered surface. I'd assume they fit into the render pipeline differently because they are fundamentally rendered differently, i.e. after meshes. I think you'd have to modify the render pipeline to extract a mask from the step unreal uses to renders decals. Once you have the decal texture you could then sample that in the post processing effect to mask the denaturation.

[zinc mica]

Just set the bloom threshold to something greater than 1, the higher you go the more you constrain the glow to strongly emissive materials. You should also try setting the color values on the particles above 1 as well, you can't do this in the color picker window you have to select the rgba values directly and then you can set them as high as you want to. That will make them glow like crazy (i think even without bloom on).

[hardy glen]

How will you implement a shooting star? Thanks!

[stoic zenith]

Any VDB experts here?
With a recent sequence I keep getting the following error on import
"LogSparseVolumeTextureFactory: Error: OpenVDB file contains no grids:"

[stiff fable]

Hellos! So Im a beginner with these things and I mostly change whats already there. Im working on a Thermal Vision Post Process that involves both hot and freezing spots depending on the custom depth stencil. I have the colors worked out and they're both showing but the Freezing ( purple ) is able to be seen through walls. Here is the file. i've tried various stuff at the end to fix it but im at a loss if anyone could help out.

[topaz violet]

If it just needs to go across the sky with no curve, sprite. If it needs a curve, sprite with a ribbon, if it needs to be closer then start looking at mesh... maybe depending on length of time on camera and distance).

[tough basin]

Can you post a screenshot of the issue and maybe the material?

What material is the wall using

Is it opaque?

[stiff fable]

https://gyazo.com/5a46263c180b021d789d65f7eb656313

[tough basin]

Is the wall an opaque material

[stiff fable]

ya. the other one the hot works just fine. but just not the purple

[tough basin]

The transparent window would not rewrite stencil

For example

Is that pot clipping through the wall?

Does it work if you move it further away?

[stiff fable]

i moved it out further and still see it though everything

[tough basin]

What does the stencil buffer debug view show

[tough basin]

And what does your material look like?

[stiff fable]

the post process? I posted that above

[tough basin]

I mean the graph itself

I'm on mobile and can't open the uasset

[tough basin]

Is the wall mesh one-sided?

eg. does it render anything on the backface?

I can see it renders facing the outside of the house, but the inside is so dark i can't tell

[stiff fable]

i think its two 1 sided but together. the first one the red and orange works just fine

[tough basin]

Basically it looks like the wall is writing to custom depth from the outside looking in, but not the reverse

which would be the case if:

• the wall was translucent
• the wall was a single one-sided mesh
• the wall was two one-sided meshes and the one visible from the inside doesn't render in custom pass

[stiff fable]

why would the first one work but not the second (purple ) one?

[tough basin]

if you swap their places does the issue remain?

in short, the material graph looks reasonable. as best i can tell the issue is with the scene meshes and not occluding the stenciled objects correctly

[stiff fable]

i just made a basic cube and put the pot behind it and it still does it

and again its just the one thats purple that you can see through. the red/oranage one can't be seen through the anything

[tough basin]

And you're enabling Render CustomDepth Pass for that cube?

[stiff fable]

on the things i want hot or cold the cube is being used as a two-sided wall

[tough basin]

Basically if the cube isn't Render CustomDepth Pass I don't think it will occlude the pot's stencil value

still doesn't explain why the pot and bench would act differently

at that point i'm out of ideas and requesting a tag-in from anyone else who might have better 🥵

[rocky vapor]

Oh you can change the bloom threshold? Where's that?
(sorry for the 2 days late reply, lol)

[tough basin]

Post process volume, possibly also project settings

[rocky vapor]

I see, thank you

[hardy glen]

Thanks!

[stoic zenith]

Last hurdle in my Axiom simulation.
Whats the trick in advecting one pyro simulation with another?
I've converted a low res source sim fields from density and vel to influence and influenceVeolocity respectively. This is what Axiom expects.
Then merged this with the source vdbs in my target simulation.
It is having some effect but not pushing out or advecting the smoke as I had hoped! (circled in green)
What am I missing?

[silk moon]

Hey everyone.
I got a question regarding volumetric fog. (I hope I'm in the right channel for that)
So, I use local volumes for volumetric fog which is driven by the volume domain material, and applied to a simple box mesh. A classic workflow.
One thing that is still kinda unknown to me is how to "subtract" from the volumetric fog with arbitrary volumes (distance field masking is off the table due to many problems with it in our current setup).

I was thinking about doing it through Render Targets, but thats a problem since they are 2D, unless we use 3D RTs which is kinda scary on the performance side.

Another potential way is to have a sphere or a box mask generated inside the volume material which subtracts from the original volume. But that is more problematic since its too rigid and has problems with scale (how to have multiple subtraction "volumes" if its driven through a material param collection)

Did anyone here dabbled in similar systems? How would one scalably subtract from the volumetric fog locally?

[rocky vapor]

Hey chat
Say I have a sprite particle emitter, is there a way to make the sprite still visible even when seen from the side? Since it's like a piece of paper, it logically gets so thin that it gets invisible, but is there a way to add thickness to it without making it a mesh?

[tough basin]

hello @silk moon i loved your unreal fest talk and podcast. currently at 100% orpheus 100% isle and... 0% in into the abyss

What do you think about adapting Ultra Volumetrics paint mode?

• make an actor
• create dynamic material instance of volumetric material
• give it a 2d texture as heightmap -> set as tex parameter on dynamic material instance
• editor widget for painting the heightmap
  Ultra Volumetrics uses a mask but i don't see why it couldn't be a heightmap instead. potentially two, for top and bottom, if you need to carve out the bottom

performance implication would be 1-2 not-especially-high-res 2d textures per actor

[tough basin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jEjkBxyfuA

another workflow would be to carve meshes on the fly for your fog, say, using modeling mode's cube grid editor

[silk moon]

hey @tough basin thank you for your kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed it 😄

Regarding the Ultra Volumetrics, it seems like a great tool, def something I'd use for a smaller, more focused level.

My current needs are for a scalable system of volumes which are set in interior areas which should "subtract" from the main fog volume which itself is moving through the world (read, a sandstorm with a volumetric fog mesh component on it).

Your idea of having meshes (or volumes) carving the fog was my initial idea, but it has the problem if scalability, first, in a sense of how would you feed the info of the mesh location and scale, its doable with one, maybe even 2 carving meshes, but ill prolly need 100s in the end and thats just not a viable solution.

Making them draw into the render targert for subtraction would fix that problem of scalability, BUT, 2d Render Target only projects onto 2 axis, whereas I will prolly need areas where the interior is above a fog volume and if I carve that interior, the mask will be visible above ground.

Cube Render Targets might be a solution, but I never had any experience with them and the biggest concern there is just sheer cost of them.

Another option a colleague of mine mentioned is to have VDB (SVT) cubes as volumes, but ill need to figure out how to feed multiple locations for them.

[silk moon]

to correct myself, not cube render target, im thinking about volume render targets

[tough basin]

VDBs are the most natural fit, and as you observe, also potentially nasty in memory

one way to achieve subtraction would be for an actor to subdivide the scene into box fog volumes such that each volume receives some fixed number of masks (probably one)

like an octree subdivision where you only subdivide an area if it contains more than one mask

do subdivision at construction time; material only needs to apply a fixed number of masks (like one); instead of the memory/resolution tradeoff of a VDB you're spawning more fog meshes, roughly the same number of masks you have

[silk moon]

that sounds like it would do the trick, but at the same time it sounds so over-engineered.

My plan is to actually give Volume Render Targets a try, gonna try and see if they can be projected in world-space but the center being the player character, and it covering a certain range (hopefuly it won't require too-big of a resolution). If it falls out, its back to square one.

P.S. I spoke with Epic on UDN and they dont have any framework for such subtraction functionality, which is baffling to me, even now. But it is what it is.
Thanks for your input, Dan 😄

[tough basin]

good luck. excited to see the results in a few years 🙂

[analog onyx]

You cannot really subtract, no. But what you can do, is supply list of subtractive volumes you have to your volumetric material, and for every voxel of said material,run through list of subtractive volumes potentially affecting it and evaluate negative contribution.

Obviously, has to be spatially accelerated

This is all easily driven by niagara and a simple blueprint

[hardy glen]

Hi. Is it possible to disable the bloom effect in some actors and not in others? I have two types of actors with an emissive material (different for each type of object). I want to disable the bloom effect in one type. Is it possible? Now, I'm using a Post Process Volume, but it disables it to all of them.

Thanks!

[hardy glen]

Or maybe, excluding them from post processing.

[tough basin]

There's not a great way to do this explicitly

but you could:

• Write to stencil with the meshes that shouldn't bloom
• In post processing, before tonemapping, cap the brightness of stenciled pixels so they don't cross the bloom threshold

color -> divide by eye adaptation -> min(bloom threshold, color) -> multiply by eye adaptation

(or maybe it's multiply and divide, i always forget)

this will work best if the bloom threshold is pretty high, like 1+

[fervent moth]

My emissive billboard beams don't occlude the moving head lights when viewed from certain angles.

Any suggestions what is causing this issue or how to investigate?

The material used is the beam material shipped in the DMX plugin.

[tawny kraken]

does anyone know why this post processing only works in the viewport and not in game?

[tough basin]

show material

my first guess with no knowledge of how this is implemented is screen percentage

[tawny kraken]

I’ll have to send it either later today or tomorrow as I’m about to sleep

[tough basin]

other guess would be post process volume being flagged "editor only"

or camera leaving the volume

[tawny kraken]

That’s a thing?

[tawny kraken]

It’s set to infinite

[tough basin]

it's a checkbox on the actor

[tawny kraken]

I’ll have a look at that when I have some free time

[hoary lynx]

Anyone have any experience with directly coding hlsl via SceneView?
I've integrated a SceneViewExtensionTemplate plugin into my project, and managed to be able to generate a custom shader
However once I tried to add multiple buffer passes (basically outputting one texture at the end of one shader function, and then using that output for the next shader)
there seems to be a problem with creating multiple shaders. It seems all shaders declared from the global shader require you to use the same FParameters and PassParameters-

I hope this makes sense, i'm hella new to hlsl was just previously using the custom node but started realising the limitations

Or if anyone has suggestions on making a shader that can run a main CS code and then send its output to another shader

[hardy glen]

Thanks! I've been reading about something called custom depth stencil.

[tough basin]

yes, that's what i'm referring to!

[hardy glen]

Great! Thanks a lot!

[knotty scroll]

If i were to be a freelance vfx artist how much would i take for something like this?

[tawny kraken]

i also checked and it isnt set to only be in the editor

[tough basin]

Still using viewport scaling as my working hypothesis: does it work in game if you increase the width?

In general the approach doesn't quite make sense to me

As it looks like you're going to get arbitrary color multipliers at each pixel

Instead of some kind of CRT effect which I think you're going for

[tawny kraken]

It’s on unbound so it doesn’t matter about the box size

[tawny kraken]

I’m trying to get an effect similar to this but without the screen curve

[tough basin]

I'm talking about the width parameter in the material

[tough basin]

Try Screen Position (pixels) -> mask g -> fmod some width param -> divide by that width -> multiply ppi0 by that

I think your issue is caused by the banding math being wrong in a way that causes the banding to actually happen due to an interference pattern that depends on viewport size

[zinc mica]

wondering how this effect could be recreated in unreal? Talking about the particles around the emissive part of the prowler's gauntlet. They seem like they are local space to the gauntlet, but they aren't spawning in/out like a particle system. The thing is when they move they seem to have the volumetric depth like a particle effect rather than a mesh. Maybe it's a layered mesh though. What do you guys think? Is it possible with Niagara, since the particles would need to be fully deterministic and last perpetually?

[tough basin]

do you have a video reference?

you couldn't do this too easily with volumetrics in unreal because they operate on a pretty low-res voxel grid. i think you can control that grid size by CVAR but this is like 1000x smaller t han grid size

there are a lot of tricks you can do with translucency to achieve different effects. from screenshot alone i don't have much guess

they might also be getting some near-field DOF blurring

[zinc mica]

lemme share the video. https://youtu.be/uKPJ-QmYXLU?t=166 watching it over again im starting to think its actually a plane or a post scren space effect

still finding it hard to tell from this bit since it's very short. I think they used this effect in multiple places throughout the movie but for some reason this shot stuck out in my memory

[tough basin]

honestly this might just be a flat painted translucent plane

[zinc mica]

I guess a lot of time the simple solution is the best haha. Thanks for the thought 😀. The vfx in this movie are god tier

[lucid phoenix]

How do I make it so that:

1. a beam effect I have is always shown in lumen reflections (from testing only masked materials show)

2. make it so that the visual isn't culled in reflections (the beam should be visible in the reflection even if not visible in the camera)

[fresh pasture]

hi,
I am trying to find a way to dynamically remove/disable volumetric fog only around my player. For example he can turn on a lantern that removes the fog at radius 5m around him. I am searching a way by playing with the fog paramters at runtime using blueprints but can't find anything to work...
Do you have any ideas or suggestions?

[tough basin]

simplest way:

• create a material parameter collection
• vector parameter: lantern position
• scalar parameter: lantern radius
• in your volumetric fog material: if world position distance from lantern position is less than lantern radius, set extinction/emissive to zero

• update material parameters from your lantern or character blueprint

[fresh pasture]

Thanks a lot! I'll try that right away

[zealous snow]

My decals aren't showing up in your Unreal Engine 5.4 build ...

[zenith citrus]

I am having some issue importing my UE multilayer exr in davinci. I am not sure what I am doing wrong:

[silk moon]

hey everyone
So, after couple of days of experimentation and frustration with Volumetric Fog subtraction, I came up with a "good enough" system for Volume Subtraction

For context, I've tried different techniques

• With 2 Render Targets where you would write location and extents of a volume to a single pixel of those RTs, so it would be scalable due to the sheer number of pixels in a relatively small RT, but that didn't work as I would need an looping function which would need to sample those RTs as much times as there's number of pixels in that RT (and that's just not really possible)
• I even tried @tough basin solution of creating an Octree subdivision where the subtraction volumes are, but I got lost in the math and didn't continue that further (although I've seen some other interesting use-cases of octrees, but that's an adventure for another time).

So, as for the actual solution.
It's a dual-volume system, where there's a single Activation Volume which controls up to 10 Subtraction Volumes.
Activation Volume itself is responsible for gathering all the associated Subtraction Volumes and sending their location and extents info to a material param collection, which, in turn, is sampled within the volumetric fog material and used to create up to 10 box masks which subtract the existing density.
In this short amount of testing I did, it seems as a very scalable system, and fairly usable, although there are some caveates

• Subtraction Volumes are axis alignes, the box mask in material does not take into account rotation info from the subtraction volumes
• Subtraction Volumes are always boxes, not spheres, or cylinders, or any other primitive.

All these shortcomings might be fixable, but as of right now, I'll probably stick with this approach. If anyone has any suggestions or comments, I'm willing to hear them out.

Cheers!

[fresh nexus]

is there any way (that will work in packaged builds) to read Vertex Color data from a raycast on a mesh?

[tough basin]

nice 🙂 seems practical
If you want to rotate the masks here's the HLSL I use to do it:

so you can take the mask actor's rotation Rotator, invert it, send it as a vector material parameter, and then this applies the inverted rotation

[silk moon]

@tough basin wow, thank you for this, will try and integrate this tomorrow if I get the time, looks good

mainly, yes

I don't really understand the question. Do you mean if we disable volumetric fog in scalability?

By default, I think it gets disabled when Effects are bellow Medium, but I'll argue for that not to be the case for our next project, if it can be helped. If not... we will probably have to live with the fog in interiors. Or make a separate system that just globally reduces fog density which is NOT ideal.

[hoary lynx]

Can anyone can help with getting a bloom texture to stretch all the way to the bottom of screen/ viewport / render ?

• it seems that even if the bloom texture goes all the way to bottom, it doesn't react that way.
  As you can see via right image, in viewport there are points where the bloom texture fades at the bottom but the image texture fills the canvas

Happy to try a work around via code if that's the only way, but wondering if there's a simple solution

+Any sort of advice would be super helpful, just want one of my questions to be answered by someone in here:'(

[tough basin]

to confirm, you are using Convolution bloom, and this is the Convolution Kernel texture?

[hoary lynx]

Yes convolution bloom

[tough basin]

speculating, not saying for certain, but i would guess the convolution bloom is applied on downsampled textures, and if so it would be easy to lose small details along the way

the hint to me that it's downsampled is because of the squareness of the center of the bloom (suggesting upsampling from a downsampled texture) and the general lack of fidelity compared to the original texture

[hoary lynx]

That makes a lot of sense!

[tough basin]

a test could be to make the long part of that flare wider and see if that increases the length as well

[hoary lynx]

Okay sure thing let me try this, thank you so much!

[tough basin]

if you want very juicy lens flares and don't need real-time performance i like https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/cinematic-lens-flares

the flares are done in post process materials at full resolution

so, slower but mostly prettier

[hoary lynx]

Just tried with a much wider rectangle for the flare but run into same problem, it seems like once you scale the viewport out of 16:9, so say to 4:3 then the flare gets scaled with it

[tough basin]

oh i meant make the beam of light inside your texture wider

texture same size

[hoary lynx]

Yess thats what i changed, just widened it in photoshop- idk if its the way lens flares are applied as you mentioned

Maybe its a limitation, could try recreating the flare as a post process as you said could look nicer tbf

ignore the crazy amount of purple in the scene haha

[tough basin]

does increasing the convolution buffer size help?

[hoary lynx]

Noo doesn't seem to change anything if i put it at 1 or 0

[fresh crown]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_9nZX582oro how would i do this in unreal engine 5.4?

[tough basin]

1. just wait until 5.5 comes out 😅 https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1dt8mdb/ue_55_to_receive_native_first_person_rendering/

[fresh crown]

Thank you!

[fossil palm]

Hello. One of the characters in my game has a technique that'll be using a VFX very similar to this one and I'd like to know how to put it together. If anyone wants to offer assistance please let me know. :

[atomic cosmos]

Hey i want to learn to do some vfx, i was using the niagara in unreal, at all i cant find any good tutorials etc
any one have some good stuffs? i just saw some ppl doing effects from the textuers, some diff way

[waxen marsh]

hey guys, so, I've created this very simple vfx for my flare, it has some sparks, fire and smoke, however, the smoke just appears in the viewport, when I try to render, it doesn't show, any ideas of what is wrong?

the sparks and fire are functioning correctly btw

[frank thicket]

Hey Gustavo,
This is a nice scene/fx, btw I believe for rendering with MovieRenderQueue, you need some additional step in render setting( dunno if it was on AA setup or deferred renderer)
Since smoke will take few seconds to get visible when it get emitted, in render setting you should pass some frames first before capturing anything.
It called "warp up frames" just set it like ~240(means skip 4 seconds in 60fps sequence), then it will emit the particle but it will capture scene after 4sec, so here you should have your smoke! 🙂

[daring plover]

Hey guys, I'm working on a game with split screen, and we're having an issue where in build only, not editor, when the first player enters a post-process volume, segments of the screen go black. The problem resolves when we entirely disable post-processing, and it doesn't seem to matter which post process shaders are being used as we've tried multiple combinations and the only one that works is "everything off". Does anyone know why this could be?

Examples:

[waxen marsh]

thanks! But it actually wasn't this the issue, I found the solution here https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/why-cant-movie-render-queue-see-niagara-fx-ue5-0-1/536320/2

[regal seal]

Hi Guys,
Does anyone know if the Vdb files support physics and collision like in Niagara. I have a smoke sequence I want it to fade when colliding with another mesh. Is this possible with Vdb files?

[zenith zealot]

Oi peeps, you guys are probably going to cry seeing my setup in a second. I know almost nothing about particles, I have looked up courses but haven't really found any good information for noob to learn. So for my game I decided to purchase a particle asset directly and implement it in my project. You can see my implementation is likely not ideal, but again It is rather difficult for me to find resources on this stuff.

The implementation I currently have is very heavy, you drop around 10-15fps when this is active, and this is active for most of the game. Anyway I can improve upon this?

[jaunty olive]

question, is there a ability to destroy Niagara system after playing in the niagara system, without using actor->destroy component?

[zenith zealot]

Deactive maybe? I do that in the above screenshot lol

[jaunty olive]

i forgot to make it once in system properties 🙂 anyways they are played just once so letting system to handle by it self is more than enaugh for now 🙂

[topaz violet]

Whatt are you trying to do (broadly speaking)?

[cinder gazelle]

How do I stop my projectile from leaving behind these tiny fragments?

[split crane]

Hi All! Im wondering, did anyone here ever made this type of Dither in UE, like Helldivers 2? Dither TAA is quite noisy and jittery, while the one in HD2 is stable and screen space. I looked for dither and obra dinn dither, but im stull clueless atm.

[tough basin]

the obra dinn dither is discussed in detail in Lucas Pope's devblog on i think the tigsource forums

but that's a world-space dither and this is a screen-space dither

should be much simpler

this looks like:

• fmod(floor(divide(viewport pixel, pixel size)), 5) which gets you a value between (0, 0) and (4, 4) for every pixel
• adding some value to that pixel's color based on the value above
• round(divide(color, quantization)) to quantize the color

and the base color is heavily desaturated

[split crane]

Wowww! Thanks alot! I cuttently have some PFX planes in Niagara using Transparency, and for shader complexity id like to move them to Dither, but the current DitherTAA is sooooo noisy, especially when rendered over objects with shading rate 2x2. So I am indeed hoping screen space would soften the noise.

[zealous snow]

In the dark parts the hair shines, can anyone help me?

[lavish trail]

Hi, good morning, if you want to take a pivot from 3d artist to VFX, which application is better first to master for a career in the game industry, is it houdini or unreal engine 5?😄

[simple star]

I would like to know how to implement such an outline effect in Niagara. Does anyone know?

[fiery nest]

Can anyone tell me the rough steps behind these "world reveal" coloring mechanics?
For example this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCa6c445rhU&ab_channel=KyleBanks%2F%2FFarewellNorth

I am trying to understand is it a VFX or material manipulation?
You have a sphere around your player that reveals objects, change the color of the grass, etc... ?

[dawn gull]

Chris Murphy from Epic covers this and more in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exMzwH7EJUY

[hardy glen]

Hi! If I have an actor with a sphere as static mesh and emissive material, how can I get this effect? These two lines coming out from the sphere. Thanks!

[split crane]

Either a lens flare in the post process settings or a billboard with texture id say.

[hardy glen]

Thanks!

[tough basin]

Convolutional bloom with the lines as a convolution kernel texture

[hardy glen]

I'm not English. I have searched for billboard and I have found: hoarding: large panel for advertising.

[split crane]

Inside of a Blueprint you can add a material billboard or billboard actor.

These will make the lens flare texture always face the camera location.

[hardy glen]

OK. Thanks a lot.

[plain escarp]

hey so - I'm working on something akin to a scan visor as seen in Metroid Prime and Warframe.
I have a custom material that I want to overlay on all scanable targets, my issue is that I don't know how to do this... Specifically, I don't know how to make the material visible when the scan visor is active - especially since many enemy models use multiple materials

[tough basin]

material parameter collection

use a parameter to control the opacity in the material
set the parameter in blueprints

[silk moon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYs8mihcuYY
just saw this today, was pretty oblivious to the existence of this video... has some interesting techniques in there

[wild ice]

Hello, can I ask for some help in this channel in the creation of a shader?

I've been struggling with a shader mostly because I'm new to this

[silent night]

i am currently trying to create something similar to the cone shaped spear wave effect in POE, i have tried multiple approaches, but i just cant seem to hit it right

i would be very happy if someone could explain to me how i could create this wave like attack in a cone shape

i know how to create a cone with random placed sprites, but it is missing the direct set amount and most importantly it is missing the wave like animation

[modest turret]

Would anyone know or guide me to information about like a mesh transition gradually with like a opacity?

[violet jungle]

https://youtu.be/NZfjJXGBCzg?si=D_mPznGRAXZn60Nc

[silent night]

thanks a lot, thought i dont speak the language, i will look into it

[silent night]

kinda forgot that sampling particles from other emitter was a thing

[silent night]

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1032916466313478200/1287436525394464778/spearconeAttack.gif?ex=66f18a33&is=66f038b3&hm=92ce4773ebd690c802209561a42c5783f79c87bc220413fa9f7f5d07dc243229&

[drowsy lynx]

Master Class: Being a Tech Art Detective

My new talk is online!
https://youtu.be/etNmLiaLxb8?si=56AyWh4--hLVpqO0

I talk about my methods of discovering cool game art tricks (which I then document on my blog) by asking around, doing reseach, using mod tools and injecting into the rendering process with Intel GPA, RenderDoc or NVIDIA NSight. I hope that it helps you on your journey to learn from the best and of course - WE DON'T STEAL! - these methods/tools are there for learning only!

[dapper sail]

hi i hope this is the right place to ask this question but, i have a problem with the spring arm component im using for camera lag. this problem occurred when i turned on Vsync to fix screen tearing. however when Vsync is turned on, it makes the camera lag from the spring arm to increase (so there's more camera lag) i dont know how to fix this

[silent night]

Hello ladys and gents, i am back again.

Is there a reliable way to check collisions of particles from the blueprint?

I habe a bunch of projectiles that might hit walls or the player, therefor i would like to check for collisions if hit or not, to then adjust life, add more effects amd so on

[hexed plaza]

Can the Chaos Cache Manager record collision, breaking, trailing etc info for Niagara? I can't get Niagara to spawn from Chaos Cache

[carmine ginkgo]

Does anyone know if it’s possible to show objects only ina post process material. Like showing objects that are not visible without it. A reveal effect basically

[late robin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAXTgWMvCQc

Published a tutorial on creating a Mesh Disintegration FX using Niagara and Materials. This covers the static mesh disintegration and I am working on skeletal mesh disintegration and mesh transitioning effects as well.

[ancient stump]

Does anybody know if having multiple blend materials on 1 post process volume decreases performance? My instinct would say yes, but I can find this on the Unreal documentation, just unsure if I'm interpreting correctly that it doesnt add cost 😅

I read that as, you can have as many materials in the array as you want, in the end they are combined and it doesn't cost extra

[tough basin]

it's saying that the blending itself is cheap. post process materials can be arbitrarily complex and cost commensurately

profilegpu can show you how long each one takes

if a material is blended at 0.0 it won't be run. otherwose, full cost

[ancient stump]

Oh okay, so then I'd imagine cram as much as possible into 1 material 😄 ?

[tough basin]

i don't think that matters much

a post process material will involve some number of instructions on the pixel shader. it does not particularly matter if those instructions are in one material or spread across multiple

the instructions are where the cost is going to come from

[ancient stump]

What I actually mean is, will 2 materials count as extra drawcalls? Like multiple translucent objects behind eachother

But I suppose not then 😄

[tough basin]

yes, but if you're talking about post process materials, one extra draw call for the entire screen is pretty trivial

[ancient stump]

Oh alright

Thanks for the input! 🖖

[torn anchor]

I just opened a 3D Gas master emitter but the preview shows nothing, any idea why ?

Actually it seems it's for even regular vfx. What could be causing this ?

Oh, it became visible again.

[torn anchor]

Hello, I've been working on a smoke vfx atm, and due to the amount of particles the sahder complexity mode shows that the perfs aren't that great (although the game is running smoothly). So I wonder, even for big games or simulations, is it not too annoying to have a few vfx with apparently poor perfs ?

[analog onyx]

It is unacceptable to have vfx with poor perf.

[torn anchor]

It still runs at 60 fps, just the visualizaton marks it bright white.

[torn anchor]

How do you make a laser-like vfx to always stop when hitting a collision ?

[mild vortex]

Chaos Cache Manager Scaling Issue and Missing Geometry in Unreal Engine 5Hi everyone,
I’m encountering a problem with the Chaos Cache Manager while working on a destruction simulation in Unreal Engine 5. I’m trying to use the Chaos system to simulate the shattering of a stained glass window using a bomb field. During the live simulation (without caching), everything works perfectly. The glass shatters as expected, and all details are intact.
However, once I record the simulation using the Chaos Cache Manager, strange things happen during playback:
When I use Static Pose or Play modes, the Geometry Collection (GC) object (the glass) becomes much smaller than its original size as soon as the recording starts (at 0.01 seconds).
As the simulation continues, the glass fractures, but it seems to be missing key details. Large sections of the glass are absent or not being displayed correctly.
During live simulation, the bomb field interacts perfectly with the glass, and everything shatters as intended, but once I use the cache, these issues occur.
I’ve followed a specific tutorial to set this up, and I’ve recorded the issue using OBS so you can see exactly what’s going wrong. The scaling issue only occurs when the cache is played back, but the simulation itself (when recorded) looks fine.
I’ve tried:
Ensuring the GC object’s scale is correctly set and remains unchanged during caching.
Checking the Observed Components in the Chaos Cache Manager to ensure they’re properly configured.
Adjusting various settings in the Cache Manager (e.g., Static Pose, Play mode) to no avail.
Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening or how to fix it? I’ve attached the OBS video of the issue and the tutorial I followed.
Thanks in advance!
The Tutorial I followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23G-X8Oxqb4&t=69s
UE 5.4.4

[tough basin]

trust FPS over other diagnostics, but make sure to test on your target hardware

[void aspen]

are there any visual blocking volumes that can used ? or is it just best to use a simple mesh for this ?

[tough basin]

what do you want to show instead of what would be otherwise visible?

[void aspen]

im thinking of when someone would be below the landscape like in a "dungeon" or something like this, but when i do this with just meshes, there are always light that seeps through and you can see things that i'd rather not see. i could of course just make more meshes surrounding these areas but was curiuos if there was a way to do this alternatively

[tough basin]

yeah meshes. if you have complex-shaped fiddly meshes you couls supplement with thicker boxes

reducing draw distance on lights (also helps performance)

[void aspen]

yea thicker meshes/just added an additonal one in those sections is what i was considering

[void aspen]

how would i do this ?

that might help, light is prob the main issue

[tough basin]

lights have a draw distance property on them

so there's the attenuation, which is how they drop off when the light is on, but also a draw distance which affects how far they stop being drawn at all

[void aspen]

hmm not sure if it would be possible to do this on my UDS, but that would work in theory, i could just make it for below the landscape that light wouldn't come through/go below ther

[tough basin]

light blocking meshes will be the real solution here though

ah yeah sky/directional lights not really subject to that

but yesif you have a mostly above ground world with underground interiors, and clear entrances, you could fade those lights to zero as you enter or exit

talos principle 2 did that with sky lights, creating volumes for underground areas that fade from the exterior skylight to an interior skylight

[void aspen]

that would be ideal. so it is possible to "fade" the amount of light a client would be getting from the sky light? just in general?

[tough basin]

lerping intensity to zero, yes

[void aspen]

now that im looking there a lot of intensity's on UDS lol and when i turn sky light intensity to zero it's not fully dark due to the sky's stars etc.. this is more about the bp now, but i wonder if there is an overall light intensity output

[faint crown]

I just took a look at shader complexity and when viewing a waterfall in my level, it goes off the charts. But it's just a quite simple waterfall with basic shaders for refraction. And a lot of sprites for mist/splashes. Is that a normal behaviour?

[tough basin]

yes due to the overdraw induced by translucency/masking

do your framerates tank or are they fine?

[faint crown]

Yes, ms rise and frames tank when just looking in the general direction of the waterfall.

Well they don't completely "tank" but a few frames are lost.

Maybe it's because it is two waterfalls (one on the left, one on the right). I will take a look at the shader itself and maybe change it.

[tough basin]

it is inevitable that anything translucent/masked is going to add to shader complexity due to overdraw but it's not always terrible

[faint crown]

Hmm, when I set all waterfall elements to "invisible" in the editor, the FPS/ms stay the same.

Alright, I found that there was an additional waterfall behind one of the two

removed that and it works better, however, the FPS drop does not stem from the waterfall it seems.

Anyways, a step further. So I can reevaluate now, thanks for the help 😉

[shut geode]

Hi all. Please could someone assist, In all the years of using UE I can not solve this - for niagara effects, if my character/camera is looking directly at the effect it's invisible but as soon as I approach it from the side it' starts to get more and more visible, please could someone help? Thanks

[fossil swan]

not sure, it could be that a Niagara Emitter Type has been set up wrong.

[topaz violet]

Check your particle alignment method

[lucid solar]

Iirc it only takes layering 2-3 translucent layers to get into white shader complexity

[faint crown]

Oh I see, thanks for the advice!

Yes, I optimised a lot of other things and get about 70-80 in epic settings now.

[lucid solar]

Oo nice, my scenes look comparable with everything in green and then translucent being entirely red/white

Like idk how you can make any fog particles without immediately getting into white tier complexity

(In case anyone’s managed to create good Niagara fog with green shader complexity, How!???)

[split hawk]

Yeah that's the big problem with fog particles and part of the motivation for volumetrics. I'm sure there's some wizards out there that figured out how to do this. There must be some videos online on it.

[shut geode]

Hi all - I'm having this issue where ,if my effects actor is spawned too far from my character/camera the actor will only render in the corners of the screen as seen in the video. When it's within a closer proximity it's no problem. The actor is a heterogenous volume BTW.

I'

[shut geode]

Right hand side of the screen, only when looking to the side does it display correctly

[scarlet gulch]

How can I freeze cascade particle effect in the specific moment? (In UE4)

[split hawk]

Not entirely sure but this looks like it's culling based on a camera plane (clip plane). My guess is that this same thing happens on the left side as well.

[shut geode]

YEs, that is correct

[shut geode]

Any way to fix this?

[split hawk]

I haven't worked with fluid sims or hetero volumes yet, but my suspicion is there's some settings or console commands that effect this kind of culling.

[shut geode]

I've searched for culling options in both the het volume , the imported VDB and the material instance and no luck.

The het volume has these options only but what ever I change makes no diff

[shut geode]

Could it be something in the master material, perhaps these nodes?

[split hawk]

Really not sure. I would try making a simple test case and seeing if you get the same behavior there. If so I would look for console commands on het volume culling or render distance.

[shut geode]

Heeyyyy!

r.HeterogeneousVolumes.MaxTraceDistance

This solved it

Thanks man

No idea how costly it is though.

[split hawk]

No free lunches™️

but glad you found it

[shut geode]

Thanks again.

[pulsar holly]

hiya, I don't suppose anyone has any advice with preventing exponential fog for appearing inside of buildings?

[grim briar]

use the start distance to push it out far enough that you can't see it, or just turn it off when you go indoors

[pulsar holly]

will give the start distance a play around with

[open comet]

Don't necessarily need someone to walk me through things, but just a nudge in the right direction(s) so I'll go learn things instead of sitting here in paralysis
aiming for a sort of anime-slash cutting spell effect.
want my shoddy first person 'cutting left to right with fingers' animation to play, then a line of light to go from right to left across the face of everything their 'cut' hit, then have a final effect along the same line; light erupting, or some sort of 'space itself was cut' distortion, not sure, mostly focused on handling the first bit at the moment.

I don't really know my options or limitations for a lot of things, so all I have are half-baked guesses.

nothing is moving during this, so could I like...just do a trace (how would you do a plane trace? can a box trace do it or does it need cpp) and send an effect along the hit locations from right to left without worrying about the actual actors(you can get screen space from the world space of a location, right?), either directly using the hit locations or by adding those points to a spline or something? or I guess just sweep a normal line trace from right to left and use the points it produces in order?

Or maybe a big plane with a material? though I'd have even less idea how to set up a material that knows objects are intersecting it and then sends a glow along those intersection points from right to left in screen space, if that's even a thing that could be done.

it's basically just sweeping a room with an invisible laser and leaving heat marks, or cutting flesh and leaving a wound, and search suggests decals for those, but I'm not sure how decals work

[rotund sapphire]

Hey!
I'm working on a **character outline shader **and I'm wondering if i can get help on a unique feature.

Is there a reasonable way to sample the nearest vert's vertex-color and have that reflected in that section of the outline?

thinking through the steps

[split hawk]

Decals do come to mind after reading this. What is the context of this? Is this an effect for a game? If so is it single or multiplayer? Do you need to actually cut through anything? Does this effect affect the world is some other way, like inflict damage?

[split hawk]

Is this a post process shader?

[open comet]

effect for a single-player game, doesn't need to actually cut anything, and the spell does damage but I'm not too worried about figuring out that part

[rotund sapphire]

i don't think it will be as we want to go for animation style, eg outlining all features and not just the ones one the edge

on that end does anyone have experience working with inverted hulls in unreal?

@split hawk though post process may still work
is there a solid way to transmit vertex color into a post process's shader graph?

[split hawk]

If you're imagining a cut you can see on the surface of objects then a decal makes a lot of sense, but there may be complications depending on how deep this cut can go. If there's a near surface and a far one in the area of the cut, and you want to see the cut on both, you'd have to use a deep decal to reach both at once. That may work for your use case, but objects going through the decal area will have it projected on them. If you don't want to use a single large decal you could do traces at some interval along the cut, and place decals on the hit locations, scaling based on the distance to the hit. This approach is definitely more technical and would require you to parameterize the cut material to animate correctly across multiple decals. I also think you'll want to look into post process materials. A lot of anime style effects like this make heavy use of post process materials for impact frames and such, though you might be able to get away with refractive meshes for a "space cut" effect. Included an effect that your idea reminds me of. You could also check out one of Simon Trümpler's free effects project for insight. https://simonschreibt.gumroad.com/l/ekfkxy?layout=profile

[open comet]

Thanks! Gives me a few things to explore.

Knowing me, I'll end up flying off in a different direction entirely based on something I learn in the process. Progress, still.

[split hawk]

I don't think you can get vertex colors in post process without modifying the engine. I image you'd have to do a separate pass for it, unless you're planning on just rendering the vertex colors as base color. From your description it sounds more like you're looking for a fresnel type effect, rather than just an outline on the outside, does that sound right? Can you describe this shader a bit more? Is it outlining the entire character, or just parts?

[rotund sapphire]

outlining the entire character
looking to replicate something close to these

https://x.com/violxiv/status/1775197667938775309?t=WWSaE4kVpxewptA2M-rTRw&s=19

violet! 🐝 (@violxiv) on X

Commission for @EvilArtist_ !

#lowpoly #pixelart 🐰💜

Twitter · Apr 2, 2024, 4:24 PM

@split hawk note the value and color variations on teh outlines

[split hawk]

I see. You're thinking about storing the color information for the outline in the vertex color of the model?

[rotund sapphire]

yes
though open to other suggestions

we could do a simple color map - ie if white->purple outline
but hand authoring it per model sounds appealing

and if we got it working we could also drive line weight with the alpha channel

@split hawk

if there is a way to affect the stencil buffer in shaders i could also make that work

[fossil swan]

duplicate mesh, offset all verts outwards slightly, invert mesh > make it black > put it on top of main mesh > great outlines.

also, check the guilty gear texture/material authoring video on youtube.

[rotund sapphire]

yeah inverse hulls is another option
but it doulbes the vert count of all assets and complicates our asset pipelines
also its difficult to affect the line weights

[fossil swan]

performance wise its not too bad as it only uses 1 very simple black material, and you generally use it for rather low poly meshes.

also not that complicated, its one modifier in 3dsmax > done.

[rotund sapphire]

not using black materials

^

[fossil swan]

dont trip over the" black" can be any simplified thing.

[rotund sapphire]

@split hawk hmmmmmmmmmm
actually
i wonder if i can use the subsurface color g buffer,
the trick being not rendering it in the base pass

[split hawk]

Is there a possiblity here of using an overlay material with WPO along the normal, then inverting? From my testing I've noticed that overlay materials don't incur the same cost as actually duplicating the mesh. Also it seems like people do it all the time but I don't understand how it's possible to do a mesh outline like this without affecting dynamic GI.

[rotund sapphire]

that works
even found a post on it

but

[split hawk]

You mean for storing the outline color?

[rotund sapphire]

https://www.raiogames.com/outline-without-postprocess/

^this uses vertext colors to store the vert nomal for the offset

[rotund sapphire]

and yes

[split hawk]

That's interesting. The last part about averaging the normals makes a big difference here specifically because everything is flat shaded. If it was smooth shaded you'd only see a difference at UV seams.

[split hawk]

How'd you get a pic of me at my PC?

[rotund sapphire]

lol

given that we are also doing toon shading we could also smuggle in color inforation on the specular channel - just not sure how it displays in the buffer

[split hawk]

As far as I can tell the inverted mesh approach is an alternative to the post process approach. You could theoretically combine them, and it sounds like you're weighing the different tools at your disposal. As far as color goes you could do that a number of ways. You don't necessary have to store more data directly on the mesh. One method that comes to mind is projecting a small noise texture in screen space centered on the mesh, maybe a greyscale texture that is gradient mapped differently for different characters.

[steep moss]

Heyo, not new to Unreal but new to lighting and working with Materials. I'm looking to set up a semi-realistic water scene, and using the experimental Water Plugin to get a good baseline. While the defaults generally look great, there are a few glaring issues that I haven't been able to sort out yet:
Prefacing this with the fact that I've disabled the Ocean postprocess material and using my own Height Fog and Postprocess Volume separately

• The ocean material is visible to infinity, does not seem to be occluded by fog the further from the camera it is
• Looking at my sunlight source does not cause realistic light refractions on the surface (sunlight is muted, appears as a dull white circle, would expect a halo of whiteish refractions)
• I assume this is expected, but the caustics light function I have on my directional light does not produce light shafts in the Fog (but it looks great on surfaces otherwise). I assume I'll have to set up some separate effect to achieve light shafts matching the caustics light function I'm using

Any tips on achieving these three changes?

a few reference images...
https://png.pngtree.com/background/20230613/original/pngtree-an-underwater-sun-shines-on-coral-in-the-ocean-picture-image_3412292.jpg
https://blog.fractureme.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/C73A2668.jpg
https://www.ikelite.com/cdn/shop/articles/IMG_3137-X3.jpg?v=1518754805&width=1400
https://images.pexels.com/photos/1452701/pexels-photo-1452701.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&w=1260&h=750&dpr=1

[rotund sapphire]

hmm thats not a bad idea

does anyone know how the g-buffer passes currently work in unreal?
specifically the specular and subsurface layers

i want to know if they only affect the gbuffer if they are being actively displayed in the lighting enviornment, or if its a pre lighting snapshot of the colors and values

[split crane]

Hi All! I was wondering, does this type of Dithering exists in UE? Its almost like screen space.

Ive seen this in Helldivers too, and now in SAND.

[split hawk]

I'm not sure if the question makes sense. The gbuffer just captures the values of the layers each material outputs, so if something is connected to specular or subsurface, it will show up in the respective gbuffer. The gbuffer content is independant of lighting. It sounds like you're trying to store non-render data in the gbuffer, which you can do with the custom depth and custom stencil buffers. However I don't think you can get custom per pixel or vertex data with these. As far as I know the only way to do that is a custom gbuffer pass. If your specular isn't contributing to the rendered result you could put data in there.

[tough basin]

you can do this in a post process material

[split crane]

How can you apply the post processing to only the particles?

To lower shader complexity I mean.

[tough basin]

looks to me like it's happening everywhere

the whole screenshot looks dithered

looks like a CRT effect, in particular

[split crane]

Ah, I only cropped the PFX.

My bad!

I tried to enable the checkbox to use Dither as Masked in the details panel in UE, but this gives such a noisy unstable pattern effect.

[tough basin]

you could always achieve screen space dithering in a masked material by setting opacity based on screen pixel coordinates

[rotund sapphire]

i figured it out

[split hawk]

Nice lookin snazzy. Using alpha to control the thickness is 👌

[celest birch]

hey is there an easy way to make a screen wipe transition effect? similar to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3lWSFAntuk&t=1s

[thorn pivot]

hi can someone point out how can i recreate this effect visible on the edges of the screen when you go fast?
https://youtu.be/9vlVgAl8aM4?si=xa0n7b08hHDHM2hn&t=167
it's like a radial blur and air distortion, i don't know how to do the distortion bit, maybe with niagara?

[fossil swan]

just refraction in either a post process effect material, or a transparant overlay with a refraction-enabled material that is always in front of the camera. whatever works for you.

[thorn pivot]

i notice the refraction spikes in certain areas over others, it's not constant.
so how can i make this?

[fossil swan]

panner node.

plus some variables hooked up to the refraction, panner, and masking (and more) so you can adjust values depending on the current speed.

[thorn pivot]

how do i make it affect the edges of the screen more than the center?

[fossil swan]

masking

[thorn pivot]

so like a radial gradient png?

in photoshop?

[fossil swan]

i.e. a grayscale texture / generated by math

yea

[thorn pivot]

ok i'll try these out tomorrow ty

[fossil swan]

you got this! good luck

[thorn pivot]

so i made the gaussian blur but the air distortion post process is a bit tricky. for some reason it's offset (to the lower right side of the screen). removed the mask so it's easier to see

[warm star]

Anyone happen to know how to go about making an afterimage-type effect with a post process material - or otherwise, an effect that takes some scene textures and fades the differences after some frames? I'm struggling to wrap my brain around how to go about doing this. I'll explain the idea further below. I found very few relevant pages online about accumulation buffers (which is what I assume is needed here, maybe not), and I'm hoping someone has some experience making a similar effect.
What I have: A post process effect that takes a custom depth node and subtracts it with from a scene depth node in a PP material. This is used to show objects being obstructed by walls.
What I want: To be able to "fade out" the result of the above-mentioned PP material if the scene has changed. Basically, in the video posted, if the object disappears/stops being rendered, I want to keep an afterimage of it that fades to black over some frames, rather than disappearing instantly. I cannot fade the material itself, unfortunately, since multiple objects may be visible at once and may disappear at different times.
I'm assuming I need to render the resulting scene to a render target but so far my (limited) experimentation has been fruitless.

the closest thing I've found to what I'm trying to achieve is this this video from Froyok, and I checked her blog to try to decipher how she did it (she mentions in one of her videos of this effect that it uses "accumulation buffers" and "realtime distance field textures" but I don't think the result in the blog post is what I'm looking for, though I know that I should probably be using a/some render target(s) to draw the resulting frames and apply some layering to them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl-GbFYpZU0&t=8s

in case anyone is curious, this is the blog post in question https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2018-11-realtime-distance-field-textures-in-unreal-engine-4/

I've looked a bit more into her blog and it seems that the distance field article is not so related to her entry of the effect in question in her portfolio https://www.froyok.fr/portfolio/exedre-terminal . There, she mentions she only uses 2 shaders and 3 render target textures to achieve the effect.

[analog onyx]

You will need to make post process pass. And thats actually all there is to it.

[tough basin]

I think in 5.5 it may be possible to do this just from the material using the new ability to write to render targets from post process. Haven't looked into it yet (but I'm excited)

[warm star]

I've been doing a bunch of testing and right now I think the closest thing I have to this is using a Scene Capture 2d outputting some channels that are useful to me in composite/additive mode and rendering a modulated material on top of that every other frame to fade it out over time

[warm star]

that's already a given.

forwarded from another server ^

but anyway, I think I'm pretty close to finding the solution. I ran into an obstacle yesterday where scene I was capturing would overwrite every frame, instead of adding on or compositing on top of previous frames, until I realized there were such modes available to me

[warm star]

seems like it's nigh-impossible to get render targets that match scenetexture's true worldspace resolution. my render target seems to always appear squished and offset when I test with it

[warm star]

in other words, it doesn't match the player's camera and what its capturing. not 1:1, at least

and I'm not sure if this is a viewport scale issue or some other issue

[analog onyx]

That is not given. You are confusing post process material and a post process pass with global shader. You need latter, but for some unknown reason trying the former.

[hushed shoal]

I'm curious if there's a way (hacky or not) to smoothly lerp between two Post Process Settings in the player camera?

I know there are blendables (for materials), but I'd like to have different view modes for the player, which would apply different settings entirely.

(so the player activates their scanner and the screen smoothly transitions to a red tint, dirt mask, etc.)

I have a feeling the best thing to do would simply be to pull out the desired parameters and set them individually, but I'd ideally like for an artist to be able to customise the entire PP-setting struct without having to be explicit about which parameters have been tweaked!

[frank mica]

How can I prevent distortion from affecting other emitters in a system? Sort order seems to do nothing even if both materials are translucent 😕

[warm star]

care to elaborate?

I've tried drawing material to render target which didn't seem to work/do anything as far as I could tell

if there is a way to write specific post processes to render target, I'm all ears

but I've been thinking about it more and I feel like it'd just be better for me to capture what the post process/scenetexture nodes are rendering and modify that, but I don't think I have that kind of control

the only thing I've found that could achieve this is this plugin (https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/scenetextureforumg/questions), but I would rather find an alternative that works first before diving into this plugin.

[analog onyx]

which part do you need elaboration on ?

[warm star]

since you mentioned that post process pass and post process materials are two different ideas, I'd like to know what you meant by making a post process pass, and how I'd be able to use that to create the effect I"m looking for

you don't have to go into detail, I'd just like some clarification on what you meant

[analog onyx]

Post process pass can mean only one thing. Inserting a render pass somewehere in post process chain. You need to be fluent enough with engine code to proceed, and be capable of creating your global shaders, RDG passes, and finally familiarizing yourself with scene view extension for being able to inject your pass in appropriate stage of post processing chain.

[warm star]

if it's code-related I'll pass (no put intended) on that for now. I appreciate your explination though!

[tough basin]

Additionally, a user defined intermediate texture, dubbed "UserSceneTexture" can be written to and read from sequentially as a post process material. This means that UE now supports running multi-pass post process effects (such as separable filters or blurs) in a more performant manner.
from the 5.5 roadmap. this may also allow you to do what you want from the material. i haven't looked at it closely

[warm star]

that'd be amazing

I guess I'll wait until that releases then and work on other stuff in the meantime

[alpine basin]

Has anyone ran into this issue before? I have a vfx particle with a different color on the backface. In environments with good lighting, the colors are shown properly, but in low lighting, both colurs just end up looking the same

[warm star]

is the material set to lit or unlit? seems like it's lit

from what I recall, using alpha transparency will still block lighting on backfaces, even if it looks like it wouldn't

[alpine basin]

ah that might be my issue!

I was running default lit

unfortunately, going unlit just removes the backface color completely

[tough basin]

is the material two-sided?

[alpine basin]

tis indeed

The way it's set up is that these 2 colors are added to the particle color in the emitter

currently the black affects the outer layer (i.e it doesn't do anything, but if I set it to another color it properly adds to the outside faces

(nvm that is a lie, it also needs light to show up)

I'm not sure if that's an isuse or just a product of the settings im using. I was able to get the backfaces to show up properly by just tossing a tiny light inside the vfx

[lavish trail]

Hiii I saw some news that vfx artists in the industry are being laid off, are you guys okay?

[faint vapor]

I've gotten this far making an additive material draw in front of objects with a post process material, but I haven't seen any examples beyond solid fills and outlines... is it possible to draw the gradients from that object in front of other objects?

The object is dual cylinders with special UV mapping to get the gradients the way I want... so not sure if I can write those gradients to some buffer for the post process material somehow?

God damnit... as often was the case with Unreal, it's just a checkbox! 😂

[quasi wolf]

whats the best way to display a grid in game, that can also change its grid side? Id imagine something to do with worldaligned texture, but when I scale that up I dont want the actual grid texture itself to get bigger. ideally this would be a dot/point grid. maybe even something with mesh instances?

always seemed weird to me how even the unreal editors grid itself scales up the image, so you end up with giant thick lines at big sizes

[tough basin]

if you're drawing based on world position (eg worldalignedtexture) it is scale invariant

unreal's built-in worldgridmaterial is an example of this

change its grid si[z]e
this would be a parameter by which you divide the world position before using it for a grid

[quasi wolf]

but unreals grid does scale its texture lol

[tough basin]

lol apparently it sure does XD

it's using UV, not world position

Absolute World Position XYZ -> AddComponents (v3) -> Divide(Scalar parameter "size") -> Frac -> Subtract (0.5) -> Multiply(2) -> Saturate -> Base Color should be a black and white grid

and scale invariant

[quasi wolf]

guess I messed up somewhere

[tough basin]

no it's probably my math which I wrote up in haste and did not test

Second attempt:
World Position -> Divide(Scalar parameter "size" defaulting to 100) -> Frac -> Subtract(0.5) -> Multiply(2) -> Saturate -> Add Components (v3) -> Fmod(2)

or you can take the wheel. what you have already is a material that emits a color based entirely on world position and does not care about object UVs or transform

[quasi wolf]

lol uuuuhh

[quasi wolf]

also, sorry if this is a bit hard to read but its my set up for an adjustable texture, Im making a level editor and this allows some degree of texture editing. however, is there a way to expose this local position node in a way that I can access that to align another texture to it?

or am I stupid and thats just the actual location of the mesh its placed on

just need a way to get the texture position of one mesh, then apply that to an adjacent mesh with an offset based on its location

basically I want this exact mechanic that Hammer has

[meager harbor]

Guys, I'm having an issue with my groom when rendering with Movie Render Queue and Path Tracer. As you can see in the image, there are these 'holes' or missing areas in the groom (looks like incomplete strands or gaps). I'm using Path Tracer, and I’ve tried adjusting some settings, but the problem persists. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Could it be related to sample count, strand width, or something else in the groom setup? Any help would be appreciated!

at viewport render its ok

[dim musk]

is there a way i can directly access the light calculation in a shader? i want to modify the light pixel position to sit inside the texel and i know this is possible with forward rendering, i just dont know where unreal exposes data for me to work with

basically each texel should have one single light value instead of this

[golden umbra]

Not without significant engine modifications.
You could also use unlit material and do your own light calculation in the material.

[dusky drift]

Hello, can anyone tell me why this particle is not looking correct only in this level? it works okay in other level

it should look like this:

this only happened when I add particle to the map. if i add inside blueprint, this works without any issues

what could be the reason?

[grave elk]

Hey guys i'm really struggling with one thing, i want to make a little dust effect when my character start to move, but not repeat it when he's moving, just when he start the walk/run

how can i do it?

[urban panther]

attach an emitter at the base of the character, when he walks for the first time, so an event where he goes from velocity 0 to something not 0, reset emitter

[grave elk]

oh perfect! during my niagara try to create a fog effect, how can i make a simple sprite fade out? i did the simplespriteburst but when i change the sprite it doesnt fade away

[tough basin]

if your material is unlit, try passing the value going into the emissive node through InvEyeAdaptation

my hypothesis here is that your emissive is getting clobbered by exposure settings

[faint crown]

I am trying to make a Post Processing Effect where the world is plunged into darkness, except for a small area around the character that can be turned on and off. Any best practices or examples for this or on how to achieve this?

[warm star]

judging by this pic, it could be that your transparent parts of the effect (ie. the foreground elements) are either not being drawn, or being drawn behind other things like the environment from the first image. seems like the opaque background stuff is being drawn properly but the rest of it isn't. That, or the glowy elements of your effect aren't parented correctly to the main particle? those are my two guesses

[paper sapphire]

Hey do yall know if the sequencer can render a cascade particle system?

[echo knot]

is there a way to make this particle effect into a volume? i'm having to spam it all over my map

[iron skiff]

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5We0LE

WPO anims

[tough basin]

i made an asset which does this https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/pitch-black-darkness-anywhere -- your use case describes the "inverted" mode
you could also try implementing it yourself. it uses a post process material that accepts parameters for world position, radius, fade distance, etc. and remaps the scene color based on the pixel's world position distance from the parameter

multiply(postprocessinput0, some-math-on(distance(absolute world position, location parameter)))

[dim musk]

why would this post process material cause pixel flickering from lights? the flicker is a lot faster than the gif makes it appear

i also tried applying that same shader math to a png of the default color LUT and using that instead of the shader
it fixed the flickering but the color distribution as the light fades was changed in a way i didnt like

also worth noting that if i only do the "contrast" or "colors" part of the shader and exclude the other, it still flickers

and it happens if the light is dynamic or baked

[tough basin]

if you're using TAA or TSR, you are going to sample slightly different world positions for each pixel each frame

and if they land on different sides of that rounding, you will see very different results per frame

potential solutions: disable AA, use FXAA, or use forward rendering and MSAA

[dim musk]

i have all AA disabled

[tough basin]

what's the blendable location?

[dim musk]

i actually just figured it out

in PostProcessTonemap.usf i added the return 0 to this function

half GrainFromUV(float2 GrainUV) 
{
    return 0;
    half Grain = frac(sin(GrainUV.x + GrainUV.y * 543.31) *  493013.0);
    return Grain;
}```

so nothing happens

i found solutions for ue4 for that same shader that just said to #undef a preprocessor variable

but that didnt work in 5 so i just found it in there manually

weird that there doesnt seem to be a way to control it in editor

[tough basin]

what is this function doing? at first glance film grain but if so it's unclear to me why the solution wouldn't be to disable film grain

[dim musk]

my post process volume already had that at 0

not sure why anything was happening

now if only i could figure out how to have one light value per texel

[forest panther]

so i made this custom shader and i wonder if its okay to use in game and wont cause performance issues , its a mix of painterly effect and cel shading

[tough basin]

need to see the shader

https://blueprintue.com/

[forest panther]

i havent included it in unreal , this was a test run in blender to see wether its good to work with before i jump to ue5

[tough basin]

it's probably fine. what makes you think it might not be?

can post the blender material too

[forest panther]

since i will be using it for p2p game i thought it might be resource demanding

since cel shding doesnt have a lot of details ,since its just 2 or 3 tones

but this one has a decent amount of detail , maybe thats why

[tough basin]

basically all the work here is in the noise generation. not familiar with blender noise

but i would guess there's an inexpensive noise that gets the job done in unreal

sampling a texture for the noise is pretty inexpensive

[forest panther]

i see , ill give it a try in unreal and see what to do next , cheers mate

[faint crown]

Oh great! That sounds perfect! I'm still on UE4.27.2 with this project, however. Any chances for this to come out for UE4, too?

[tough basin]

Afraid not. I'd have to make everything from scratch to bring it to UE4 and the sales do not justify the labor.

[faint crown]

Makes sense, I will switch to UE5 for my next project anyway 😉

[gaunt prism]

hey, i have busted my head over this for some time.

im trying to sample a directional light shadow to manipulate the shadow in post processing.
i figured by creating a orthographic camera, allinged with the same rotation as the directional light that captures the depth buffer of the scene to a render target i could use that as a sample but that didnt go anywhere.

while i have plenty of experiance with shaders already, im in no way shape or form a programmer, just a artist dipping thier toes in techy stuff.
does any1 know this is possible in unreal with its built in features or does that require tweaking the engine?

[tough basin]

what does "didn't go anywhere" mean?

[tough basin]

my post process shadow detector: #materials message

not perfect. i don't think there is a perfect solution unless you constrain the problem. but maybe good enough for your purposes

[gaunt prism]

ill have a look thank you

ill give it a try when im working on the scene again

im trying to get an effect i've seen in zenless zone zero replicated, it has like colored bloom around the edges of the shadows.
while in ZZZ its pre-baked, i wonder if this is possible in real-time

[tough basin]

hard to see from tiny screenshot but looks like chromatic aberration

and it might be doing that everywhere, just most visibly where there are shadow edges since that's high contrast

but yeah if the aberration or effect is only happening where there are shadows, my shadow detector should be good enough to approximate this

[gaunt prism]

i could not find a better screenshot but i've seen it in game, it defo has these in the shadows, not chromatic abberation

its a bit easyer to spot in this shot

there is this very noticeble red glare on the edges of the shadows

[tough basin]

i see. agreed, not aberration. i still suspect this is not deliberately done to the shadows specifically

feels more like a natural outgrowth of bloom + tonemapping

like bloom + jacked up saturation in specific color bands

like high saturation of orange midtones, idk

[gaunt prism]

nope, visible at all times at any angle and screen uv position

[gaunt prism]

shaders i can edit, render pipelines i cannot :<

[quartz marsh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_MIDLTs6ig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WmoDEqroRg

[regal seal]

Hi,
I'm facing some issues with Volumetric clouds. I see some artifacts in the sky. It's mostly the assets printed in the sky. Can anyone help me with this.
Thank you

[calm vault]

Someone did something similar, specifically that colored shadow terminator, on the VisualTechArt discord here:

https://discord.com/channels/994614198250262628/1266048142936379513

[quasi wolf]

how do I simply just use this exact effect but with an emissive base colour? my character model by default has its emissive as its base colour + 0.5, but this messes with it completely and whatever I do it wont work together https://youtu.be/gxnefIEmESg

there are lots of tutorials for this effect so Im hoping someones familiar with it

Ive tried add, Ive tried multiply, nothing works at all, either does nothing or makes the base texture BLUE because of inverting the contour colour or something

cant plug that multiply in anywhere else on the b without it causing more problems

Im going insane with this

and for context the only reason I multiply by the base colour in the first place is because I cant stand how self shadowing looks in partial darkness, if I could just find a way to light the whole model at once when it goes from light to dark areas (like source engine games like tf2 do) that would be so much better but Ive never found anything for that in all the time Ive been using unreal

[noble elk]

Hey, I've noticed that Unreal seems to be messing with the precision of vertex colors when importing a mesh. I'm currently working on a VFX tool which requires remapping 0-255 to 0.0-1.0 and storing this data in vertices, before decoding it in a shader.

Unfortunately, when I decode this data, I'm noticing a slight offset in the values, consistent with .2f precision. For my purposes, I need to preserve at least .3f precision. Does anyone know if there's a way to force Unreal not to mess with vertex color precision on import?

[analog onyx]

unreal does not do anything to vertex colors

[tight basin]

hey folks
can someone pls help me with volumetric fog
for some reason the fog cause some sort of brightness when the camera is under the spot light
but when the camera is outside the spot ligth everything is ok .

[tough basin]

is this fog and not just specular reflection on the floor?

[tight basin]

yeah
if i disable the fog the issue is gone

[noble elk]

Are you sure? Other folks seem to have encountered the same issue. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/vertex-colors-precision-limited-only-to-2-decimal-places/1427884

[analog onyx]

I am

[tight basin]

never mind
im just stupid
i found out that i had my scattering distribution set to -.9
setting it in the middle (0.12) or something like that fixed it for me .

[quasi wolf]

right, thats about what I expected...

[dawn gull]

Has anyone gotten UserSceneTextures to work with color from SceneCapture 2D in UE 5.5 ?
Update: Seems I need to build from ue5-main as "Support for "Render in Main Renderer" flag with Scene Color capture source, converting the capture to an unlit Custom Render Pass. Previously, only Scene View Extensions could create Scene Color CRPs." was added only in ue5-main, not 5.5 branch .. see https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/b0e4169

[gray portal]

Is there a guide about how can I achieve this kind of data moshing effect in unreal engine 5?
https://x.com/i/status/1737138248177127812

find.ompu.co (@ompuco) on X

A lot of people were very curious how the lossy datamosh effect was done in my latest gamedev prototype, so I decided to make this breakdown.

Everything is rendered in realtime in #unity3d using custom post processing shaders & a custom DXR (raytrace) setup.

#madewithunity

Twitter · Dec 19, 2023, 3:50 PM

[tough basin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uapad3pVxBY
or
https://www.fab.com/listings/f54fa19f-b19a-4330-88a6-a467f6a00bca

[gray portal]

Yeah I watched that but it isn't really a guide if you aren't already know how to do things like that lol, and I don't want to buy it ready, I want to see how it is made.

[tough basin]

well, if you buy it, you'll have a working copy in hand. plugins come with source code

[ripe bay]

How would one go about crating the shader on middle part of Ember Heirlmoon skin from warframe?
My best guess atm is having 2 objects within each other both with their own shaders in order to get that depth glassy one on top and the effects on bottom with fresnel? o.o

[tough basin]

looks like a cubemap darkened by fresnel

(i presume this is the crotch in question?)

[ripe bay]

Yeah, that's the one in question

[tough basin]

ok now that i see it animated i don't think a cubemap is necessary

i think it's just painted, with some of the dark spots painted in, and also darkened by fresnel

still a bit hard to tell without being able to pan around myself

i'm reminded of https://www.fab.com/listings/68461e0a-7401-4dac-a407-6a363282897a which i think does use cubemaps

[ripe bay]

o! Yea, that asset looks very similar

[tough basin]

it doesn't reaalllly look like the crotch texture changes on viewing angle but my lazy search found very few examples so I don't really know

[ripe bay]

It doesn't change based on viewing angle but it does move around (polar on that is my guess)

[tough basin]

does it have this kind of vibe with implied depth?

[ripe bay]

Well, almost, the is closest like the right most side of that. It feels like a layer that is clearly below it but is it with the depth

(IF that makes sense?)

It's like, With that sphere, it looks like there's another sphere inside on top of which the effects are

[tough basin]

so here's my graph for that ball

then i'd multiply the color by fresnel to darken the edges

i think that blend is just a three-way screen blend.

but you don't need it either way. the sense of depth comes from varying the rotation speeds of the layers

[ripe bay]

Thank you 🙂

[noble elk]

Posted about this the other day, but it seems Unreal is manipulating vertex colors during mesh import, resulting in issues with display.

The mesh on top is exported directly from Maya, and the mesh below is the same mesh exported from Unreal. As can be seen, several of the values have been changed dramatically.

It becomes even more clear when looking at the actual values. Here's the raw mesh data from Maya. As is expected, each of the triangulated quads results in six vertices per color level, with .4f precision.

On the same mesh exported from Unreal, some color levels are duplicated (with 12 vertices) and others are missing entirely. Meanwhile the precision level has been lost.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be causing this, and potential means of fixing it?

[orchid iron]

**VDB QUESTION:
**I don't think it's currently possible to retrieve metadata from a vdb on import or during runtime but the openvdb library appears to support this and i don't see this used in the SparseVolumeTextures Editor/Runtime yet.

[tepid pendant]

Hello, I'm having some issues with my VDB cloud that I made. It looked fine in the beginning (1st pic). But as the project went on the cloud completely changed and looks less detailed and cream colored. I haven't touched the material. Has anyone had a similar problem and might know the solution?

(im using the SparseVolumeMaterial)

[tough basin]

is this due to a change in lighting and exposure?

the whole scene looks much brighter on the right

[tepid pendant]

yes there are some changes in lighting. I've tried to play around with it but didnt manage to fix it 🥲

[tough basin]

turning down the exposure -- potentially a lot -- might restore the appearance on the left

[tepid pendant]

yeah I have tried that but there might be some hidden setting that i have clicked on accident and made it weird. Will try to tweak the exposure abit more

[inner stratus]

Hi everyone! I am currently trying to make a bullet tracer VFX referencing this one from helldivers. https://youtu.be/5HDLnkMQlmM?si=IQvEolnTJhly1h00&t=427

However, I cant figure out how to have the ribbon renderer dissolve on the length axis, I can only get it to shrink the width over time. I also mainly want to get rid of that hard edge at the beginning of the effect and have it start closer to the player and fade away along the length so it feels like it is following the bullet.

maybe the ribbon render is the wrong way to go? Any advice to make it look closer to that helldivers reference would be much appreciated!!

[spark hollow]

Hello guys!
anyone have any experience with balancing out using FX in unreal5 BUT also using different color spaces? specifically ACES cg?
because im trying to use some asssets i got from the store like Fire FX's but the colour space is making them look whack

[tall viper]

I think ACES is for composition which is after rendering process, so i think using Davinci Resolve or Nuke will help you with that...

[spark hollow]

hmmm... i was looking into using it more at runtime rather than for exporting out of the engine

because i already got ACES cg hooked up on my scene, and it works well with everything that is not FX or Niagara

only now that im adding those things near the end im noticing these issues

[tall viper]

If you're using IMG/sequence as a part of ur FX (which u cant control for some reason bcoz it's fixed/src) for example flame or IRL Smoke I believe you can use Photoshop or other tools to change the color of ur desire look.

[spark hollow]

ohhhhhh.... so the colour discrepency is sourced at the texture file?

ok i will investigate

thank you!

[tall viper]

I hope it does help you and good luck, btw I always encounter that problem when importing my asset from Blender to Unreal Engine because UE works differently and I love the Lumen realtime rendering so quick & good result tho 🙏❤️

[spark hollow]

I love lumen so much
i just want to enhacne it with stuff ive learned from working on film!

[tall viper]

same here, can we connect Andres and grow together? if you dont mind because i think we have same interest and maybe can help you & learn from you 🤔

[spark hollow]

yeah feel free to DM anytime

[violet jungle]

Add ScaleColor node in particle update And scale Alpha over lifetime with curve in there

[midnight tapir]

Hey, i am trying to use the default unreal water in my scene and i want to have a flowing river. I managed to get the fluid simulation working for my character which is actually pretty cool but does anybody know if the River water actor can have regular waves like the Ocean water actor does? Right now the river is just a 2d plane with a scrolling texture basically

[weak root]

how can I put a cascade visual effect in a widget?

[violet jungle]

Im sorry for offtopic, but what the reason to use cascade in nowdays?

[topaz violet]

If you’re on a project that doesn’t support Niagara. Not likely anymore (?) generally, but is project dependent and therefore engine version dependent.

[quick horizon]

https://pin.it/1GZiu5BVa is it possible to make this in UE5?

[split crane]

Sure, you do need a bit of a subdivided mesh to achieve this.

Then the displacement goes into the WPO of your material.

[meager crypt]

I'm not really sure which channel to put this in but im pretty happy with the results of my carousel selection system. the boxes are template objects that can be replaced with characters, weapons, levels, 3d widgets, etc. its modular and takes heavy inspiration from the ssx tricky menus, but i plan on modifying it and taking it further

[quick horizon]

thanks!

[echo knot]

hello! my character has a base mesh and a bunch of attached armor components on top. when i attach a niagara particle to the character, the base mesh gets the particle but not any of the attached components on the mesh

Body->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Helm->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Chest->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Legs->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Arms->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Shoulders->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Belt->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);

does this mean that i have to attach the same niagara particle to every single mesh component? and how would i go about doing that? if possible it'd be nice to not have to attach the niagara particle to every single mesh component individually

[amber lion]

You might be able to make a scratch module in your nigara systeme to grab the attached meshes as well

[echo knot]

i ended up just doing it in C++ and as usual, it worked

i had to add it to every single skeletal mesh component

[amber lion]

Okay great!
Only issue I can see with that is that you have indeed one system per Skeletal mesh component while if you can get all the skeletal mesh component in the scratch pad you only need one

[echo knot]

what's a scratchpad?

so i have all of these different skeletal mesh components

wait a sec

these are not parented correctly o_O

they should be parented on the mesh...

void UGearComponent::BeginPlay()
{
    Super::BeginPlay();

    if (const ACharacter* Character = Cast<ACharacter>(GetOwner()))
    {
        const auto MeshComponent = Character->GetMesh();

        Body->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Helm->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Chest->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Legs->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Arms->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Shoulders->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
        Belt->AttachToComponent(MeshComponent, FAttachmentTransformRules::KeepRelativeTransform);
    }

    SetupArmorPieceMeshes();
    SetupWeaponMeshes();
}

is it because I'm doing this in BeginPlay?

ah these are all other their own skeletons. because the animations will play on all of these skeletons. can i somehow simply attach the meshes themselves onto the main skeletal mesh component?

[amber lion]

Scratch pad modules are basically one-off module behaviors that you only want to use in this particular Niagara system. There’s no real difference aside from the fact that you don’t have to name them and save them to disk. It’s sort of like putting blueprints directly in a level blueprint, instead of having to create an actor that contains the blueprint code you want to write.

You can also create a Niagara Module to get the needed particles position from an array of skeletal meshes through them

[echo knot]

yeah i just broke a ton of stuff trying to make sure that my skeletal meshes were all parented from the main skeletal mesh but i'm gonna go back and try the scratchpad method in the niagara particle instead

i have very, very little experience with niagara and this is a marketplace asset and i'm very overwhelmed by the entire niagara system

@amber lion you have any recommendations on how to learn niagara?

[amber lion]

If you are looking to learn the tech side of Niagara I think those videos are a great start
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUi8nuTUEtTshYxpmR7brPE3tV7JsO0VP

It doesn't speak about Niagara Module and stuff since it is already more advanced stuff

[cold cipher]

hey I am importing vdbs via python in 5.3.2 after the import the vdb does not playback...
LogMovieSceneECS: Warning: Unable to resolve property 'bPlaying == false' from 'HeterogeneousVolumeComponent' instance 'HeterogeneousVolumeComponent'
LogMovieScene: Warning: Unable to resolve property 'bPlaying == false' from 'HeterogeneousVolumeComponent' instance 'HeterogeneousVolumeComponent'
when I reopen the project it works... any idea what I could do to make this work after import ?

it is in a levelsequence and the frame property is properly keyed...

[hollow ice]

How the local fog suppose to look when the player is in the volume?

Is it suppose to go away? Then you get to see the edge of the local fog.

[wet sequoia]

I am trying to get static meshes (just a sphere) with a material that uses a distance scale, that is spawned by PCG, to work. If I place the object in the world it works as expected, but when spawned with PCG it is invisible (eval WPO enabled). Is there anything I have to do in the material on a per instance basis? It makes no difference whether its standard or nanite.

This is what im feeding WPO.

[tough basin]

All of the instanced objects will share the same Object Position
You could use Distance(World Position, Camera Position)
Or, more involvedly, populate each instance with custom data indicating its position, then use PerInstanceCustomData

[wet sequoia]

Thx

[raven sage]

Does anyone know if it's possible to output DMX through the DMX UE plugin with a USB to DMX hardware device?

[hallow fjord]

Any ideas on how to make it look better?

[grim briar]

what is it

[hollow ice]

Is there any tutorial or plugin, that creates the tripple A looking post process for your game?

[tough basin]

You can do a lot of things in post processing. What looks or effects did you have in mind?

[hollow ice]

I like the way the environments look in last of us, RDR2, Stalker2, GoT, etc?

AC games, etc

[tough basin]

What about them?

[hollow ice]

I know it's not only HD texture, but a lot of lighting, and post process

I want to capture their post process

[tough basin]

It's a whole stack of things that make those games look nicer than, say, Wolfenstein 3D. Unreal gives you most of the tech you need and ships with nice defaults. Beyond that is art direction, which is subjective and depends on the project

There's not a magical post process effect you can drop in to get from 1996 to 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbMvkEITTmo
Here's a good guide to foundational lighting (there's a part two). Everything really starts with good shapes and good lighting.

[hollow ice]

Stalker2 was done in UE. It looks nice as well. I think it has a lot to do with PP

[tough basin]

it starts with shapes and lighting

and what you're doing in post processing is never going to be one-size-fits-all

different projects want different things