Tech - Week Seven
Now this is where I have to draw a line… quite literally, I’ve been working with splines for the past week. Moving the spline tool forwards, I’ve been researching into the different ways splines can be used to manipulate meshes and their application within the Engine. I’m looking to create a tool that has as much functionality as possible, giving the artist as many possibilities for its use as they need.
As of the prototype I made it I already had it so that you can draw a spline with a single mesh that gets stretched between each tangent. The stretching is an issue, one that I’m hoping to find a resolution for. But aside from that I have managed to add other ways to add and manipulate meshes along a spline.
I’ve added the ability to place a given number of meshes spaced evenly along the spline. The idea behind this came from the need to be able to use it to string lights up. So as well as having the ability to add the mesh for the lights I’ve added it so that light actors are also placed along the spline in the same fashion.
It was working so that it was only a single mesh that was repeated along the spline. Given that I had already found a way that works to input and swap multiple meshes into a blueprint, when working on the Modular Building tool, I’ve taken the theory behind how that works and applied it to spline tool. This has added great amount of usability to the tool as it means you can create strings of alternative meshes, breaking up the repetitiveness that was previously created.
Continuing to add functionality I have already researched and implemented elsewhere I’m going to be adding the material parameter change function from the Modular Building tool. As well as this I’ll be finding more ways that splines can be used and fixing any bugs that arise in the week to come.
