Tech - Week Ten
This last week has most been finishing the graffiti decals I started at the end of week 9. I’ve now added a lot more functionality to the decal blueprint. With the ability to select from a set of weathering masks that can all be tweaked in the blueprint to give the look of varying ages to the graffiti. I have also as well as finished the texture sheet of tags added gameplay inspired graffiti icons (arrows etc.) and individual letter alphabet texture masks.
I gave Kit the early version of the decal blueprint from the end of the week before so he can play with it and test it in the environment. It was then that we found out that decals by default need direct lighting on them in-engine to render. This obviously isn’t going to work for us. After researching and doing some testing I was able to fix this by turning on DBuffer decals in the project settings and changing the Blend Mode in the material. Yay now it works. Well it does and it doesn’t.
It was working up until we went to use the Rift with it. By turning on DBuffer and changing the position that things are rendered in the frame buffer it has stopped the left eye from working while in the Rift. Epic have noted the issue, but there is no indication as to when this may come to resolve. This will mean that the environment in its non-optimised version will not work for the Rift but when it comes to making a rift build I’m sure I can come up with a solution to replace the projected decals. Probably just use a plane with the same material as the decal on it.
So, apart from refactoring some of the main blueprints most of time this week has been on decals. Moving away from graffiti we also want road markings. This is something I am going to focus mostly on next week as I have a plan on using script from the spline tool and combining it with that from the decal blueprint to create a custom tool that allows you to draw road markings out using a spline.
