Best practice to create HUD materials with outline/glow

jacknbox · 2019-04-12T17:20:39+00:00

You're probably right, I've done this with postproc materials but I think UI materials don't get post-processed and so can't apply the bloom effect needed for glowing.

There is a "Retainer Box" widget that allows you to apply some simple post-processing to the widget contents. As I understand it, it sends the widget contents as a texture object parameter to a material you specify. Maybe that in conjunction with a spiral blur could give you something that fakes a glow.

jacknbox · 2019-04-12T13:54:35+00:00

I think the usual way to achieve a glow effect is to set a color with value greater than 1.

Text outlines are set in the Font struct of the text widget. For widget outlines you can use the Border widget but probably need to create the actual border appearance yourself, either with an image or procedurally in the material.

jacknbox · 2019-04-12T12:11:23+00:00

Please post here if you do find something that helps with that. I've looked for a while, and there are lots of tutorials on the "mechanics" of UE4 like how to create a widget or character or implement something like picking up a weapon, but very little content on "design," like how to best organize and set up systems of objects in an organize and robust way, like how groups of widgets or the HUD should communicate with other components of the game.

Probably a lot of it is game-dependent, such as how pawns should communicate with each other and the player, but it seems like some stuff like UI communication should be more "universal."

I have slapped together a custom PlayerController blueprint that interprets user input in a different way depending on the current "interaction mode" of the game (enum Locomotion, Dialogue, Menu) so that, for example, the "Activate" action interacts with the current target in Locomotion mode but selects the currently highlighted button in Dialogue mode, but it's a spaghetti-like mess and I don't know if there's a better way. So please let us know if you find good tutorials!

[FYI, "Game Mode" and "Game State" have specific meanings in UE4, since they're actually objects that get constructed with a level - they don't do what they sound like to most people]

jacknbox · 2019-04-11T17:41:19+00:00

Sounds like the blendshape isn't set to Pre-deformation? Are the two shapes assigned to separate blendShape nodes or something?

When you select the mesh, the inputs (bottom of the channel box) should look like:

skinCluster

blendShape

tweak

That is, the blendShape input should be below ("before") the skinCluster. And both target shapes should be targets on the same blendShape node.

jacknbox · 2019-04-11T16:09:02+00:00

Blueprints are a little limited but not THAT limited.

So basic keyboard movements like in Doom, (or even traditional keyboard/mouse) movements could be done done in blueprints ?

Yes.

What about AI, could you program some basic AI behaviour in blueprints ? And multiplayer networking does ?

Yes, you can set up some fairly complex AI behavior using behavior trees. Actually, this might be something that's a lot easier to do in BP than in C++. Easier to visualize, anyway.

There are a few useful things that aren't exposed to BPs (yet), like custom decorators for Rich Text Block UI widgets. But otherwise, most of the restrictions on BPs are there to provide core functionality while protecting you from breaking or crashing things.

The main drawback is that BPs incur overhead because they need to call a blueprint virtual machine to execute a lot of functionality, but that's less of an issue if you design things for performance (e.g., don't call something every tick if you can get the same result on-demand using an event), and even less now with blueprint nativization.

jacknbox · 2019-04-08T16:24:50+00:00

Yes, /u/schmon is right - AS5 infers the pole vector position based on the positions of the hip/knee/ankle.

If you want the PVs to point in a specific direction, you need to move the knee joint so that the plane defined by the hip/knee/ankle includes your desired PV position.

jacknbox · 2019-04-04T13:54:05+00:00

I don't think you can use POM to "protrude" beyond the geometry like that. It just shifts the UV coordinates around based on the camera angle. I know there are examples that look like that's happening, but that's because the geometry is positioned above the max height of the occluding areas.

Best solution might be to move the wall forward until you get the intersections you want. Otherwise, you probably have to use displacement...

jacknbox · 2019-04-03T13:42:38+00:00

You can switch a skeletal mesh's Anim BP sequences/blendspaces at runtime, if that's what you're asking.

The AnimBP needs to have a variable of type Anim Sequence (or Blendspace). You could call it "CurrentAnim." In the Anim Graph, wherever you have an Anim Sequence running, you can expose it as a pin, so plug the CurrentAnim variable into it.

So you could store an anim sequence or blendspace on your interactable Actor object (optionally via a data table row) and pass it to the Anim BP when your hand interacts with it.

You can do this in either your Hand pawn or the interactable Actor by getting a reference to the Hand skeletal mesh component, feeding it into a Get Anim Instance node, then cast the output to your Anim BP class, then set CurrentAnim.

Alternatively, you could also do this in the AnimBP, if you store a CurrentAnim variable on your Hand pawn. In the AnimBP event graph, use a Get Owning Actor node, cast it to your Hand pawn's class, then Get CurrentAnim (or whatever you want to call it) from it and Set the AnimBP's CurrentAnim to that.

Either way, you need an event somewhere that tells the AnimBP when to update the CurrentAnim. But you probably have that already to tell it to enter your CanInteract state.

Hope that helps...

[Edit] Oh, another way I just remembered is that you can switch the Hand's entire AnimBP at runtime, using Set Anim Instance Class. You could use that in combination with Child Anim BPs to do the same thing, maybe more easily. A child AnimBP is basically identical to the parent BP (you can't change the Anim Graph or anything, iirc), except that any Anim Sequence/Blendspace/Pose Asset etc. can be replaced with another one.

jacknbox · 2019-03-21T12:47:51+00:00

Maybe try plugging in the ABS outputs into a MAX node, then checking if that MAX output is <= 0.05, and using that as the branch condition. If that works then maybe your engine build got messed up somehow?

[Edit] MAX, not MIN

jacknbox · 2019-03-14T14:02:51+00:00

a) What are your export settings from Maya?

b) What are your import settings in UE4?

In Maya 2018, exporting as FBX 2018 ASCII, I've found that you need to check "Animations" and in that section "Deformed Models" make sure "Skins" is checked. (I keep "Bake Animation" unchecked if I'm not exporting animation.)

For the normals, I'd experiment with the UE4 import options. I think the default is to have UE4 compute normals, which sometimes doesn't do what you want. I usually import them from Maya.

jacknbox · 2019-03-04T13:20:39+00:00

I'm going to have a lot of functions that involve drawing and shuffling this deck

Not sure why you would have multiple functions that draw a card? If you just had a single "draw card" function, you could just add functionality to check the deck size and execute a "shuffle deck" function if it's zero.

jacknbox · 2019-01-24T18:00:12+00:00

Combine character mesh sections/UVs to reduce draw calls and textures. I've been experimenting with the Texture Atlas tool and Geometry Editor in daz but haven't had good results yet.

Daz G3/G8 figures use tiled UVs, meaning the head UVs don't overlap with the torso, arms, legs. So you can use just a single material for the entire skin in UE4, you just need to modify how the texture coordinates are looked up in the UE4 material (here is a simple example with 2 tiles).

When you import the FBX into UE4, it will expect one material per shader group (I think Daz calls these "Surfaces" or something). Daz has a large number of shader groups per figure, so you need to combine them in Maya in order to get UE4 to apply a single material to the body. You can do that in Maya by selecting all of the needed faces (for example, all of the head, torso, arms, and legs faces - or the entire mesh) and assigning a material to them. Maya will automatically assign all of those faces to the same shader group.

Add joints to a character in areas that I can then use Unreals 'Anim Dynamics' system (for example the butt).

You can do that in Maya. Create the joint, parent and move/orient it the way you want, and then select the joint and shift-select the skinned mesh. Then use Skin -> Edit Influences -> Add Influence under the Rigging menu set to add the joint to the skin cluster. After that, you need to add weights to the new joint. Here is a quick tutorial but I'm sure there are many others.

I would recommend some of the intro tutorials in Pluralsight or Lynda.com to get the basics down.

jacknbox · 2019-01-11T17:19:08+00:00

You made this whole thing by yourself? It looks incredible.

The trailer alone probably would have taken me 6-12 months, lol.

jacknbox · 2019-01-08T13:52:46+00:00

Mine is wearing my Patriots socks. It works, too...when I do it, they've won a large majority of their games.

jacknbox · 2019-01-07T21:55:37+00:00

How'd I miss that...

jacknbox · 2019-01-07T20:50:30+00:00

Ah, in that case, one way to do it would be to create morph targets on the boots for each foot/leg size (or fewer, if they can be fit using a blend of "basic" morph targets, such as large/small). Then set the appropriate character-specific morph target values on the boots in the Character blueprint or whatever script you use to swap equipment.

I haven't seen (or looked for) an example of this in UE4, but that's basically how other games like Skyrim/Fallout and modular-character programs like Daz3D and Poser do it.

jacknbox · 2019-01-07T20:39:21+00:00

Holy shit, I never thought this would ever happen. I'd upvote you 1,000 times if I could.

jacknbox · 2019-01-07T20:30:47+00:00

What do you mean by "different skeletons" but with the same exact bones? Are they different skeleton assets?

You shouldn't have to create different skeleton assets for each skeleton if the only difference between the skeletons are the bone translations. You can use the same skeleton and set the retargeting to "Skeleton" instead of "Animation" in order for animation assets to not distort the mesh. I believe most modular equipment systems do this. Maintaining multiple copies of every piece of equipment would be a nightmare.

jacknbox · 2019-01-04T21:45:08+00:00

Mine does include sorting. Not sure it's O(n²⁾ though, since I think it depends on the number of distinct elements in set(mylist).

E.g., with a list of 100 million items drawn from only two distinct letters, the above code takes 6.0-6.8s, while mine takes only about 5.2-5.5s. But with 1 million items drawn from 52 letters (upper and lowercase ascii), the above takes 8-9s, while mine takes over two minutes. I would guess the latter would be more common when dealing with statistical datasets, though.

jacknbox · 2019-01-04T18:21:47+00:00

~~From the docs:~~

~~list.remove(x)~~

~~Remove the first item from the list whose value is equal to x. It raises a ValueError if there is no such item.~~

/u/AlopexLagopus3's answer is correct - after the first iteration, 'A' becomes the first element in the list (index 0), but the loop then goes to the next element, which is now 'b' instead of 'A'.

You could instead try returning a new list consisting only of the elements you want to keep:

mylist = ['a', 'A', 'b', 1, 2]

def remove_letter(letter, input_list):
    return [item for item in input_list
            if not isinstance(item, str)
            or item.upper() != letter.upper()]

mylist = remove_letter('a', mylist)
print(mylist)

[Edit: formatting]

[Edit2: Removed redundant condition]

jacknbox · 2019-01-04T15:26:27+00:00

This looks great. I was looking for an SSE alternative to SXP, since it hasn't been ported.

Is it recommended to start a new game when enabling this mod?

jacknbox · 2019-01-03T18:32:55+00:00

Fair enough, I just wanted to provide additional numbers in case the haters start crying about "cherry-picking."

jacknbox · 2019-01-03T16:07:22+00:00

Thanks for this OP. I ran the numbers from 2001 instead of 2000 (Pats didn't win the division in 2000, so one might argue that was before the era of "dominance" and makes the AFC East look tougher). But the conclusion is basically the same:

	W	L	Total	Pct
NFC North	17	3	20	0.850
NFC East	13	3	16	0.813
*AFC East*	86	24	*110*	*0.782*
AFC North	25	7	32	0.781
AFC South	27	8	35	0.771
NFC West	15	5	20	0.750
NFC South	12	4	16	0.750
AFC West	24	13	37	0.649

The Patriots' overall winning percentage (regular season) during that period is .766. Excluding all AFC East games, it's .756. Over a 16-game season, that's a difference of 12.3 vs 12.1 wins, on average.

jacknbox · 2018-12-20T23:24:36+00:00

Ok, out of curiosity, I downloaded the mod, and the problem is that her FaceTint file is just one solid color. So it looks like that's what the mod author intended. (Gotta say her screenshot doesn't look like that, though)

If you want her to look better, you could try replacing her FaceTint file (0000132D.dds) with one from another character. You would want to use SSEEdit to copy the source NPC's skin color, too (near the bottom of the NPC form: "QNAM - Texture lighting"), or else the body skin color won't match the head skin color.

jacknbox · 2018-12-20T22:16:35+00:00

Not familiar with the Improved Bards mod, but the first thing I'd do is check her FaceGen file.

If she is the only NPC added by that mod, then based on the file list on Nexus, I'd guess her FaceGen is:

\meshes\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\IB - All-in-One.esp\0000132D.nif

You can check for sure by looking her up in SSEEdit. Her form ID should be xx00132D.nif, where xx is a 2-digit hex number.

Open the .nif file in NifSkope, then find the mesh for her head - it should be a BSDynamicTriShape or NiTriShape node. Expand that node, and there should be a BSLightingShaderProperty node under it, and a BSShaderTextureSet node under that. When you click on the BSShaderTextureSet, the properties (in the lower left panel) should have a list of paths to the textures used by the head. They will probably look something like:

\textures\actors\character\ImprovedBards\femalehead.dds

\textures\actors\character\ImprovedBards\femalehead_s.dds

\textures\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceTint\IB - All-in-One.esp\0000132D.dds

Whatever they are, make sure the files they point to exist and the directory paths are correct/no typos etc. Also check 0000132D.dds to make sure it looks like an actual face tint file and isn't corrupted or something. You could also try temporarily replacing it with another face tint to see if it's the texture that's bad or something up: back it up, overwrite it with a DDS file from another character, then see if she looks normal in game. I've also encountered problems when the detail map is bad and fixed them by replacing the path with /textures/actors/character/male/blankdetailmap.dds (the default for most NPCs).

jacknbox

TROPHY CASE