Decals and more (Final Major Project Update)

The first real post I have put on here related to my Final Major Project (development blog @ blog.keproject.co.uk), also if you haven’t seen my previous post on my scripting blog go take a look. I’ll be posting up most of my updates on those two blogs, but as I’ve been working mostly on decals and VFX for the past few weeks I thought it’d be best to do a quick update on here.

As part of a larger ‘Environment Pack’ we are creating for the project there are small subsidiary packs that make that up 2 of which are Decals and Particle Effects. The content in said packs are all themed around the ‘British Slum’ atheistic and are to be used in conjunction with the other packs, but should also work as standalone assets.

To add more detail and variation to the environment quickly without having to bake more information into the textures and have it tile everywhere, we are including decals to be projected on the walls and floor. Whenever you see graffiti it is very rare that you see exactly the same piece twice, so using decals was going to be key. But to get the variation we want out of this the default decal actor doesn’t deliver the enough options in it vanilla form.

To overcome this I have made a custom decal actor using blueprint to allow for the use of sprite sheets that hold multiple decals, meaning I don’t have to have a different texture sheet for each individual piece of graffiti. As well it means I can open up a range of editable variables that give even more options for customisation for each instance of the actor.

Here’s a video demonstrating the use of the decal actor and the options available:

Another thing that we wanted to have without having to bake the information onto the texture was road markings. I have again made a custom actor that allows you to draw out the road lines using a spline in engine and pick from the given options to give a wide variety of outcomes. These use a meshes instead of projected decals so that it will conform to the spline but the concept is basically the same, trying to give the user a controlled way to get as many outcomes as possible and further increase the variation in the environment without a huge performance hit.

Another video showcasing the road marking tool and the possibilities you can produce through it:

I am currently working on the particle effect pack and will have something like this to show in the near future. But for more information and more regular updates on this project please follow us at:

FMP Blog:  blog.keproject.co.uk

UE4 Forum Thread:  /UE4-Student-Project-Slum-Environment-Pack

Twitter: @KEProject_E