Use maxwell render materials in unreal engine 4
To do this, add the highlighted nodes:įirst, go to the Create Dynamic Material Instance node and set Parent to M_Canvas. Then, you need to apply the dynamic material instance to the canvas mesh.
To display the render target, you need to create a dynamic instance of M_Canvas and supply the render target. Displaying the Render TargetĪt the moment, the canvas mesh is using its default material. Now you need to display the render target on the canvas mesh. This will fill the entire render target with a greenish color. You can use this node to set the color of your render target. Higher values will increase image quality but at the cost of more video memory. This will set the resolution of the render target to 1024×1024.
Locate Event BeginPlay and add the highlighted nodes. Go to the Blueprints folder and open BP_Canvas. The advantage to this is that you only create render targets as needed and they do not bloat your project files.įirst, you will need to create the render target and store it as a variable for later use. However, if you wanted to have multiple canvases, you would have to manually create a render target for each canvas.Ī better way to do this is to create render targets using Blueprints. This will allow you to easily reference the same render target across multiple actors. The first is to create them in the editor by clicking Add New\Materials & Textures\Render Target. There are two ways to create render targets. The next step is to create the render target and then use it in the canvas material. Afterwards, connect it to BaseColor.ĭon’t worry about setting the texture here - you will do this next in Blueprints. To do this, create a TextureSampleParameter2D and name it RenderTarget. This means you will need to set up a texture as a parameter so you can pass in the render target. Navigate to the Materials folder and then open M_Canvas.įor this tutorial, you will create render targets dynamically in Blueprints. For other types of geometry, a more advanced method is required which I will cover in a future tutorial.įirst, you will create the material that will display the render target. Note: The method in this tutorial generally only works for planes or plane-like surfaces. On a perfectly UV mapped plane, a hit in the middle will always return (0.5, 0.5), regardless of the plane’s location and rotation. Using UV space, you don’t need to do any of these calculations. You would also need to take into account the plane’s rotation and scale. You can then use some simple math to calculate the draw location.īut why get the location in UV space? Why not use the actual world space location? Using world space, you would first need to calculate the hit’s location relative to the plane. If it hits the bottom-right corner, you will get a value of (1, 1). If the line hits the canvas, you can get the hit location in UV space.įor example, if the canvas is perfectly UV mapped, a hit in the center will return a value of (0.5, 0.5). To determine where to paint the render target, you do a line trace going forward from the camera. The first thing you will need is a render target to act as the canvas. To start, let’s go over the method you will use to paint. The UI elements on the left will be the texture you want to paint and its size. The square in the middle (the canvas) is what you will be painting on. If you press Play, you will see the following: Unzip it and navigate to CanvasPainterStarter and open CanvasPainter.uproject. Start by downloading the materials for this tutorial (you can find a link at the top or bottom of this tutorial).
#USE MAXWELL RENDER MATERIALS IN UNREAL ENGINE 4 SERIES#
Note: This tutorial is part of a 3-part tutorial series on using render targets in Unreal Engine:
And what’s more simple than just painting onto a render target? Sounds pretty exciting, right? But before you get into such advanced effects, it’s always best to start simple. This feature allowed for advanced effects such as fluid simulations and snow deformation. With the release of 4.13, Epic introduced the ability to draw materials directly to render targets using Blueprints. You could then display the render target on a mesh to simulate something like a security camera. You could point a scene capture at something and store the image to a render target. On the user side of things, render targets were mainly used as a sort of secondary camera. On the engine side of things, they store information such as base color, normals and ambient occlusion. A render target is basically a texture that you can write to at runtime.