How to make a vertical material animation on a static mesh without modifying UVs?

Development Rendering
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1

We’re looking to make a vertical animation on some of our static meshes where they “fade in” from the bottom-up.

However, the current techniques we’re looking at for doing this require us to do a completely separate UV set for the static mesh that’s vertically mapped.

How can we create a material animation that allows us to somehow fade in the static mesh, but avoid the step of creating separate UVs? Having to maintain the separate UVs for all of our objects would be a maintenance nightmare for us.

Alternatively, is there some way to make a “volume” and make the static mesh invisible (or visible) only in the areas where it intersects with that volume? If we could do that, we could animate it by raising that volume over the course of the animation.

We’re also concerned about cases of complex blueprints that have maybe 10 or 20 sub-objects at various orientations that form a single “object,” and we want the fade to happen from the bottom of the blueprint object up to the top as a whole animation.

2

Maybe you could use WorldPosition’s Z as your UV’s V coordinate (with U being a constant number)?
Check planar mapping in my recent video:


You can even use these values directly as mask. Remapping a world position to a 0-1 gradient is simple: http://www.danielelliott.co.uk/2016/05/05/super-useful-ue4-remap-material-function/

3

Guys I appreciate the responses, but – we asked this question 2 years ago and honestly forgot it was here. We’re way past it now. Thanks all the same!

4

I used the material function here to make my material “fade” (mask transparency) based on distance from the player camera. You could probably tweak it to get what you want. How to fade out a opaque object - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums

5

You could also use a flipbook to animate some masks…