Decals very transparent under static lighting

I need the blood stain to be much more opaque under static lighting (can’t change all my lights to stationary as it’s too much performance loss). I have tried playing around with the material, going through all the translucency settings and even tried the DBuffer tweak which hasn’t worked at all.

Any suggestions on how to set up the material properly so I can have a masked decal show up correctly under static lighting?

Dont use it as a translucent material. With static lights the material will get a shadow and show through. Instead make it a masked material and tweak the opacity values.

There is a slight improvement with masked but still not good enough. The more intense the static light the more it fades.

How opaque is your texute value wise?

I set it to a solid 1 and it’s still the same. If I apply this material to a static mesh (like a plane) it works fine, just not on a decal.

I could spawn the blood as plane meshes, but around stairs it would be hovering in the air and break the illusion :confused:

You could vertex paint in on

I may do that to put a bit of dirt & grime in places. But with the blood splatter, it spawns at enemies location when they get hit, and as far as I’m aware you can’t do vertex painting at runtime.

I ran into the same issue with decals behaving unpredictably (fading to almost nothing in bright light) I wasn’t ever able to really achieve a fix for it.

FIXED

The DBuffer enabling trick wasn’t working because I missed a step not mentioned in many other forums.

In project settings I went to rendering and set early z-pass to opaque and masked meshes. This made the dbuffer decals show up and look fairly decent under static lighting.

Just to help others (don’t forget to restart your level/project)

Just a heads up to anyone who tries to do this; it crashed my project and wouldn’t let me open it again.

Not a big deal, you can fix it from a config file. Go to:
C:\Users[computer name]\Documents\Unreal Projects[project name]\Config

Open the DefaultEngine file. Scroll right to the bottom and set r.DBuffer=False

Either this doesn’t work with the new version of the engine or isn’t supported by my graphics card c:

did u ever find a fix for the project no loading I have the same problem, cant get the decals working with out this setting