Splatoon Ink, effectively.

Development Rendering
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I’ll give you everything that I know as I simply can’t figure this out.

The effect seems to demand the ability to take a hit location of an object then get the UV location and then from there write to a texture somehow and… man my mind is fried. Hoping that I’ll just sort it out while I’m asleep :stuck_out_tongue:

Lightmaps, despite seemingly being required for this effect, are unavailable.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2011/gdc_2011_grimes_nonstandard_textures.pdf

ue4 dynamic texture - Google Search

It all makes sense to me on a conceptual level. Many of these operations I’ve done manually before. But the challenge in doing them like this is solving the relatively simple problem:

How do I take a black texture and apply a circle to it that’s centered to where the hit location in world space is? Or similar.

From there I guess the next question would be how do I tell where there is or isn’t “ink” for gameplay purposes.

I’m kinda surprised that this is difficult. But because I’m not well versed in C++ it’s made even more difficult. It seems to me that there should be a significantly easier way to “paint” in 3D in real time. Outside of this solution is… I dunno. A lot of tiny cube HISMs with a diffuse parameter and a million material ids assigned to each one so that every pixel can be assigned… I dunno. Crazy stuff. 6am

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I’m really interested in this too. I found an article that covers how to do this in Unity (Real Time VFX Mike: Splatoon in Unity) but I’d love to know how to handle this in UE4. Would you use Render Targets? And if so, would they be efficient enough? How would you apply a render target material to an entire level?

This video (Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Making a Usable Whiteboard - YouTube) shows how to create a whiteboard that you can draw on using Render Targets. I wonder if you could do this with a full level. I’ll play around with this tomorrow and see what happens.