Im wondering how many vertex paint channels do we have access to and if that is something in the region of RGBA, why dont we have access to more? Like perhaps 8 or 16 channels. The ability to add or subtract channels as required might be cool but Im not sure how much of an optimization that would be.
We support 4 RGBA. Supporting a variable number would add a good deal of complexity to the renderer and we haven’t really had the need for more internally.
Maybe I can explain my line of thinking to see if theres an alternative. Right now we have triggered material blends, basically these change one material to another based on an alpha overlay, overall there are numerous combinations that can be made. Now adding vertex paint ontop of this system seems to limit the amount of available channels since we’re already using 1 alpha for the blending. Basically it limits a vertex paint channel to only being able to blend to 1 other type of material as far as I can tell.
This is an example of a similar effect to ours.
Perhaps there is a better technique that can be used to combine these two systems together rather than adding channels to the overall. The reason vertex paint is important at this point though is it can save us alot of texture space, rather than using fixed painted atlas’ we can instead use more tilables and paint the details instead.
Example of what we would like to do in combination with the above.
Blending 2 materials requires 1 channel. 4 Channels can blend 5 materials.
For the first video I don’t see where the vertex painting factors in. There is a blend between 2 materials based on the distance to a point.
Yes Im working on a video of our system which combines the two. Ive had to work around for now triggering individual actor transitions instead of using world coord alpha in a material function or something to that affect.
If I blend this alpha with vertex paint Im still only limited to the same 5 blends but I can transition to another single channel on all 5 vertex paint channels but it is fixed. I cannot change green for instance to blue as there is already a blue channel.
Like I said this is largely a WIP and I am working as fast as I can so I can show you a decent example. I need to blend between 20 different types of materials minimum without vertex paint being limited, ofcoarse maybe vertex paint can have its material dynamically assigned but if I change the vertex paint material on one side of the radius of influence (the blend between materials based on distance) then it’ll change the other side also because the colour channels still match.
Which raised the number of different blends I require again!
Now I know that I dont need to instantly blend between any number of materials, only 2 sets so I can narrow how the channels are used but it still requires more than 5.
This visualization above is technically wrong because it limits the amount of blending between the other channels but it shows a similar effect to what should happen if I had more than just visible channels for painting.
Ive been looking into material layers, how that could perhaps help with this. I really dont want to limit my artist but it has been said decals might be a solution over using more vertex paint. I also know we’ll have issues with texture atlas because of a world location blend in the material itself which could be solved using vertex paint channels as a complete replacement.
Daniel, you can have more than 4 channels- in the Blueprint setup, you can keep adding channels if you’d like.