Damage by texture map?

So I want to implement damage by location via a texture map. What I was thinking, was having a blank texture to act as the damage map and add it to the material for the targets in my project and write to said map to put in the damage, and have the target read from the map to indicate damage, and to tell if the target is “dead” or not.

So my question is really two pronged, 1) How do I write values into a texture map at given real world locations (probably easier than I think it might be) and 2) how do I read data from the texture map to make use of it

Also, I will gladly take solutions in both blueprints and in C++ as I intend to integrate both in this particular project, given the complexity of some other key components, but would prefer blueprints.

I think this post might help you:

hmmm… interesting… I’ll have to look into it another time, more focused on other aspects of my project at the moment, but it looks promising, hopefully I’ll be able to use the same method for what I want to do, and hell, seems like I can even have 4 damage channels, like, say kinetic damage, thermal damage, and… whatever else I would ever want all stored in the same texture.