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feathering decals

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JoshWilkinson polycounter lvl 9
I'm working with decals in UDK and sometimes my default alpha doesn't do as good a job of removing all the artifacts. I feel like I used a feature in UDK several years ago that essentially pulled the borders of the alpha in and very quickly, very easily removed these artifacts.

Is this all in my head? Included is a screen of my artifacting asphalt decal.

tRnQG.png

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  • passerby
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    passerby polycounter lvl 12
    try useing the power node, on your alpa, and changing the exponent.
  • JoshWilkinson
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    JoshWilkinson polycounter lvl 9
    passerby wrote: »
    try useing the power node, on your alpa, and changing the exponent.

    That was easy peasy, thanks a lot dude. Never used a power node before but that is dang handy.
  • passerby
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    passerby polycounter lvl 12
    ya a pretty useful node especially when you need to work with masks and gradients.
  • Harbinger
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    Harbinger polycounter lvl 8
    It's not in your head, in older versions of Unreal there was a bias value on textures using 1-bit alpha to let you adjust the greyscale threshold of what would be opaque and what would be transparent.

    I'm not sure why, but newer builds of UDK seem to have removed it. I've noticed this often, especially with lights, that some parameters are being disabled in their .uc class files in newer UDK releases. My only guess is that this functionality has been moved somewhere (and I don't know where) or Epic is trying to de-clutter some parameters to reduce the learning curve.

    If you dig through some of the base classes, like Texture.uc for example, you'll see parameters without () next to the var declaration. This essentially disables the ability to change that variable in the editor. For example, you can no longer set textures to be non-compressed, because of the missing parenthesis for that flag:

    var bool CompressionNone;

    I did a quick scan through Texture.uc and Texture2D.uc and couldn't find that bias value that I remember, so it's either gone or I've forgotten what it's called and can't find it. I wish it were back, it's cheaper to tweak in the source texture than fixing it in the material.
  • LoTekK
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    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    newer builds of UDK seem to have removed it
    It's not just in UDK, either. I don't know which, but one of the code drops for UE3 has also removed the threshold setting in the Texture editor. Happened a while back, but I don't recall when it disappeared.

    [edit]
    Noticed this earlier, though it's less useful than the texture-level threshold setting (Material editor, when no nodes are selected)

    udkClip.jpg
  • Harbinger
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    Harbinger polycounter lvl 8
    Ahhh that's where it's been moved to... I guess I can see some advantages to having it at the material level though, you can adjust per material rather than globally.

    Thanks for pointing out the new spot!
  • LoTekK
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    LoTekK polycounter lvl 17
    Harbinger wrote: »
    I guess I can see some advantages to having it at the material level though, you can adjust per material rather than globally.
    Until you move towards a couple of monolithic uberShaders that you instance from :p
  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Too bad you're stuck at 512 instructions, so you're limited to an ubershader ;P
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