Unreal 5.1 - How to paint damage textures and other effects on skeletal meshes
This tutorial video explains how to paint on skeletal meshes in game, which can be used to paint damage on materials, and other effects. Here are the techniques explained:
- Unwrap mesh in runtime to find a physics' hit UV location
- Use that UV to generate 2 masks as Render Targets
- One of them is used to swap the material textures for a "damaged" one
- The second is passed through a material stage to dissipate it, and then used to add glow and particle VFX.
All this solves the problem of not being able to get the hit UVs on skeletal mesh characters ("Find UV from hit" not working as of Unreal 5.1)