Description

***Monthly Unreal Engine Sponsored Content product for October 2021***

Check out RomanSmirnov’s other products here: RomanSmirnov Content 

Video: https://youtu.be/q66uIcjD8gI

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/hHZwvYIkuwg

Surface trails system allows you to capture trails from characters or any other objects on a surface by attaching spherical components to them. As main usage example there is snow landscape demo with walking character and physics objects leaving deformation trails after them. 100% Blueprints.

 

Technical Details

Performance notes:

System uses rendering to render targets, so it will affect GPU performance. This can be optimized for low performance platforms by decreasing render target resolution. By default resolution is 2048×2048 and all render targets will cost 24 MB of GPU memory.

If you are going to use snow deformation from example for your project, make sure that landscape tessellation also fits your performance budget.

Multiplayer note:

The system works in multiplayer independently for each player because it depends of player camera. It will produce similar results for different players as long as their cameras are closer to each other then the parameter MaxDistance in BP_TrailsManager. When testing in multiplayer be sure that game instances DON’T use single editor process. Uncheck checkbox ‘Use single process’ in ‘Advanced Settings…’ under the Play button. (UE4 documentation page)

Number of Blueprints: 6

Network Replicated: No

Supported Development Platforms: Windows

Supported Target Build Platforms: Windows

Documentation: ExampleMap and tutorial video

Additional information: Asset is distributed as a complete project (because of necessity to handle user input for demo purpose), however system itself doesn’t require any additional project configuration and can be easily migrated.

Supported Engine Versions

4.19 – 4.27