Undefined signal
My submission for LD59. I worked solo and participated mostly to learn rather than to ship a finished game.
After thinking about the theme "Signal", I wanted to implement something inspired by the radio scanner from Outer Wilds.
It's not my first jam, but it is my first using unreal.
I spent a good chunk of time on the arm animation blended with the UE 5.6 first-person template movement. I'm not used to animation work, and since this template was updated recently there isn't much documentation or tutorial yet, so I had to dig into the code and blueprints to understand how it works.
I modeled the scanner in Blender and created the materials in Unreal. The sine-wave effect was a bit tricky to get right, as it was my first time working with animated materials.
There is no real gameplay loop, so I did not package a build since there isn't much to play. Still, it was a fun jam and I hope to come better prepared next time!
Tools used:
- Unreal Engine 5.6
- Blender
- Git
- Textures from: https://kenney.nl/assets
After thinking about the theme "Signal", I wanted to implement something inspired by the radio scanner from Outer Wilds.
It's not my first jam, but it is my first using unreal.
I spent a good chunk of time on the arm animation blended with the UE 5.6 first-person template movement. I'm not used to animation work, and since this template was updated recently there isn't much documentation or tutorial yet, so I had to dig into the code and blueprints to understand how it works.
I modeled the scanner in Blender and created the materials in Unreal. The sine-wave effect was a bit tricky to get right, as it was my first time working with animated materials.
There is no real gameplay loop, so I did not package a build since there isn't much to play. Still, it was a fun jam and I hope to come better prepared next time!
Tools used:
- Unreal Engine 5.6
- Blender
- Git
- Textures from: https://kenney.nl/assets
Comments8
For the screen on the 3D model, I assigned a separate material and texture in Blender. Make sure to UV unwrap the screen so it takes up the full UV coordinate space, otherwise the widget won't display correctly on the mesh.
Once imported in Unreal it should have created a separate material dedicated to the screen, open it and create a parameter texture assigned to the base color.
Then I added a Widget component on my tool blueprint, selected it, set the Widget source as the one I wanted to render, set the render size as my desired widget size, and toggled off Render on Main Pass so the component doesn't render in the game world but only on it's render target.
Then on the blueprint Begin Play, create a dynamic material instance of the screen material and store a reference as bp variable, and then on Tick get the render target texture from the Widget component and assign it to the material instance parameter texture you created earlier using the Set Texture Parameter node.
I learned this by following the YouTube tutorial:
It also explains how to size your widget accordingly
And
Wich made me discover the "render on main pass toggle"