D-Buffer Decals changed my life! [UE5]

[@ZacDonald]

Deez tutorials have changed my life.

[@ckay11002]

Nutz how such useful tools are hiding just beneath the engine's surface

[@PrismaticaDev]

HAha

[@somename371]

The idea of combining decals with height blending is just awesome

[@LionUnchained]

Ive been watching your tutorials for a bout a year while learning UEFN and its awesome finally being able to just sit down and actually be able to listen and absorb all the information you're talking about since im finally up to speed on what all these thing are and do. It's been quite the journey, i feel like im actually ready to learn and apply the content now 😅

[@noah8162]

Are you planning to do a video on render targets? Would love to learn how to play around with the mythic power of real-time texturing

[@PrismaticaDev]

For sure - I'll be doing a video about Niagara2D (the output of which is usually a Render Target) but covering the original "Draw Material to Render Target" would be very handy as well

[@Jayraj300Mind]

i will be waiting for that @@PrismaticaDev

[@zeropalooba8646]

This is so awesome. The gunshot decal thing is a crazy idea 22:19

[@PrismaticaDev]

It definitely has a lot of potential haha. You could even apply the decals at half-opacity so they gradually reveal more and more damage layers!

[@OverJumpRally]

Amazing stuff! I love placing decals around and these tricks can definitely come handy!

[@MellowMornings-ox1yv]

You are awesome, dint watch the video yet but you have always been an uncredible and talented dev!

[@Erfanbahrami]

You always do stuff that blow's my mind... Excellent video...keep up the good work

[@YoanJallais]

Thank you so much for the tutorial! This is exactly what I needed for my project without even knowing it.

[@dembe3188]

Brother, you're majestic! Thanks for everything!!

[@AndrewWeirArt]

Great video! I was very interested in all this at one point, and it seems you have covered pretty much all of the cool stuff. I don't know why this isn't used more, because with Nanite you can't do per-instance vertex colour . so this can feed into that system nice and easy.

[@martyr4861]

imagine having a dripping down decal for that bloody Decal on the Crick wall 10:30. Is the Material Node "Dbuffer" always been around or ist this somewhat new?

[@inflamethetreehouse]

another banger! keep it up 🙏

[@PrismaticaDev]

I plan to :)

[@il4w]

hey another awesome video ! just wanted to understand was there a specific reason when at around 5:30 you subtract 1 from B channels of brick and wood normal maps ? my understanding is you did that to reduce the weight of existing normal maps for brick and wood texture and make the weight of roughness parameter from the decals more prominent to drive the lerps towards brick and wood texture since i see your multiplying the values of the decals's roughness by 2. Your videos have helped me a lot as I am working on a multiplayer online shooter game so thank you again !

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@il4w hey hey! I was using a technique called ‘height Lerp’ which I have a video breaking down :)

[@vyacheslav1746]

PrismaticDev you also can use Stencil buffer to isolate decals one of another to make more complex effects with decals (which will not affect other objects, like default decals do)

[@PrismaticaDev]

Heyo! I saw a post in out Discord about this very thing (after my original decals video) and decided to include it in an "Advanced Decals" video, since it could apply to both D-Buffer and regular Decals. I'll also be covering POM/BumpOffset decals in it as well

[@pamparam3495]

Awesome trick!

[@kevinhoward9930]

Really good stuff. Thank you for your great tutorials 👍

[@PrismaticaDev]

Cheers! Thanks for watching :)

[@glitchered]

so... the materials handle how decals will look on themselves? this is good stuff. a lil more computation per material, but i can see a use for that. dbuffer glass bullet hole refraction with a normal map. crimson wanted that a couple weeks ago. :)

[@PrismaticaDev]

This is just my very limited knowledge/assumptions speaking, but I think performance-wise it actually evens out. The old way would need each mesh/material to process the decals individually, sort of how Forward Shading lights work. So if 1 decal spanned across 3 meshes, all 3 of them would need to process the projection of that decal. With the new way, the decals' projections are calculated from the depth buffer and then read from the materials in screen-space. The extra buffer obviously adds a bit of overhead but yeah. I also don't see why decal instancing isn't possible if the D-buffer gets drawn in 1 go.

[@Lemniscate_Mike]

We need a "9-Minute Nodes" playlist that explains literally every node in UE5 now... K thx!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hahah luckily there isn't any difference between the Material graph in UE4/UE5 so I don't have to remake eeeeverything :P However, there are some new additions!

[@Lemniscate_Mike]

@@PrismaticaDev oh no no, I meant on the Blueprints side of things, mate. =D P.S. You're really doing God's work with your tutorials and such! Very quality videos!

[@matiasadrianmahler322]

Would be cool to have a buffer id, so you can change how a material react when the decal is from an explosion or a blood splat...since you want it to break and show the bricks on an explosion but not from a blood splatter unless is acid blood

[@medmel2160]

I'm wondering if you activated windows since.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Nope :)

[@now_ever]

Talking about bullet holes: Does regular decals support "parallax occlusion mapping"? I believe, I saw a video where guy make bullet holes with parallax. But I can't find it now.

[@JieDu-yj2vd]

One of the problems is that if you want to mix with decal you need to set decal response to None, and then you have two decals on the same object, and you want one not to mix and the other to mix, and that's not going to work, because decal response is set to None, A dbuffer is required for all decals, otherwise they cannot be received

[@PrismaticaDev]

To some extent, yes. However, if you just want to use one of the aux channels for extra effects (usually metallic, as it's kinda redundant) you can just apply the remaining channels as normal. However you do need to do it manually in the material or write a mat function to do it for you.

[@jerobarraco]

I love your tutorials man. I wish that you say the node or params names when connecting. Instead of 'we connect "this" in "here"' Sometimen im on my phone and cant read it. Or sometimes im multitasking and listening.

[@DominikLevitsky]

So am I correct to assume that used this way each decal is still causing an additional draw call?

[@PrismaticaDev]

I’m pretty sure - however I don’t see why batching them isn’t possible on a technical level. I’m curious about how Niagara decals work in that regard

[@thelittlethingsthatmatter6690]

When do you think the next devlog will be?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Probably in another decade or two :P

[@thelittlethingsthatmatter6690]

@@PrismaticaDev Lmao, I just really like the gameplay I was seeing. I've been watching the tutorial's to find the little bits I can. I love the progress that you've made from the first devlog, It's looking better then most AAA games.

[@MGScheu]

Should this work plugged into the opacity mask? I'm having trouble getting it to mask out decal

[@PrismaticaDev]

It should be going in to the Opacity of the decal, although you have to "un-pre-multiply" it like I explain towards the end of the video

[@titouchose6534]

Hey thx for the video! What are the channel correspondances for the Roughness DBuffer decal ouptu? RGB A? I have a hard time figuring out the A channel on this buffer.

[@Pierraxl]

Go to settings to activate Windows.

[@Drakuba]

i read decals are quite expensive, couldnt you have just a ball or field tell game where to change textures? That way you could have players react to colors changing (blood, damaged walls) adn NPC have programmed to react to the ball itself (if they are in the LOS)

[@TorQueMoD]

Amazing video as always! Sadly this does nothing to stop a mass of decals from being ridiculously expensive to render though. lol. But awesome to know we can make them better. Sad that Epic hasn't just built this in as default functionality though.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yeah haha it's unfortunate. I don't think there's anything technical stopping decals from being instanced (if the material is the same) but it just isn't implemented, to my knowledge. It may be a different case with Niagara decals, but I'm yet to test that. Will definitely report findings in a video!

[@TorQueMoD]

@@PrismaticaDevYeah, I'm hoping they do something like Nanite Decals so we can use an unlimited number :)

[@redtroll80]

one actor spawning decal components, 10000 decals with practically no fps penalty

[@MelonadeFX]

would it be possible to feed in angles of the decal in the material so you can lerp between different textures even, like a stretched out blood squib vs a top down splatter?

[@PrismaticaDev]

That's an interesting idea... It would definitely be possible with a construction/begin play script on the decal actor using a line trace against the surface dotted against the splat direction, but I'm not sure there is enough data to work with in just the material itself.

[@MelonadeFX]

Hence I asked, i've done this before for bullet impacts and using de dot product to create 3 angled masks and swap the material instance depending on the value, but it'd be ofc much easier to work with it just in one mat, albeit with the added cost of extra texture samples.@@PrismaticaDev do you know if this also works on animated characters/skelmeshes?

[@mikelkram]

Spawning decals on glass surfaces (Blend Mode-Translucent) does not work properly in UE. If I'm not stupid and this question is really interesting, I could look at it in a video.

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey there! Yeah it's a bummer, since translucent materials don't draw to the Depth pass they don't seem to interact with the D-buffer. There's a tickbox for drawing translucent materials to the Depth pass but it still doesn't seem to work. Will definitely include it in my next Decals video if I find a solution!

[@Tylru]

@@PrismaticaDev hey dude! Did you ever figure out a way to get dbuffer decals to draw into the depth pass? Doing similar experiments and came across this video in the search :D

[@IstyManame]

OK but why would you use traditional decals then?

[@PrismaticaDev]

Less complicated and doesn't require any setup, I guess haha. You can always do both

[@Mittzys]

wow this shits bananas this shits crazy i cant believe the d-buffer is real

[@PrismaticaDev]

John DBuffer

[@The9PointStar]

Hi! i have a problem, i need to add wrinkles to a furniture with normals in the decal, but the normal of the wrinkles overrride the normal of the leather material base, is there a way to blend them together? thanks!

[@PrismaticaDev]

Hey hey - in the Decal material you can multiply the final opacity to make it "softer"

[@mendeleev_9H2PDsgXu7NmphCUEH]

Can I create a new decal buffer and pass additional decal data alongside with default decal data? Or they are limited?

[@vaillecgart1854]

Looking at this aswell, because for now, I'm also facing the fact that , If I go custom D buffer response, this means I "give up" the possibility to use regular decal on the same surface, while also having to be careful where I place these "custom" decal projector, as they might bleed very weird values onto material that doesn't have a specific dbuffer material response.

[@PrismaticaDev]

@@vaillecgart1854 Correcto. There are certainly ways around it but you have to be careful and do some planning ahead of time.

[@No1001-w8m]

"You can probably see where this is going". No dude, it's my first video on decals, I don't see where this is going :P

[@PresidentNelson]

Bee-aye-in-aye-in-aye-ess

[@PrismaticaDev]

Gwen Stefani has entered the chat

[@wilsman77]

wow, this shit is bananas

[@PrismaticaDev]

Ban nans

[@mmertduman]

If I setup my materials to have a custom bullet hole response on DBuffer roughness, then there is no way to use the roughness channel for other effects, right? i.e. the material doesn't know which decal the buffer values come from? I guess you can programmatically decide that some surfaces cannot get bullet holes and use the roughness for something else there, but that gets confusing very quickly..

[@PrismaticaDev]

Some people have said you can use Stencil Channels to manipulate certain decals on certain surfaces, so there might some possibility there. But otherwise, yes haha. It would be really nice if Epic allowed you to make additional channels/rendering features easier. For example, I would love vec4 distance fields instead of Scalar. You could make meshes emit DF R but only receive DF G. Maybe one day...

[@Mittzys]

DBufferDeez

[@PrismaticaDev]

Gnuts

[@pebbers7060]

activate windows!! just kidding but epic video

[@swampdert]

simply 🍌🍌🍌

[@PrismaticaDev]

Yum

[@Vylocity]

deez bufferz

[@PrismaticaDev]

AAAAAAAA

[@xylvnking]

Yes please feed me content

[@PrismaticaDev]

Delicious

[@Cgeek-h3dui]

स्थानांतरण

[@KalikAP01]

Wow this shit bananas this shit so crazy cant believe the dbuffer is rael

[@PrismaticaDev]

For rael for rael

[@yvettenaomi3870]

d-buffer? I hardly know her

[@PrismaticaDev]

SHEESH

[@VladyVeselinov]

Deez buffers

[@capzor]

r u actually jesus in disguise

[@pygmalion8952]

deez-n

[@PrismaticaDev]

Biscuits

[@Cabinet445]

wow this shit is bananas

[@PrismaticaDev]

Pls no