Log 06: Summoning and Destroying Ranger Weapons

Pictures speak a thousand words so here's what I was working on this past week:

Don't let the simplicity of the images fool you, those icons weren't just PNG's that I could slap into textures, they were 3D meshes (yes, even the numbers!) that I had to set up round about ways of getting them on to the HUD. But at least they look a lot nicer than just colored boxes.

The only problem with them now, is that because of the wonky way I had to set up the image capturing in-engine, when the project closes, the images get lost. I would be willing to bet money (and I'm not a betting person) if I made a build of the game, it would be the same thing. I'm going to have to figure something else out. Either putting the blueprints into the map (but outside the actual level), which would not be good because then I'd need to remember to do that for ALL of them in EVERY map I make. Or find some way of making the texture images permanent.

But that was all only a day or two. What did I work on the rest of the week and the entirety of the weekend? Particle systems to make summoning and dismissing the Sentai weapons look cool as the functionality was already built.

This was my first attempt. At first I was using pre-built packages from the Unreal Marketplace. But, as you can see, they weren't....quite working.

After hours of fiddling, analysis, and multiple tutorials on mesh/material dissolves as well as mesh/particle interactions I finally got something I'm mostly happy with!

It's still not perfect, but it is serviceable. Not to bad for someone just learning this stuff, if I do say so myself.

Part of making this work and not clogging up the player character blueprint was making the weapons their own actors that are children of the playable character. This required the creation of a new interface so I could get communication between them without a bunch of casting.