[UE4] Any plans for UMG integration?

Roland_Price

Hi, everyone

We're doing UE4 2d project called Luscus and we're using Spine for all the ingame animations. So far we're loving it as it covers all our needs (though integration with UE4 itself could be improved). But so war there's no UMG integration and we can't deliver all these sweet moving pictures to UI layer.

So we wanted to ask are there any plans for making a UMG component for UE4?

Thank you in advance for your answers

InnerChild

UMG will not work with Spine because of how Spine creates the render. In fact UMG does not support paper2D flipbook animations neither.

You have 4 options:
Export Spine animation as spritesheet and create a material with a flipbook node to play the animation.
Mix a 3dwidget with your Spine Renderer inside a Blueprint.
Capture the Spine animation in a texture target and send it to UMG via material
Create/Modify a slate to render 3d objects on UMG.

Roland_Price

InnerChild wrote
UMG will not work with Spine because of how Spine creates the render. In fact UMG does not support paper2D flipbook animations neither.

You have 4 options:
Export Spine animation as spritesheet and create a material with a flipbook node to play the animation.
Mix a 3dwidget with your Spine Renderer inside a Blueprint.
Capture the Spine animation in a texture target and send it to UMG via material
Create/Modify a slate to render 3d objects on UMG.

Thank you for your answer, we'll investigate these options. Although we were hoping for a native integration, mainly because there is a plugin that actually adds the Flipbook play to UMG (no materials support so far, but still).

InnerChild

If you are looking for a flipbook solution, you can use this
Unreal Engine 4 Flipbooks Materials - YouTube

and set the material domain to UI

Roland_Price

InnerChild wrote
If you are looking for a flipbook solution, you can use this
Unreal Engine 4 Flipbooks Materials - YouTube

and set the material domain to UI

Thank you for the link. I've tried this solution earlier, it won't do - max texture is 8k x 8k and we have a 32 frames FullHD flipbook, so it's kinda heavy 🙂

InnerChild

Then try a 3d widget.
Or render texture

Roland_Price

InnerChild wrote
Then try a 3d widget.
Or render texture

Thanks, we're currently evaluating another skeletal based software that has UMG solution, so we'll see how it goes

Mario

Sorry, I've totally missed your post. I've added an issue to the tracker here [ue4] Add UMG support · #1047

It seems that I can paint a procedural mesh in a widget implementation, so there shouldn't be any technical hurdles (apart from maybe tint black support, which requires an additional vertex attribute). I'm afraid I won't get to this before the new year.

You said UE4 integration could be improved overall. Please let us know what you think could be done better!

InnerChild

Roland_Price wrote
InnerChild wrote
Then try a 3d widget.
Or render texture

Thanks, we're currently evaluating another skeletal based software that has UMG solution, so we'll see how it goes

what solution is that?
:o

Roland_Price

It's Creature (there's a discussion thread about it somewhere on the forum). They have rolled out a UMG integration about a month ago, it's in beta, but seems to be working pretty good. So far we're not a huge fans of the software itself because of many reasons. But UI animations in UE4 are an absolute must for us to have, so we're torn in between right now.

Our animators love Spine and have experience with it going way back from KS days, but so far there were no words from Spine team on UMG integration and that's a kinda bummer...

badlogic wrote
Sorry, I've totally missed your post. I've added an issue to the tracker here [ue4] Add UMG support · #1047

It seems that I can paint a procedural mesh in a widget implementation, so there shouldn't be any technical hurdles (apart from maybe tint black support, which requires an additional vertex attribute). I'm afraid I won't get to this before the new year.

You said UE4 integration could be improved overall. Please let us know what you think could be done better!

Sorry, missed your post also - noticed it after replying to InnerChild). Thank you very much for addressing this feature, it's a really important one for us (and for the UE4 2d community as well). If you can deliver even a prototype in a separate branch - that would be really helpful as it would give us understanding of whether we'll be able to use Spine for all of our needs.

As for the overall improvements:
1) animations dropdown list - I'm not sure, but you had something like this coming up in the next plugin versions, but I'll still add this: it would be cool if all text fields for animations would be replaced with dropdowns that could be listed in the array or a similar format with validation and so on.

2) blend overrides - it's quite handy when you can override animations blend time just for one particular case when using "Set animation" node, right in the node itself.

3) latest plugin version gives us UE4 editor crash when importing JSON (no issues with .skel though)

4) we are not sure if this one is a plugin issue or else, but we're getting something like "LODs not loading properly" issue in editor and cooked build (see attachment)

Mario

Thanks for the extensive feedback! I understand that missing UMG functionality is a bit of a blocker for some users. It's on my todo for the near term. Sorry I can't give a move specific ETA.

1) I'm not a UE4 plugin expert, but I actually wanted to implement that. It seems there's no way to pre-populate string properties and have it displayed as a drop-down list in UE4 :/ I can take another look, but I remember researching that for a long time.

2) That's makes sense. Could you file an issue on https://github.com/esotericsoftware/spine-runtimes? That way you'll get notified when I get to implement that.

3) That should not happen! What UE4 version are you running? Do you have a stacktrace for me? There was a memory bug that would only show up on Windows which I fixed recently. See this commit Revert "fix warnings (#1034)"@f40efe6. You'll have to update the spine-c runtime as well.

4) Hm, I have not seen this issue before. Do you have a little sample project that lets me reproduce the issue?

Roland_Price

badlogic wrote

Thanks for a robust answer
1) Ok, just please mind that there's a team out there somewhere waiting for this feature like nothing else 🙂

2) Sure, done. [UE4] Blend overrides for "Set animation" node · #1049

3) We'll check it out in 4.18, as we have just migrated. Prior to that it was 4.17, so the crash definitely was there

4) Unfortunately we don't, but we can send you the full one. Also, the issue could be fixed for editor for one session if I load the "problem" characters via BP>Viewport first. If I select data and atlas file for the buggy character then he's loaded ok in viewport and ok in game, but after editor restart the issue is back and i have to do these steps anew

Mario

4) Oki, hit me up at contact@esotericsoftware.com.

Roland_Price

badlogic wrote
4) Oki, hit me up at contact@esotericsoftware.com.

Sent you a mail

InnerChild

About the drop down we were working on it using Custom K2 node but we have frozen our project with spine until it gets more features.

Roland_Price

InnerChild wrote
About the drop down we were working on it using Custom K2 node but we have frozen our project with spine until it gets more features.

Can you please drop some details here on the custom nodes? We're about to make some crutch-ish solution for this stuff for now 🙂 But we hope guys will get the UE4 plugin in the proper shape soon

Mario

I'd also be interested in some hints on custom K2 nodes. The docs are very unspecific :/

InnerChild

There is no official docs about it.

We have been checking the ue4 github and see how the implemented dropdown on BR extending Pin class and UK2Node Class
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/How_To_Create_Custom_Blueprint_Pin
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Create_Custom_K2_Node_For_Blueprint

Mario

Jupp, the wiki pages you linked to are pretty much the only thing I could find as well (plus a few forum posts).

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