Problem:

While designing our levels and puzzles, we decided that we wanted to have a way to show the player what hackable objects are connected to what interfaces. To do this we decided to use wires that the player could scan through walls and see. These wires would lead the player toward their objective. This approach not only allowed us a thematic way to help the players but also helped us find ways to incorporate our scanner functionality. To accomplish this, I decided to try to make a spline-based mesh system to be able to easily create customizable wires. This would prove to be a lot harder to accomplish than I thought it would be.

By following the tutorial above, I was able to get my wire added along the spline as I had wanted. Now I just had to find how to make the mesh scannable. This is where the issue came in as the static mesh type being used by the spline mesh was not one that had the settings I needed to access the custom depth rendering for the post-processing effects. This led to me being able to make the wire but not scan it.

Solution:

Once I realized the issue was because they were two different types of static meshes, I now had to find a way to be able to access the variables I needed to. Initially, I tried to just do a cast in blueprints but since a Static mesh object reference did not derive from a static mesh component this would lead to the cast failing every time. I tried every workaround I could think of to get around this. I tried to set up a static mesh component with the custom depth settings in place and then access specifically the static mesh of the component. This would not work, however, due to the static mesh itself not keeping the values I needed. After an hour or two of trying, every workaround we could think of, we finally found a solution. We would use the spline blueprint to create the shape of the wire then we would use the dev tools menu to merge all the actors involved in the shape. This would create a separate mesh that was the exact shape of the spline-based wire we just made but this one would have the custom depth rendering I needed to make it scannable. After all this time I was finally able to get the wire scanned as seen below.

- Christian Ortiz (VECCA)