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Starkium
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July 9, 2024

5.4 Distance Fields and Vulkan Es3.1

https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/568b9363b7c04409d5c60a1076c30427f5460196

I can get "distance to nearest surface" material node to work in vulkan preview in editor ( global illumination set to medium, effects set to epic, material quality forced to epic, and DDPI variable set true ), it fails to show up on device.
I do have mobile hdr set off, but hopefully that shouldn't matter?

On device I've forced all my engine ini, device profile, etc to have these settings.
The engine recognizes that the DataDrivenPlatformInfo.ini file has support distance fields enabled, but the actual buffer or whatever is never filled.
This makes all text render actors into solid blocks as the alpha mask is not working on them, breaks height fog for some reason, and distance to nearest surface does not have a mask. It's returning a solid value.

 

My guess is that all the above have a path for if distance fields are enabled, but the buffer for the field is not being filled. Any thoughts?

*edit* 
side note: vulkan preview button in editor forces material quality level to high and you can't click on epic. The only way to get it to go to epic is via command line r.MaterialQualityLevel=3. I have directly called this in command line in my project on quest as well, no change. 

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      CSArt
      New Participant
      November 5, 2024

      Outside of the Vulkan Preview, I have noticed that Global Illumination has affected how the functions I have learned from tutorials work. You want that up usually in the standard preview. That didn't really change much however in Vulkan Preview. What I've been trying to accomplish is raymarching with surface distance calls, but that doesn't seem to work. I noticed when I visualized mesh or global distance fields, nothing shows up. So I'm thinking that Vulkan might not render the meshes necessary to call GetDistanceToNearestSurfaceGlobal, which has prevented me from using the overworld for interactions. I have been able to get my raymarched sphere to wobble a bit based upon location data with distances, so there seems to be potential in utilizing a static mesh as a window of sorts into a raymarched space. The math is a lot more complex though and I'm figuring that out still. I'm more of an artist than a programmer. Lemme know if you figure anything out that might make this simpler!

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