okay here it is all wrapped up — my recreation of Baldur's Gate III's occlusion cutout effect in Unreal! i learned a LOT from this experiment over the past couple days, and will share some breakdown bits in the 🧵 shortly! #gamedev #shaders #unrealengine
here's some more raw 'gameplay' footage too! while it's hardly the star of the show, it was fun setting up the camera pan/pitch/zoom controls too!
🔎 here's a breakdown of how it works! notes: - run spherecast on delay to save perf - only tick logic is FInterp of 'AvatarPos'/'CutoutTransition' values - separate ground/walls to not fade out stuff characters walk on - use 'ShadowPassSwitch' to keep shadows from faded geo
the real doozy on top of this is in BG3 they actually utilise this alpha mask to allow mouse clicks to pass through it when it's cut out so you can pathfind to uncovered locations 😵💫 That's a whole other rabbit hole for later though lol - i am content with this for now :D