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The picture below must look strange to you: A poor sod being looked upon a group of billboard-carrying Wilber aficionados.

Like all tutorials gone wild, I had some fun improvising on the Blueprint tutorials from the Unreal Team. The example here is focused on mass-producing a series of attributes and behaviour into one object – a Blueprint – and then drop as many as I want into the scene.

So here we see the famous UE4 Blue Man in idle position.  Around him is a capsule that prevents the player to go through him and an additional box that is used as a trigger when my player enters his “personal space”.  Once in it, I can then use some key to trigger an interaction between me and the character.

The ‘Wilber’ (the GIMP’s mascot) on top of the head was a funny thing.  It’s my first try in billboards and I’m currently using the one that’s built-in the characters blueprint.  I originally wanted to write names and professions over each character’s head when I figured that dealing fonts and transparencies isn’t that easy. So I went with something simpler, like having this iconic mascot with transparent contours. I happy with the “always-facing” part but it needs to be less geographically located on the Z axis (or whatever axis that may be since UE4 uses Z for “up”).

I still have issues with it.  Unreal fails to load a 32-bits PNG file with transparency into the asset editor directly.  So I got the simple DirectX texture tool, loaded the PNG into it then saved it as a A8R8G8B8 format.  When I load it, the texture is now considered as a DXT5 file but it still kept it’s alpha channel.  I finally got transparency when I took the alpha channel and connected it to the opacity property with a translucent blend mode.  I’m not sure if this is the best way but it will suffice for the moment.