Posted February 25, 2019 by Heart of Mars
#ue4 #unreal engine #tools #dev log
Meandering about my day on a saturday morning, I saw a post on Facebook asking for some help on how to create icons from 3d models. I'd recently done some work for the current main project with regards to showing mesh previews in an inventory screen, so the whole approach of Render Targets and Scene Captures was fresh to me, so I gave a little advice. I'd also previously tried creating a static texture from a render target, so knew there was some sort of capability around that too.
I gave a bit more advice, but it made me think - why do this individually when you could do it in bulk? So I set up a folder in my main project to try it out, create a struct, an actor, and some other pieces. Tweaked it back and forth until the results were satisfying, and shared the journey on my main (non-HM) twitter account. The response was positive, so thought, why not genericise it? So pushed it to a new project, and started modifying it a bit more.
I thought about doing a step-by-step video on how to do the same thing, but my mileage on those- it has varied. So since the impetus was on helping rather than anything else, created the project you see here, and created three models expressly for the purpose of generating icons from them.
I'm going to make some improvements to the process, switch it to something you can extract over the top of an existing project (though note, I've used 4.21 to create this, so you'll be at the mercy of the migration process), and ultimately turn it over. I'll also look at doing a video anyway, just to share what can be shared.
If you find it useful, please let me know. Say Hi or whatever :)