Retainer Box got an update. Now it has 2 bools. Render on Invalidation and Render on Phase. The first one enables the redraw when one of the components has changed. The second one is the frame-dependent refresh.
Thankyou Mathew. This helped me solve a problem with retainer box with a black background on my hud. the penny dropped when you explained my 'hud' becomes the texture and needed to feed the alpha into opacity to get it transparent again. Yours is definitely the most useful reference channel I use for UE4! quick, to the point explanations.
Heads up, with 4.26 it seems that the Retainer box now forces clipping on all child widgets, so even if the stuff bellow it is set to not clip it may clip it resulting in parts flickering in and out of being visible at times.
Nice. Word of advice, don't use Size To Content on retainers or in general adjust their size at runtime. Try to make them large enough hold anything they'll need. Dynamically changing their size, results in the occasional stretched frame you saw when the time was reporting different size strings every frame. On top of that - it would need to allocate a new render target matching the necessary size.
Hello, I read that using "Event Tick" in widgets is expensive. So in this example, does using Retainer Box nullify the cost of Event Tick, since the target of the Tick is the Text node being set inside the Retainer Box?
No, it will only affect the rendering of the umg element not event tick. So even if you set the phase count to something extremely high your widget will still tick every frame. If you want to avoid tick, either set your umg elements visibility to hidden, this will stop it from ticking but it will still respond to events. So you could have for example an event to show you widget again and then it will start ticking and hide it after a certain amount of time. Even better is to use the event to start a looping timer with a duration say 1/30 = 0.0333 which means your "timer tick" will be at 30fps or every 0.0333 seconds. This way if your game is running at 120fps your ui will only update at 30fps, which should still be plenty to make it look really smooth.
Seems using retainer box is a tradeoff of texture memory for cpu calculations. So, is it only useful for developing phone apps, or can anyone think of a use case for PC?
I can't figure out how to get black text, shadows, etc to not be hidden when using this technique. Is it not possible? It seems like the target texture in the retainer uses black for opacity, so it gets removed. Edit: I figured it out. Newer versions of UE4 have an extra pin at the bottom for RGBA. If you drag that into Opacity rather than the A pin, you'll have problems.
Anyone knows when should I use InvalidationBox or RetainerBox? If I use the InvalidationBox doesn't make sense to use a RetainerBox inside of an InvalidationBox, is that right?
Awesome, I think this could be the great solution to my problem. I'm trying to play a youtube video using the webbrowser widget and then applying a chroma key (or maybe an hologram effect) to it. Do you think could be possible? and if so, What do you think of performance?
Thanks for explaining, great video series. I tried to change the opacity inside the material, so the texture opacity is not directly connected to the opacity output, but modified. This doesn't seem to work, though.. should it be possible?
If nothing is connected to the Opacity part of your Material Node then your Material will have no Opacity on whatever you put it on. If you want to modify it inside your material that is fine just make sure the output is hooked up or your material will be just opaque (as it has no idea what to do for an opacity)
Well it is connected, but seems to only work if it's a direct connection. If I modify the opacity value, e.g. just add a substract 0.5 node, it's not taken into account anymore. Could be a bug or I'm doing something wrong...
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47783892/umg_retainer_box_mat.png (oh, I can post links :) this is what I tried to do - it shows correctly in the preview, but ingame it didn't work)
RetainerBox adds effects for its contained widgets. If you want to add post-process effects for a widget’s covered region, you can try this: ua-cam.com/video/_7YDG8c-WZM/v-deo.html
Retainer Box got an update. Now it has 2 bools.
Render on Invalidation and Render on Phase. The first one enables the redraw when one of the components has changed. The second one is the frame-dependent refresh.
Thankyou Mathew. This helped me solve a problem with retainer box with a black background on my hud. the penny dropped when you explained my 'hud' becomes the texture and needed to feed the alpha into opacity to get it transparent again.
Yours is definitely the most useful reference channel I use for UE4! quick, to the point explanations.
Thank you so much! The explanations are exactly what I'm looking for.
Heads up, with 4.26 it seems that the Retainer box now forces clipping on all child widgets, so even if the stuff bellow it is set to not clip it may clip it resulting in parts flickering in and out of being visible at times.
Keep in mind: you can't preview the result in the editor, you have to press play.
Nice. Word of advice, don't use Size To Content on retainers or in general adjust their size at runtime. Try to make them large enough hold anything they'll need. Dynamically changing their size, results in the occasional stretched frame you saw when the time was reporting different size strings every frame. On top of that - it would need to allocate a new render target matching the necessary size.
Awesome and good advice =) I probably should have mentioned that in the video at some point.
Hello, I read that using "Event Tick" in widgets is expensive. So in this example, does using Retainer Box nullify the cost of Event Tick, since the target of the Tick is the Text node being set inside the Retainer Box?
No, it will only affect the rendering of the umg element not event tick. So even if you set the phase count to something extremely high your widget will still tick every frame.
If you want to avoid tick, either set your umg elements visibility to hidden, this will stop it from ticking but it will still respond to events. So you could have for example an event to show you widget again and then it will start ticking and hide it after a certain amount of time.
Even better is to use the event to start a looping timer with a duration say 1/30 = 0.0333 which means your "timer tick" will be at 30fps or every 0.0333 seconds. This way if your game is running at 120fps your ui will only update at 30fps, which should still be plenty to make it look really smooth.
The best video you ever made is video 4.
Lol. This has tripped me up more than once, thinking; wait... are there videos 1-3 on the same topic..? 😅
Seems using retainer box is a tradeoff of texture memory for cpu calculations. So, is it only useful for developing phone apps, or can anyone think of a use case for PC?
Applying a UI material to a umg/ widget component that doesn't support materials (eg text block as shown in video)
I can't figure out how to get black text, shadows, etc to not be hidden when using this technique. Is it not possible? It seems like the target texture in the retainer uses black for opacity, so it gets removed.
Edit: I figured it out. Newer versions of UE4 have an extra pin at the bottom for RGBA. If you drag that into Opacity rather than the A pin, you'll have problems.
Makes me laugh searching UA-cam for "wtf is _____ ?" XD!!!
Anyone knows when should I use InvalidationBox or RetainerBox? If I use the InvalidationBox doesn't make sense to use a RetainerBox inside of an InvalidationBox, is that right?
Awesome, I think this could be the great solution to my problem. I'm trying to play a youtube video using the webbrowser widget and then applying a chroma key (or maybe an hologram effect) to it. Do you think could be possible? and if so, What do you think of performance?
Thanks for explaining, great video series. I tried to change the opacity inside the material, so the texture opacity is not directly connected to the opacity output, but modified. This doesn't seem to work, though.. should it be possible?
If nothing is connected to the Opacity part of your Material Node then your Material will have no Opacity on whatever you put it on. If you want to modify it inside your material that is fine just make sure the output is hooked up or your material will be just opaque (as it has no idea what to do for an opacity)
Well it is connected, but seems to only work if it's a direct connection. If I modify the opacity value, e.g. just add a substract 0.5 node, it's not taken into account anymore. Could be a bug or I'm doing something wrong...
Do you have an example you could post showing what you have and also what you are trying to do?
Can't post links here but let's chat on your Tutorial Request List, or #unrealengine on freenode?
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47783892/umg_retainer_box_mat.png (oh, I can post links :) this is what I tried to do - it shows correctly in the preview, but ingame it didn't work)
Wow thanks Mathew for these exciting tutorials! Much better than that Brackeys guy!
Thanks man
RetainerBox adds effects for its contained widgets. If you want to add post-process effects for a widget’s covered region, you can try this: ua-cam.com/video/_7YDG8c-WZM/v-deo.html