Strange Blink on Mac

Discuss issues pertaining to the various game/web runtimes of Creature here.
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lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Wed May 24, 2017 10:40 am

There is some strange blink on Mac. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4zipi ... sp=sharing. Please help me.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by chong » Wed May 24, 2017 3:24 pm

Hello,

Sorry but the video recording is a bit too zoomed in to tell what is going on :)
Is this a portion of an animated character? What motors are you using for it?

I have never seen this blinking issue before; could it have something to do with your rig weighting? Just a guess.

Cheers

lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Thu May 25, 2017 1:38 am

chong wrote:
Wed May 24, 2017 3:24 pm
Hello,

Sorry but the video recording is a bit too zoomed in to tell what is going on :)
Is this a portion of an animated character? What motors are you using for it?

I have never seen this blinking issue before; could it have something to do with your rig weighting? Just a guess.

Cheers
yes. This is a portion of an animated character. Mostly FK motor. There is no blink on windows.https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4zipi ... sp=sharing a new screen recording.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by chong » Thu May 25, 2017 2:09 am

Hello,

Thanks for the recording video, if there is no blinking on Windows this might mean a display driver issue on Mac. I will need to investigate but I suspect it might have something to do with the Mac's GPU display drivers for opengl itself. The code path to render the characters are the same regardless of Mac or Windows so this points in that direction ( possible Mac driver issue )

Cheers

lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Thu May 25, 2017 3:03 am

chong wrote:
Thu May 25, 2017 2:09 am
Hello,

Thanks for the recording video, if there is no blinking on Windows this might mean a display driver issue on Mac. I will need to investigate but I suspect it might have something to do with the Mac's GPU display drivers for opengl itself. The code path to render the characters are the same regardless of Mac or Windows so this points in that direction ( possible Mac driver issue )

Cheers
Will this problem be solved? And there 's a crash issue on Mac, too. It may be because creatureToolsDetails.h and creatureToolsDetails.cpp import function from dll.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by chong » Thu May 25, 2017 3:20 am

Hello,

I will look into this issue but I haven't actually seen it on Mac yet so it might be difficult to reproduce on my end.
Regarding the crash issue on the Mac, you are referring to the Mac CreaturePlugin? It does not support LiveSync so you shouldn't be running LiveSync from Mac. Is the LiveSync DLL code compiling on Mac? If it is not, you should just comment out the DLL import portion. Or is it crashing when you click on Live Sync? That function is not available on Mac, only on Windows.

Update:
Sorry when you showed the blinking issue, are you referring to the output of the Creature UE4 plugin in UE4? You were not clear about your issue. If this is a plugin issue, then it does sound like a possible bug in their rendering path for Mac itself.
There is a region_overlap_z_delta property on the CreatureMeshComponent that you can try tweaking ( increasing the z depth offset between regions ). If that does not help but it works on windows, then it does not sound like a bug with the CreaturePlugin, but rather, a bug with the engine's mac rendering path itself.

Cheers

lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Thu May 25, 2017 8:05 am

chong wrote:
Thu May 25, 2017 3:20 am
Hello,

I will look into this issue but I haven't actually seen it on Mac yet so it might be difficult to reproduce on my end.
Regarding the crash issue on the Mac, you are referring to the Mac CreaturePlugin? It does not support LiveSync so you shouldn't be running LiveSync from Mac. Is the LiveSync DLL code compiling on Mac? If it is not, you should just comment out the DLL import portion. Or is it crashing when you click on Live Sync? That function is not available on Mac, only on Windows.

Update:
Sorry when you showed the blinking issue, are you referring to the output of the Creature UE4 plugin in UE4? You were not clear about your issue. If this is a plugin issue, then it does sound like a possible bug in their rendering path for Mac itself.
There is a region_overlap_z_delta property on the CreatureMeshComponent that you can try tweaking ( increasing the z depth offset between regions ). If that does not help but it works on windows, then it does not sound like a bug with the CreaturePlugin, but rather, a bug with the engine's mac rendering path itself.

Cheers
I tried comment out the DLL import portion and the crash stop.
Blinking issue is referring to the output of the Creature UE4 plugin in UE4. I follow the tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7X3hk1 ... e=youtu.be. And the issue appeared. region_overlap_z_delta doesn't help. the blink area is inside a region. The head and shoulder is from the same region. So when I rised up the region_overlap_z_delta property, it didn't help at all.

I also tried update the unreal engine to 4.16 today and the problem is still there.
Last edited by lion on Thu May 25, 2017 8:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Thu May 25, 2017 8:07 am

chong wrote:
Thu May 25, 2017 3:20 am
Hello,

I will look into this issue but I haven't actually seen it on Mac yet so it might be difficult to reproduce on my end.
Regarding the crash issue on the Mac, you are referring to the Mac CreaturePlugin? It does not support LiveSync so you shouldn't be running LiveSync from Mac. Is the LiveSync DLL code compiling on Mac? If it is not, you should just comment out the DLL import portion. Or is it crashing when you click on Live Sync? That function is not available on Mac, only on Windows.

Update:
Sorry when you showed the blinking issue, are you referring to the output of the Creature UE4 plugin in UE4? You were not clear about your issue. If this is a plugin issue, then it does sound like a possible bug in their rendering path for Mac itself.
There is a region_overlap_z_delta property on the CreatureMeshComponent that you can try tweaking ( increasing the z depth offset between regions ). If that does not help but it works on windows, then it does not sound like a bug with the CreaturePlugin, but rather, a bug with the engine's mac rendering path itself.

Cheers
BTW, is there any way to add socket in creature mesh component? I want to bind an actor on hand. But I can't find any way to do it.

chong
Posts: 1178
Joined: Thu Feb 19, 2015 2:21 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by chong » Thu May 25, 2017 8:14 am

Hello,

Right now the way to do it is via the BP function:

Code: Select all

	// Blueprint function that returns the transform given a bone name, position_slide_factor
	// determines how far left or right the transform is placed. The default value of 0 places it
	// in the center of the bone, positve values places it to the right, negative to the left
	UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable, Category = "Components|Creature", meta=(DeprecatedFunction, DeprecationMessage = "Please replace with _Name version of this function to improve performance"))
FTransform GetBluePrintBoneXform(FString name_in, bool world_transform, float position_slide_factor);
This allows you to grab the world transform of the bone. Then you just set the the actor you want for attachment purposes to have the position retrieved from the transform. This is essentially the same thing as a socket but it gives you more flexibility since you can "slide" a position along the 2 end points of the target bone you want to bind to.

Regarding the blinking issue, there is no actual rendering code that the CreaturePlugin does, it just defaults to UE4's own renderer. More investigation will be required but what I can tell you right now is that this feels like an issue with UE4's own engine rendering code path. There are no specific Mac or Windows rendering code paths as far as the CreaturePlugin is concerned.

Cheers

lion
Posts: 26
Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:45 am

Re: Strange Blink on Mac

Post by lion » Thu May 25, 2017 8:50 am

chong wrote:
Thu May 25, 2017 8:14 am
Hello,

Right now the way to do it is via the BP function:

Code: Select all

	// Blueprint function that returns the transform given a bone name, position_slide_factor
	// determines how far left or right the transform is placed. The default value of 0 places it
	// in the center of the bone, positve values places it to the right, negative to the left
	UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable, Category = "Components|Creature", meta=(DeprecatedFunction, DeprecationMessage = "Please replace with _Name version of this function to improve performance"))
FTransform GetBluePrintBoneXform(FString name_in, bool world_transform, float position_slide_factor);
This allows you to grab the world transform of the bone. Then you just set the the actor you want for attachment purposes to have the position retrieved from the transform. This is essentially the same thing as a socket but it gives you more flexibility since you can "slide" a position along the 2 end points of the target bone you want to bind to.

Regarding the blinking issue, there is no actual rendering code that the CreaturePlugin does, it just defaults to UE4's own renderer. More investigation will be required but what I can tell you right now is that this feels like an issue with UE4's own engine rendering code path. There are no specific Mac or Windows rendering code paths as far as the CreaturePlugin is concerned.

Cheers
Thank you very much. That solve my problem.

I will cover something on to the creature mesh component to work around with the blink issue. Just hope unreal fix this issue in the future. thank you very much

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