To add a stroke or outline effect to units in Unreal Engine 5 using Spine, you can follow these general steps:
Create an Outline Material: You need to create a material in Unreal Engine that will serve as the outline. There are various tutorials available online, such as this YouTube tutorial, which can guide you through creating an outline material in Unreal Engine.
Apply the Outline Material: Once you have your outline material, you need to apply it to your Spine skeleton. This can be done by setting the material on the SpineSkeletonComponent or SpineWidget if you are using UMG for UI integration. You can refer to the spine-ue4 Runtime Documentation for more details on how to set materials.
Detect Cursor Hover: To highlight the unit when you hover the cursor over it, you need to handle the cursor events. You can use the OnBeginCursorOver event for this purpose. Ensure that your component is set up to react to this event. If you encounter issues, you might want to check if there are any known bugs or updates related to this event, as mentioned in this forum post.
Change Material on Hover: In the event handler for OnBeginCursorOver, you can change the material of the Spine skeleton to the outline material. Similarly, you can revert to the original material when the cursor leaves the unit.
Here is a basic example of how you might set this up in a Blueprint:
Event BeginCursorOver
{
// Set the outline material
SpineSkeletonComponent->SetMaterial(0, OutlineMaterial);
}
Event EndCursorOver
{
// Revert to the original material
SpineSkeletonComponent->SetMaterial(0, OriginalMaterial);
}
Make sure to replace SpineSkeletonComponent with the actual component name you are using and OutlineMaterial and OriginalMaterial with your respective material references.
For more detailed guidance, you can refer to the spine-ue4 Runtime Documentation and the Unreal Engine documentation.
