Writing Letters and Printing Books

Today I will try to display text on the book, paper and envelope. The idea is to create user widgets, set up a camera that captures the widget to a texture, then create a material with that texture and apply it to the mesh.

I’m going to start with the paper because I expect it to be the least complicated - it has but a single surface. The next one I am planning to do is the book, which has multiple surfaces and the surface of the paper is curved. But the face of the page is a separate material slot so I think it will work. Lastly, the envelope - I’m not sure if this approach will work for it so I might have to think of a different approach, but one thing at a time.

The first thing is creating the materials; I’m going to first simply use an image with visible borders so I can tell how my texture falls on the page.

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Pretty happy with the initial results, I feel like it’s going to work.

I had issues with the book since the entire mesh had only one material slot. Turns out setting a separate material slot for the book page faces was not that difficult. Doing it was not difficult, but finding the tools in Unreal Editor was pretty tough. Searching the web for the answers proved to be difficult since this functionality seems to have moved a lot from version to version.

In the end I found the answer in a youtube video ("Unreal Engine - Add Material Slots to anything."). It still seems very counter-intuitive to me to have to place the Actor in the level in order to change something on its static mesh. I would expect to find these tools by opening the Static Mesh Editor.

The book pages UV does some warping on the right-hand side, but I think the usable area is big enough. I might look into just using the left side of the book and mirroring it since it displays much better. Or maybe I can fix the UVs, I’ll need to look into that. But overall, I think it might be good enough for the initial version.

The material for the paper doesn’t look quite right, it looks a bit plasticky, but I’ll worry about that later, I’m still not sure what style I'll go for in the end.

I might need to find a new envelope; this one is mirrored so it doesn’t have a back side on which I can put the recipient’s name.

I’m going to call it a day here and start creating the widgets for the paper and book tomorrow.