DynamicTexture Sample for Unreal Engine 5

If you've ever wanted to generate a texture from C++ in UE5, here's one way to do it.

Quickstart using the plugin

I've never packed up an Unreal plugin before, so maybe the plugin in the src folder just works for you if you copy it into your project folder, 🤷

1. Add the BP_DynamicTexture actor to your scene (it should be a cube with the Material_Dynamic already set on it, and DynamicTexture component already added)
2. Run the project and you should see a cube with a pattern like shown above
3. Modify the UDynamicTextureComponent::TickComponent() function to modify the texture in whatever way you want
4. Go back to Unreal, hit CTRL-ALT-F11 to trigger a hot rebuild (do NOT use build from within Visual Studio)
5. Repeat from 3 until you have what you want

How to replicate the plugin yourself

If the plugin fails for whatever reason, here's how I went about doing this.

Create a new UActorComponent

• navigate to the Tools menu
• select New C++ Class
• click Show all classes
• type ActorComponent
• name it whatever you like, I called mine DynamicTexture

Unreal will do its thing, then should show you your files within Visual Studio

Modify your build file to cater for our dependencies

• you should see a file ending with .Build.cs near your new source files (mine is DynamicTexturePlugin.Build.cs)
• you should see existing dependencies such as "CoreUObject", "Engine", "Slate", "SlateCore"
• add "RHI", "RenderCore" to the end, otherwise you'll get linker error

Implement the rest of the Owl

• copy the source from the repo into whatever files you've created
• DynamicTextureComponent.cpp
• DynamicTextureComponent.h

Create a texture to use as a source

• pre-empting the next step, we need a blank texture
• create a texture the same size of what you're going to use via code, for me it's 1024x1024
• save it as a PNG and import it into Unreal (I called mine Texture_Blank1024)
• double-click it to open it
• change Mip Gen Settings to NoMipmaps
• change Compression Settings to VectorDisplacementMap (RGBA8) (which ironically results in a B8G8R8A8 texture for us to use)
• uncheck the sRGB checkbox

Create a new material

• right click on your content browser and click New Material, I named mine Material_Dynamic
• double-click it to open it
• left click the Base Color pin and drag it off to the side, then release it
• in the popup that appears, type TextureSampleParameter2D to create that node
• it will be asking for the name of it, make sure to name it DynamicTextureParam
• with the node still selected, note the Material Expression Texture Base section of the Details tab that should be visible somewhere
• change the texture from DefaultTexture to the texture you setup in the previous step (Texture_Blank1024 for me)
• change the Sampler Type to LinearColor (this would fail with the default texture, which is why we created our own first)

Finally we can create our actor to use this all

• right click on your content browser and click Blueprint Class
• show all classed
• selected StaticMeshActor
• I named mine BP_DynamicTexture
• double-click it to open it
• select the StaticMeshComponent component and select a mesh, any will do, a plane works
• change the material it's using to be the material we created above (Material_Dynamic for me)
• now add a new component, the component we created in the first step (DynamicTextureComponent for me)

Now you should finally be able to run your project and see a changing texture!