Widget LED screen

In this project I wanted to be able to have an animated widget be shown in the world on a realistic LED screen.

In its entirety the prop consists of:

• A blueprint with the screen actor, containing a hidden widget component
• A widget blueprint that contains animation (possibility for embedded widgets, in my case a widget showing the level’s record time as a proof of concept)
• A Clear Coat material for the screen actor, with scanlines and visible pixels depending on distance and view angle

Scanlines in material made with help of Ben Golus article “The Best Damn Grid Shader Yet” which i highly recommend! With my first solution I ended up with a quite bad Moiré effect, see additional images below.

One obstacle I ran into was to make sure the animated Slate gets pixelated correctly. It’s simple to do with a static texture, but when animating the moving elements were bound to end up half-lighting pixels and setting filtering on the render target doesn’t seem to do anything (probably since Slate isn’t a true texture) . The solution I found was surprisingly simple, with some UV maths directly in the material:

Fixing the UV’s like this makes all the difference in the end result, and the Slate result looks perfect with no half-lit pixels: