Not exactly sure if I should create a new thread for this, but most of the basic concepts were learnt from Niels. Anyway I made an attempt to reproduce the same terrain scan effect of Death Stranding in UE 5.2.
This is the material. I am obviously not using the Deferred Decal domain because it doesn’t support Dynamic Material Parameter or Additive blend mode (WHY EPIC???). Anyway this is just a surface additive unlit material:
Most importantly, you need to disable depth test.
I am using Niagara to control the behavior. I just burst one particle. The rest is very straightforward:
The mesh itself is a simple sphere with flipped normal, IOW pointing inward instead of outward (another crucial trick I learnt from Niels) so it wouldn’t matter if the camera is “within the sphere”, and this avoids the necessity to enable “Two Sided” in the material. Niels’ sphere has a radius of 1 unit/cm; mine is 100 unit/cm. I did this so I can preview the mesh in the thumbnail, but consequently I need to multiply the “Object Scale” by 100 in the material for correctly scaling the distance calculations, which can be avoided if you follow Niels’ way.
Edit: minor typo correction