Holographic Weaponsight Material using BumpOffset

As a small personal experiment I built a holographic weapon sight in Unreal Engine 4 a while back. Some people were wondering how it was made and it is really quite simple – it all relies on the BumpOffset-node. The material is available for download at the bottom of this page!

To find out more on BumpOffset, the official documentation has some info on How to use Bump Offset. To achieve this effect  I sample a texture once for every row of lines, they will all be rendered with a different (incrementally higher) BumpOffset applied.

The material for the 3rd-person survival project:
holosight_thirdperson
Impression of the material’s complexity:
holosight_mat_overview

[gumroad id=”holosightue4″ text=”Get it Now!” type=”embed”]

Use this material as you wish in your UE4 project! If you have another neat trick with BumpOffset, let me know the comment section!

14 Responses

  1. Just tried implementing it and looks amazing staying still . . . but also finding that it blurs with camera movement. Any way to fix this? It’s pretty much unusable as is.

    • Same, it’s many years later and I have never found a solution for this. Would be nice as now it makes it quite unusable even when the effect is nice.

    • After several years (on and off this project) I found out it was the Anti-Aliasing Method in the “Project Settings” that caused this problem (for me at least). It’s on TemporalAA by default. Setting it to None or FXAA will fix the blurry when moving issue.

  2. Thanks for creating this. Any idea how to make it look like the cross hairs is at infinity, but stays the same size projected on the glass (to replicate how these work in reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflector_sight)

    currently, if you increase the bump offset to make the cross hairs appear further away, this also makes the cross hairs appear smaller…

  3. For some reason whenever I apply the material on any object (a plane acting as the glass of my holosight for example), the material gets destroyed and doesn’t work anymore. Even the thumbnail picture of the material in the content browser changes to a transparent checker pattern :/

    • Alright, nevermind it was just some import issue… But what i am having problems with is this blur effect which occurs on rotation of the player holding the weapon (aiming up, down, right, left). I am using the simple holographic material and when i move from left to right while aiming, the vertical line of the crosshair gets a little blurry and it gets super blurry and even stretched out quite a bit when I aim up or down. Same thing with the horizontal line when aiming from left to right

      Is this normal? Seems like a render issue to me, or is it a property of the material that I have to change in order to reduce this effect?

  4. I have tried that but 3dmax crashes when trying to open the fbx files, same happens with the prototype characters (could be something @ my end)

    • I don’t have Max to try this out myself. The crashlog might tell you more on which side your problem is. Or you could contact the product owners and ask for the source, I’ve received that before with animation products I bought.

  5. I just started with it, it’s just I’m still struggling on how to apply them to the “prototype weapons and prototype characters” packages as I can’t alter the weapons itself (no fbx files?)

    • You could export them to FBX through the context browser. Having the work files w/ the purchase would be great though

      – Tom

    • Could be done using 3D Widgets too yeah. Have not worked with that, for more advanced and functional sights I would probably try that instead.

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