In late 2022, Epic Games presented a talk on Advanced UI Templating Techniques using Blueprints and Materials. In the talk they showed off the ability to alter a widget's position in 2D space by displacing the widget's verticies via a material. This technique opens the door for many interesting animations of UMG widgets without the need to calculate the animations via blueprints or timeline animations.
I was inspired to take this idea a bit further and build functionality to allow for UMG widgets to be transformed in 3D space. This project had a few challenges. I had to build upon my learning from the HexTile Material project to better understand how to calculate rotations via matricies, and I needed to figure out how to calculate UV's that take perspective distortion into account.
I feel like this type of transform has a lot of possibilities. Some future work I'd like to try is adding scale and translation of widgets, as well as animating transforms via curve atlases.
