Display Player Location on a Map with Render Targets in Unreal Engine

Use a Scene Capture 2D and a render target to bake a top-down map mask in Unreal Engine, draw the live player location on it with a custom depth stencil, then export it as a static texture.

A render target in Unreal Engine showing a white robot silhouette on a black background, tracking the player's live location on a map

This tutorial uses render targets to show the player’s location in the world. We build a top-down baker that captures the level into a render target, draws the live player position onto it, and finally bakes the whole thing out as a static texture you can reuse. If you have read Part 1 of the fog of war series, this is exactly how that walkable floor mask gets generated.

The map baker actor

We start with a Blueprint actor that will do the capturing. We add a Scene Capture Component 2D to it and rotate the component to point straight down at the floor, so it sees the level from above like a minimap.

A top-down view in Unreal Engine of a robot floor mesh with the scene capture frustum bounds visible

Positioning the capture over the whole level

To capture the entire world the camera has to sit high enough to frame it. We measure the scene first: here it is roughly 3000 cm wide. So we set the Scene Capture Component to 1500 cm in height, drop the Blueprint into the level, and set the actor itself to 1500 cm on its X and Y coordinates so it is centered over the map.

Setting the height of the scene capture component in the Unreal Blueprint details panel

The render target

Next we create a Render Target asset and assign it as the Texture Target on the Scene Capture Component 2D. This is the texture the camera renders into every time it captures, and the texture we will read back later.

Assigning a render target asset as the texture target on the scene capture component 2D

Capture only what we want

We want the capture to show only specific actors and leave the rest of the world black. So we change the Primitive Render Mode to Use ShowOnly List, and we change the Capture Source to Final Color (LDR) so a post-process material can later turn the capture into a clean black-and-white mask.

The scene capture component settings showing capture source set to final color LDR and the primitive render mode dropdown

Telling the capture what to see

With a ShowOnly list, nothing is captured until we explicitly add actors to it. The easiest way to find the actors we care about is to give them a tag and look them up by tag in the baker Blueprint. We mark the robot floor mesh with a scene capture tag.

Tagging the floor actor with a scene capture tag in the level editor details panel

In the baker Blueprint we use that same tag to find the floor actor and set it as a ShowOnly actor on the Scene Capture Component. Now the capture sees the floor and nothing else.

The baker Blueprint finding the floor actor by tag and adding it to the scene capture show only list

A black-and-white post-process material

To turn the capture into a mask we create a post-process material for the Scene Capture Component. The goal is simple: anything in the ShowOnly list returns white, everything else stays black. We use a Scene Texture node to read the diffuse color of each pixel, then an If node that says any pixel with at least some color returns white and everything else stays black. A Saturate node at the end keeps the values clamped between 0 and 1.

A post-process material graph using a scene texture node, an if node, and a saturate node to output a black-and-white mask

Previewing the result on a screen

To see what the capture produces, we display the render target on a big screen in front of us in the level. We make a very simple unlit material with a single Texture Sample node pointing at the render target, and apply it to the screen mesh.

A simple unlit material with a texture sample node, used to display the render target on an in-level screen

Drawing the live player location

Now for the player marker. We add a mesh above the character in the shape we want to show on the map. Since we are feeling creative, we use a smaller robot.

A small marker mesh placed above the third person character in the Blueprint viewport

This marker should only appear on the map, not in the normal game view, so we enable Visible in Scene Capture Only on the mesh. The player never sees the floating robot, but the capture does.

Enabling visible in scene capture only on the marker mesh in the character Blueprint

Using a custom depth stencil to stamp the marker

Our goal is to draw the marker as a black shape on the white floor at the character’s location. We do this with a custom depth stencil. With the marker mesh selected, we open its Rendering properties, enable Render CustomDepth Pass, and set the Custom Depth Stencil Value to 1.

The character marker mesh rendering properties with render custom depth pass enabled and a custom depth stencil value of 1

Back in the post-process material we use the stencil value to replace any pixel where it equals 1 with black. We read it with a Scene Texture node set to Custom Stencil; that gives a value on all channels, so we just pick red. A One Minus node flips it so stencil pixels become black, and a Min node between the white floor and the black marker leaves us with the marker shape cut into the white floor.

A post-process material reading the custom stencil with a one minus and a min node to stamp the marker shape onto the floor mask

Adding the character to the show only list

The Scene Capture Component 2D only sees ShowOnly actors, so it cannot read the stencil we just set unless the character (and its child marker mesh) is on that list too. Otherwise the Custom Stencil Scene Texture node returns nothing. We use the same scene capture tag trick to find the character and add it as a ShowOnly actor alongside the floor.

Adding the character actor to the scene capture show only list via its tag

Seeing it in game

Starting the game, the render target now shows the player marker moving across the map in real time, captured live from above.

In game: the third person character on the floor with the big screen behind showing the white robot marker on the render target map

Baking the render target to a static texture

A live render target is great for a minimap, but for something like a static walkable mask we want to bake it out once. We add a Bake function to the map baker with a single node: Render Target Create Static Texture (Editor Only). We point it at our render target, set an export name, change the Compression Settings to Masks since this is a black-and-white mask, and say no to mipmaps.

The bake function calling render target create static texture editor only, with compression set to masks

Making bake work without running the game

That node can only run from the editor, so we mark the Bake function as Call In Editor. But because we are now baking without pressing Play, BeginPlay never fires, which means the ShowOnly list never gets populated. We move that setup into the Construction Script so the capture is configured whether or not the game is running.

The construction script populating the scene capture show only list so baking works without running the game

Flipping the upside-down bake

Calling Bake now exports the current render target as a new static texture. Like most newborns, it arrives upside down. To fix it we rotate the Scene Capture Component by 180 degrees and bake again, and the texture comes out the right way up.

The exported static texture in the Unreal texture editor showing the baked robot silhouette mask, now right side up

Wrapping up

That is the full pipeline: a Scene Capture 2D pointed at the floor, a render target to capture into, a black-and-white post-process material, a custom depth stencil to stamp the live player marker, and an editor bake to freeze it all into a static texture. The same approach drives minimaps, location indicators, and the walkable floor masks used in fog of war.

If you want a replicated, performance-minded fog of war system built on top of techniques like this, the Multiplayer Fog of War plugin packages it up for multiplayer and single-player top-down games.