We can use a custom material on our Post Process volume to adjust the look and feel of our scenes. Better yet, we can access those properties as parameters and drive changes from Blueprint. Let’s see how to make it happen! First we’ll need to add a Post Process Volume to our level. By default …
Unreal Engine has two handy functions called Get Horizontal Distance To and Get Vertical Distance To. These can be used to see if an actor is in range of something else. Here’s a quick example on how to use them. Imagine a drone that we shoot from a distance, and a blast radius that would …
UE5 has changed some of the menu options that let us package a project for distribution. In UE4 we could find these options under the File Menu, but they’re gone. We now have a brand new entry under the Platforms button at the top. Under Binary Configuration we can now conveniently pick shipping, debug or …
Storing values between game sessions can be done with the Save Game object in Unreal Engine. Much like with other objects, we create a custom subclass of it, give it variables that we want it to remember, then populate those before the game ends (and retrieve from it when our game begins). Let me show …
ZBrush has an overwhelming amount of brushes available, but many are just variations of things artists have created over time. Typically we don’t need to use more than a handful, and as such it might be useful to switch between them faster than using the default key sequences (like BST or BMV). Many users prefer …
I’ve just tried ChatGPT for the first time and though I’d share its output with you. The prompt was “write a short story about an ice cream shop in the desert”, and what I got back was beyond my imagination. It simply blew me away, and that’s after a single use. I’ve added a Midjourney …
I’ve often wondered how these “endless runner” type games are made under the hood. Julia and her team have recently released a project like that called Dash and Splat that was made in Core, and I wondered if I can make this work in Unreal Engine. After some research and tinkering, here’s one way to …
Sometimes I use the option to open a new window when preview playing my project in Unreal Engine. That way I can still keep an eye on other goings on in the editor while watching the action. The option comes up on the little three dots menu next to the play button. The new window …
Sometimes it’s the simple things that catch you out, like quick references. Say you wanted to access a property on your animation blueprint for something you’re doing in your player character. I couldn’t remember how to do this, so I thought I’d best make a note of it. Here’s how we can do that: This …
When a character dies, we can play a death animation either as a montage, or via the animation blueprint. In this quick tip I’ll explain the latter principle. We typically have a boolean (like “is dead”) that checks if the character has died, and it’s true, we’ll transition to a new state in our state …
I have a simple class that spawns x amount of enemy characters into my world, but by default they all use the same skeletal mesh. I wanted Unreal Engine to use a different mesh from a random pool of characters. I’ve used an array for this, create a random integer not larger than the array, …
Typically Animation Blueprints need access to the forward speed of your character. This can be done in a few different ways, and I thought I’d compile a list of options for every eventuality. If you know other approaches, please let me know and I’ll add them here. In your Animation Blueprint The easiest way is …
I’ve been dissecting an old project of mine and couldn’t remember how the projectiles I was shooting happened to magically fly away when they were spawned. They seemed to have an initial velocity or inertia in the forward direction, yet nothing in my Blueprint was causing this. Then I figured it out: we had added …