I’m using a live-retargeted CC character with regular locomotion in my project, using a standard combined skeletal mesh from Character Creator. I wanted to add a subtle facial animation to the character at runtime, something that could change depending on game play, without having to split off the head from the body. Thankfully there’s a …
Narrative Pro 2 uses EPIC’s Game Animation Sample Project for motion matching by default, with a character in jogging mode. The right mouse button will make the character walk temporarily, while CTRL will make him sprint. Let’s say we want to change this to a walking state by default, with SHIFT held down doing the …
By default Narrative Pro shows the compass navigation and mini map, but maybe your game doesn’t need it, or you want to enable these things later as players find an “item” in the story. Before I forget how to do this, here are a few reminders. Removing the Mini Map Both widgets can be referenced …
To get an idea which part of a large system is processing what is vital to understanding where issues come from. Without knowing where to start, it’s impossible to fix things that aren’t working. Input controls in Unreal Engine for example can be spread across a number of files. To understand where our input is …
The above video shows how to integrate SF and Digi Cam. I’ve had to do this multiple times to wrap my head around it and thought some notes are in other, so here’s how to do it: Player Controller Input Overrides In the DigiCamInfo Data Asset, pick Story Framework’s main gameplay input mapping context (SFGameplay_IMC). …
For debugging we sometimes need to know what class is being used, for example what Game Mode might be used. There’s no easy way I know of that can tell us the exact file name, but we can do the next best thing and test which class is used. Here’s an example: This code hooked …
We can fracture just about anything in Unreal Engine using real-time physics and the Facture tool. However, it’s always been a bit puzzling to me how to make these cached sequences available in sequencer. After a bit of R&D and plenty of testing, here’s how this works: Let’s see how to do this step by …
In the Viewport Outliner, we can designate any folder in our hierarchy as the “current folder”. This means when we add objects from the content browser into our scene, they don’t clutter up the main hierarchy but instead end up in said folder. Simply right-click the folder you want to use, then choose “make current”. …
Tasks are missions (or quests) for the player to do and to progress in the game. In Story Framework they’re part of the task queue, which in turn is part of the inventory manager. We can add tasks to the queue, which when active can be later completed or failed. We must implement the “reaction …
If ever we need to trigger any custom logic initiated from dialogues we have with our NPCs, we can use the Bind Even on Dialogue Reply function. It’s not super elegant and relies on the specific text of the reply, but it gets the job done and keeps the setup very simple. For this to …
Dialogues are a little tricky, complex and unintuitive to setup in Story Framework, so here’s an overview that will aid my (and perhaps your) memory. The hierarchy goes like this, no wonder I’m confused about it: Basic Conversations Each index in the Dialogue represents an independent conversation. We need at least one section, while others …
To interact with a Non-Player Character in Narrative Pro, we need to first In addition we’ll see how to bring up a dialogue option only if the player has an item in their inventory, and how we can give it to the NPC. Let’s take a look how all this works. Creating and spawning an …
Narrative has a component we can add to a blueprint that will turn it into an interactable object. It’s aptly called NarrativeInteractible. Once added to the class, we can select it and override the OnInteracted event. This will let us implement custom code that executes on interaction. The Interaction section on the component lets us …
In the player controller (SFDemoPlayerController_BP in the default project), select the camera manager component. Under Camera Settings on the left, switch between ThirdPerson and FirstPerson. This will determine what mode the game starts in. To switch camera modes while the game is playing we can press C to toggle (or hold Y on the gamepad). …
If you want to properly convert Genesis 8 and some Genesis 3 clothing over to Genesis 9 without using auto-fit, there’s a handy Developer Tools menu we can use. To convert into a native G9 item, the clothing needs to be stripped of its existing rigging, then re-rigged with Transfer Utility. Here’s how the Developer …
I’ve recently invested in Narrative Pro, a very comprehensive game framework for Unreal Engine 5. It features maps, quests, dialogues, inventory, combat, Metahuman support and a whole bunch of other stuff – in short, the glue code that would take me a good year write from scratch. As I get into it, I’ll need to …
I was working on a scene for which several actors needed to wear long draping robes as they walk slowly across a scene. This proved challenging to Unreal Engine’s native Chaos Cloth solver, which isn’t designed to drape high-res self-colliding cloth. While it can work, the results looked less than stellar as you can see …
I had an interesting issue today with rendering cloth simulations with Movie Render Queue in Unreal Engine: my cloth was either not showing up at all, or it was royally freaking out, as illustrated in the above screenshot. I spent two whole days testing and researching, until I found the issue my animations were having: …