Jay Versluis In the above video I’ll explain how to use depth maps created in 3D rendering software to infer an accurate Depth of Field effect in Photoshop. This can be useful if you want to avoid re-rendering when you want to change the effect, or if your rendering software isn’t accurate enough (looking at you there, …
I’ve been using Premiere Pro since version 5. That was before it became “Pro” or CS. It was just called Premiere back then. At the time of writing that’s been around 25 years ago, perhaps even longer. As such, it really isn’t easy for me to un-learn all that muscle memory. Premiere is such a …
It’s rather painful that the 3D industry hasn’t come to a consensus for a “sane set” of viewport controls that’s applicable in every app. Developers seemingly go out of their way to confuse users by inventing their own control scheme, likely laughing behind out backs while we get ever more frustrated when we have to …
Object IDs are masks defined by the 3D objects that make up a 2D render. This means that compositing artists can mask out areas after a render is complete and make adjustments. Imagine re-colouring a coffee cup, darkening the sky and all kinds of other things. The big advantage of this workflow is that a …
We work a lot with animated image plates, typically of rotoscoped actors (Unreal Engine calls them Media Plate Actors). That way we can position and integrate them into the 3D world. One of the hard parts is moving the camera to a different position while leaving the plate sizing intact as we make changes to …
I get this question from time to time and thought it might be helpful to explain how to save your own morphs. This applies to characters as well as clothing, and ties in with an article I’ve written a while ago that explains where the actual files end up on your system. Assuming you’ve imported …
Landscapes in Unreal Engine typically don’t have a lot of detail. For close-up shots, we usually have to place static meshes manually or use foliage painting tools, but it can be time consuming to get right and tricky to change later. PCG Geometry Decals makes this a breeze: These decals project a texture onto a …
Render pipelines typically work by way of using the same colour profile between applications that need to process image data. When you’re working on your own even across multiple applications this is less important as you just grade the final output the way you want. However, if you’re working as part of a team and …
I need vertical sync on at all times, or my monitor gives me bad screen tearing. Thankfully there’s a simple console variable that lets us enable this ad-hoc: Sadly this does not persist between sessions. However, we can patch an Unreal Engine config file that sets this variable every time we launch the editor. This …
The nighttime buildings in EPIC’s City Sample Project are full of functionality. Did you know you can change how many windows appear lit in night mode? Me neither, had it not been for an anonymous reader who asked me about it. Fascinated by this myself, I took a closer look and here’s what I found …
Blender isn’t exactly well known for its video editing capabilities, but rumour has it there’s a very capable editing tool included with Blender since forever. While I might not be brave enough to use it for YouTube just yet, I was in need of a quick video I needed to assemble from a rendered PNG …
Everyone loves a good UI change for absolutely no reason, and the total waste of time that goes with finding where your everyday features have been hidden. Because EPIC can’t be asked to tell us what’s moved where, I thought I’ll compile a list for us so we can sleep a little easier at night. …
I was working on an oil lantern, to whose interior I wanted to add a flame. There are some nice flame and fire effects in the M5VFX Vol. 2 Pack from the free EPIC collection, and I thought it worked rather well for my project. So I’ve added a Niagara component to my lanterns, and …
Unreal Engine continues to surprise me with idiotic things that shouldn’t happen, like some objects not rendering in Movie Render Queue, for absolutely no obvious reason. I’ve had this before, forgot to make a note, but thankfully remembered a trick that is saving my bacon time and time again. Turns out some assets LOD0 screen …
Mesh Blend is an Unreal Engine plugin that blends materials on intersecting objects, including static and skeletal meshes, as well as landscapes. It’s available for UE 5.5 and up, relatively easy to setup and works beautifully for cinematics as well as real-time gameplay. Let’s take a look at how to get it going. DefaultEngine.ini Tweak …
Narrative Tales is great for creating dialogues with its node-based intuitive workflow. Story Framework is fantastic at everything else – why not bring the two together. But how? Before I forget, here’s how I did it! Adding Plugins In a brand new or existing Story Framework project, let’s add the two plugins we need to …
The brief is simple: you have an object, and we want it to move along a path. Something that many animation apps have built-in by default is not so easy or obvious to implement, unless we code this functionality ourselves in Unreal Engine. Because that’s how hip and cool UE users have to be. Why …
Very occasionally, updates destroy functionality we need to get our jobs done. Newer doesn’t always equal better. Go figure! Reallusion is no exception, and much like Daz, they don’t have an easy way to downgrade their applications. Thankfully there is a way to do it, if you’ve saved the old installer files. In this article …
Narrative Tales and Pro have some basic tasks built-in that can be used as part of the Quest System, such as “reach location”, “play dialogue” and of course completing/failing quests. We can design our own custom tasks for things like collecting items, but there are plenty of pitfalls to get it right. Let’s take a …
I wanted to add a character to a GASP project that was made up of multiple pieces using the Character Builder Component. I didn’t quite know how to handle this at first, but thanks to the vendor and EPIC’s documentation I could make it work. Before I forget, here’s how that worked. For reference I’m …
There’s a fad of sorts that’s completely passed me by, had it not been for my friend Brian Cramer who experimented with it the other day: 360 panoramic videos. Apparently with the correct rendering format and resolution, and a bit of magic meta data, we can upload spherically rendered videos that the viewer can explore …
If we take an image with Digi Cam, we may want to trigger custom logic depending on the specific picture in the level. For my photo quest I want to loop through an array and see if the picture has already been taken, and if so bring up a message. We can hook into the …
Whenever an action with consequences happens, Story Framework will bring up a default popup that tells the player that their action will have consequences. This can happen as a result of a dialogue action, or an item pickup, or any other manual story event. We can easily remove it or change it to something else. …
By default UDS has that dreadful auto exposure enabled. While nice for gameplay, it always gets in the way for cinematic lighting. This is also known as eye adaptation, and it’s easily fixed with a post process volume, just not when using UDS by default. This is because UDS has a post process system built-in …
Unreal Engine has a DateTime object that returns the current time up to the millisecond. As such it’s a little awkward to deal with the raw value, but there are handy outputs when we split the struct. Here’s a simple example of how to get something like 250808 for the 8th of August 2025:
When building an Unreal Engine project for distribution, a common issue is the “multiple build targets found” error. This will stop the build with no real explanation as to why this happened. Turns out there’s an easy fix for it: the multiple targets it refers to are typically created when we rename a project. This …
Journal Entries are tracked as part of the SF Inventory Manager class. They’re a way to display items the player has found but not necessarily collected. As such, items in the Journal can be examined with the 3D viewer, just like inventory items can, although they’re not in the players possession. This is a nice …
Memoirs are pre-defined entries in a data table that can be unlocked by consequential tags. They’re easy to setup and trigger through custom logic, let’s take a look how to create one from scratch. First, take a look at the MemoirEntryList_DT under Pick a row and see how the examples are setup. Create a new …
Multi-pass rendering is a bit of an adventure in Unreal Engine. Here are some notes on how to get this working in Unreal Engine 5.5, using the layers system. Results are not quite what I had expected, but we can work around that. Let’s take a look at everything that’s involved. Project Settings In your …
Narrative Tales and Pro excel at dialogues, and they can be kicked off manually upon interactions with NPCs and objects like smart appliances, telephones, anything really. All we need is a brand new dialogue object and flesh it out. Open it up and select the Class Defaults, then populate the participants of this dialogue. It’s …