Jay Versluis Cascadeur can create animation loops, but it’s far from intuitive. It’s also a destructive process, so save your projects before applying them. Here’s how to loop an animation using Interval Edit Mode. Select the first keyframe on the timeline, let’s assume this needs to become the seamless last frame of our animation. Switch into Point …
When exporting files from Blender for use in Unreal Engine via OBJ, we have to apply some settings for objects to behave correctly. These can be made either on export from Blender, or on Import to UE. Of course I forget how it works when I need it next, and despite the handsome presets I’ve …
We can retarget animations with the Pro version of Cascadeur. As long as the figures are setup to have an auto-posing rig, the app can translate motions between figures. It’s a little cumbersome and unintuitive, and I’ll probably forget, so here’s a quick note for you and my future self. I’ll use my previous Battle …
In this article I’ll show you how to take a character from iClone with an animation applied, import them into Cascadeur to make changes, then bring the animation back into iClone. The official documentation is a little outdated at the time of writing, and thankfully this pipeline has been greatly improved. This works with CC3+ …
With Cartoon Animator 5.3 we got this exciting new feature called Puppet Stage. With it we can trigger pre-defined motions by way of keyboard hotkeys. This is very simple to implement with single objects and characters, but not quite as intuitive when multiple objects come into play. Here’s how to do it. For my simple …
When I import a mocap clip from Rokoko Studio into iClone, it’s usually not coming in aligned to the world centre. It’ll still work, but in target applications it would be helpful to have the pivot point where my character is, and the rotation aligned to where s/he’s facing. Thankfully iClone has us covered in …
The other day I had some rotoscoped footage we wanted to enhance with Topaz Video. The transfer went well, but sadly Topaz Video is very pernickety when it comes to retaining alpha or opacity. Although it’s apparently a feature, I’ve never been able to make it work reliably. Hence I thought I’ll use the original …
Extending a short part of a motion into a longer segment can be tough. Say you had a few steps recorded and you needed the character to walk like this for several seconds, while retaining forward motion and rock solid foot tracking. Thankfully iClone is the perfect tool to get the job done. Of course …
The GASP Project is designed with easy extensibility in mind. This means it’s a tad harder to figure out how to amend the project at first, but in this article I’ll show you what to do and where to add your values so your own pawn comes up in the menu. What we’ll need is: …
We wanted to tweak the ever-so-slightly-excessive wind speed that’s part of the procedural grass in Brushify. This took some research, but a video by Joe Garth greatly helped me understand where to look for the setting. Each landscape layer’s layer info gives a clue where to start your reverse-lookup research. Select the landscape, then switch …
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 …