Jay Versluis Unreal Engine has a nice feature that allows us to break a connect between nodes. Blender does too, I just never knew it existed. I had always assumed that deleting a node and re-creating it would be the only way. Turns out there’ a better way: To delete a connection between nodes, CTRL + Right-Click …
Read moreHow to break or remove a Node Connection in Blender
I’m having great fun with the City Park Environment in Unreal Engine. I picked it up the moment it was released and have never regretted the amount of time I spent with it. Having done so, I understand that it’s not easy to get started with it when you’re a novice. The set takes long …
Read moreHow to optimise the City Park Environment by SilverTM for Unreal Engine
I’ve imported a mesh model as FBX that was setup with an opacity map. Most of the simple material was created for me by Unreal Engine, but the opacity (transparency) texture was not imported. I had no idea how to do this, but figured it out. Here’s what it should look like and how it …
When internal lines intersect with an external one, there’s no intersecting point with said outside line by default. In the example below, the top line (in yellow) is still in one piece. Let me explain how we can create a split at this exact point. Select the line tool (Z) and select the outside line, …
Read moreCreating points at intersections with internal lines in Marvelous Designer
Sometimes one frame is just too large a step when you’re editing audio in Premiere Pro. Thankfully we can infinitely expand the steps in the timeline by showing Audio Time Units. To do that, find the super tiny nondescript hamburger icon in the timeline, just above the timecode display. Click it and choose Show Audio …
Only days after reverting from my All Apps Creative Cloud subscription to the Photography Plan, I’m already missing Premiere Pro badly. I had hoped to live without it, but I must admit I love it too much 😍 I thought there would be an easy way to add the Premiere Plan to my existing Photography …
Read moreHow to add a second single-app plan to Adobe Creative Cloud
During yesterday’s Twitch Stream, I’ve built a camera animation with the Urban Future 6 set in Unreal Engine. I was wondering how to show the camera full screen while I was positioning it and found out this morning. That’s what a good night’s sleep can do to you 🙂 I thought I’d share it with …
Read moreHow to preview a Cine Camera full screen in Unreal Engine
Last year I’ve signed up for the All Apps Creative Cloud plan, at a reduced rate of $30 a month. I only ever used Photoshop and Premiere and never tried any of the other apps. In two days, Adobe will start charging me $52.99 a month. That’s too much for me right now 😢 I …
Read moreHow to switch to the Adobe Photography Plan as a current subscriber of Creative Cloud
It appears that most Synty Polygon packs share the same skeleton. Therefore we can mix and match characters from various packs and use them in the same project, without the need to retarget our characters again. I’ve explained in a previous post how to retarget a Synty skeleton to the Unreal Skeleton, however if we …
Read moreHow to use skeletons from various Synty Packs in the same Unreal Project
I’m getting back into MD (and a little CLO too), but it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the app so I’ll have to re-acquaint myself with some of the basics. Tracing patterns from images is one such thing I’ve never quite mastered, not until watching Lori’s new MD course about version 9.5. Here’s …
Unreal Engine has a nice feature that lets us build distributables (packages) for Linux on a Windows system. It’s a magic known as Cross Compiling. This doesn’t work out of the box, but it’s easy to implement with any Windows version of Unreal Engine. It’s not exactly oblivious how to get started with this magic …
Today I’ve learnt about something called the Game Instance. This is an object that exists only once in our games, is created when the game starts, and torn down only when it ends. It persists across level changes, making it the ideal candidate for storing variables across level loads. It’s one of the first things …
Read morePersisting variables across Level Changes in Unreal Engine
Every language has a way to modify strings: add something to the end, search for something in the middle, concatenate two pieces of text, that sort of thing. C++ is no exception, and Unreal Engine exposes that functionality in Blueprint. Let me give you an example: I wanted to find the name of a material …
I found a very elegant way to animate various properties of the UI widgets we can add to the screen in Unreal Engine. Anything from animating their position to opacity and all kinds of other things can be confined to a mini timeline, then queued programmatically when necessary. Let’s take a look how I’ve animated …
I’ve recently found a much easier way to use Unreal Guy’s animations with the Synty (Polygon) characters, thanks to TC Mabe’s video (and his other one too). This is an updated version of what I’ve described back in March, something I was never really happy with, nor did I fully understand all steps involved. The …
Read moreRetargeting Synty Characters to the Unreal Skeleton
I was looking for a way to turn a string value into a Material Instance. I had hoped that Unreal Engine would have a node for that, but alas it does not. Nevertheless, I needed something that like a key/value lookup and came across Map Variables. Those work exactly like a mini-database right inside the …
For character selections, we may want to replace the skeletal mesh of a character according to a user selection. This comes in handy when we want players to be able to select a different character, or the same character wearing a different outfit. Assuming all meshes share the same skeleton, there’s a Blueprint way of …
Read moreHow to replace a character mesh via Blueprint in Unreal Engine
Swimming mechanics are a tad tricky to get going in Unreal Engine. I’ve pieced this information together from various cowboy tutorials on YouTube, in the hope that I’ll be able to reproduce the principles without having to watch them again. In this article I’ll make the Third Person Character swim, letting him slowly drift up …
Read moreHow to make a character swim in Unreal Engine (Part 1)
I was surprised to see how easy it was to setup cloth animations in Unreal Engine. It’s as simple as selecting part of a character we’d like to turn into cloth, painting a weight map onto the wafty parts, optionally adjust settings to make the cloth behave the way we want, and Unreal Engine handles …
Post Process volumes are actually very simple to use. They are essentially invisible box volumes that can apply a camera effect that becomes visible as soon our camera enters them. For this example I’ll show you how to create a very simple underwater yet super popular underwater effect that will turn our image blueish when …
Read moreAdding a Post Process Volume for a simple Underwater Effect in Unreal Engine
I’ve explained how to make a character crouch in a previous article. We can use the same principle to make him (or her) sprint by setting the Max Walk Speed on our character movement. Let me show you how it works. Just like before we need: a Character (I’m using the First Person Character) an …
Line Tracing is a technique that can tell us if an object is in the line of sight, and returns all kinds of data when true. First person shooter games use it all the time, and the principle comes in handy on so many occasions. While it’s not actually that difficult to comprehend, I find …
I’ve just learnt how to let a player character crouch. It’s a little complicated so I thought I’d take some notes in the intricacies. All credit for this goes to Mathew Wadstein and his excellent video tutorial. I’ll explain how to implement the whole process using an interface call, and I’ll show how we can …
Blueprints can get so disorganised over time: the more nodes we add to our Event Graph, the more cluttered and difficult to navigate the screen can get. While there is a way to search for an event across the current class, and there’s the option to split graphs into Functions, there’s also a way to …
I’ve been following EPIC’s Behaviour Tree Quick Start guide and delved into the fascinating world of Blackboards and Behaviour Trees (regardless of the missing u). I thought this way of implementing random walk actions in background characters would come in handy for making the game world come alive. In their example, the behaviour tree is …
Read moreMake a Character walk to a random location in Unreal Engine
I’ve been experimenting with AI Controllers and my Unreal Guys walking towards random locations in the game world. As such I needed a way for them to turn smoothly towards said random locations before they starting to walk. Thankfully I found out about the Find Look At Rotation node. It was exactly the missing piece …
Read moreHow to rotate an Actor towards a Location in Unreal Engine
Auto-fire means that you can keep holding down a button and a gun in your game keeps firing bullets at a pre-determined rate. No matter how a single-fire mechanism is setup, we can modify it to work automatically. In this article I’ll show you how it works. For this example I’m using the First Person …
Unreal Guy looks grey by default. He’s made up of two material zones, a rather complex one for his body and another one for his UE4 Logo. If you want to make him look a little different without creating a brand new material, we can override the default value for his Body material like this: …
Read moreHow to assign a random colour to Unreal Guy in Blueprint
If our AI controlled foes might chase us a little bit too fast, there’s a way to slow them down or speed them up. The value we need to set is called Max Walk Speed. To get access to this node, start by getting a reference to Character Movement. Then drag off that to get …
Read moreHow to control the walk speed of a Character in Unreal Engine
Did you know there’s a way to specify an Actor object by something other than an a reference? I thought this was a handy trick. iOS has a similar “hack”, and it can save your bacon on occasion. Tagging an Actor in Blueprint In the Class Defaults of your actor object, head over to Actor …