How to adjust Normal Map Strength in Unreal Engine

It’s nice to have adjustment options on our normal maps. Sometimes the strength that works in another DCC doesn’t work for the final look, something I frequently encounter with the base colour channel. Typically I add a Vector 3 and Multiply nodes before the final output, but for non-colour data this doesn’t work. Instead we …

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How to change the Timeline Default Duration in iClone

By default, an iClone Project comes in with a duration of 1800 frames (0-1799) and a frame rate of 60fps. Being a new user and all, it’s impossible for my brain to remember where to change this, as it’s in an incredibly tricky to find place called Project Settings. Here’s how we get there: The …

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How to set the path to Blender in Godot

I’ve been checking out Godot recently, and as it turns out it uses the Blender executable under the hood for many of its operations. You wouldn’t even notice, but having Blender installed is a major advantage, and as such the path to Blender needs to be set correctly for the app to find it. Godot …

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Working with Takes and Shots in Unreal Engine

I’ve previously talked about using Shot Tracks in the UE Sequencer. There’s a related feature called Takes that I’ve just found out about. It can make life easier as you try things out while you work with animations and adds an “alternate” shot that can be swapped out without destroying the original. Each take is …

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How to keyframe Cloud Movement in Sequencer with Ultra Dynamic Sky

By default, Ultra Dynamic Sky calculates cloud movement continuously, no matter if you’re running game mode, simulation mode or if you’re working with a Level Sequence. There is a way to make sure the clouds form the same way as you move the playhead so that we get predictable results in our cinematic keyframe animations. …

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Automating UDIM Texture Export from Faceform Wrap with Python

I’ve been using Faceform Wrap for a couple of years (formerly R3DS Wrap), and it handles texture conversions beautifully. While it can handle UDIMs natively, it’s a little cumbersome having to change the texture for each tile before export manually. Thankfully there’s a better way, and my man Brian found out how to do it …

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Multi Camera Rendering in Unreal Engine

I’ve been puzzling over the best way to render out multiple camera sequences from Unreal Engine. This is useful if you had a switched camera cut track for preview purposes in your project, but would like additional post production effects to be applied during editing (say dissolves or wipes between cameras). By default, Unreal Engine …

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How to fix un-deletable empty folders in Unreal Engine

When you move objects around in your content browser for re-organisation, you may end up with empty folders that you want to delete. However, often times Unreal Engine comes up with a message telling you that the folder is NOT empty, and all kinds of terrible things would happen when you delete it anyway. Here’s …

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Using non-linear Animations in Unreal Engine

Imagine you’ve animated an object with keyframes as part of a Level Sequence, and now you want to have multiple copies of that object doing the same thing. Like the cube in the above GIF. Unreal Engine has a quasi non-linear animation feature we can use that lets us queue a sequence from another sequence. …

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Baking Normal Detail into a high-res mesh with Blender

I was wondering if we could bake normal detail into the 3D mesh, for either printing or further refinement during sculpting or whatnot. Turns out Blender has a relatively easy way to make it happen, although the process is not without flaws (after all, normal maps are rendering fake rather than an archival data storage …

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How to fix Sequencer References in Unreal Engine

Sometimes, and despite out best efforts, or as a result of copy/paste actions, actor references in Level Sequences can break. Anything that may have been tracked and properly working last time is shown in white (like the audio above), while things that have broken references are shown in red. It’s annoying when this happens, but …

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How to create Linear Animations in Unreal Engine (Cinematics Workflow Overview)

I’ve finally worked out how to properly create and render animations from Unreal Engine. The concept is very elegant, but also very different from most other 3D applications that I’m familiar with. This threw me on more than one occasion and lead to multiple frustrations, so let me share what I’ve learnt and explain the …

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Exporting all textures from a Blend File

Blender can hold various image files like textures and masks, making it easy to share a single file and include everything that’s necessary to render and work with it on another system. I wanted to work with a set of texture files that came with a character, but I didn’t want to manually export every …

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How to rename Group Actors in Unreal Engine

Renaming groups should be as easy as pressing F2 in the Unreal Engine outliner, but alas it doesn’t work. There’s seemingly no renaming feature, but I’ve worked out how to do it and wanted to share it, together with another Groups related trick you may not be familiar with. Renaming Groups First of all, select …

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Changing the UV Tiling on a Material in Unreal Engine

Sometimes you have a tiled material on an object, and the UV tiling isn’t exposed. This means some manual intervention, which had me stumped in Unreal Engine, and here’s how I’ve solved it. On the material, each texture needs a Texture Coordinate node in the UV input for tiling to be changeable. If nothing is …

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Displaying an Image Sequence on a Plane in Unreal Engine

Most 3D apps have a concept of 2D planes that can show pre-rendered images and videos. They’re often called billboards, splats or simply image planes, they usually involve transparency and they’re a great way to conserve some rendering power. The principle is used with LODs as well, where usually the lowest LOD is a flat …

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How to install and use the Quixel Bridge with Blender

Quixel Megascans assets are a pure marvel of detail and flexibility. I’m having great fun using 3D meshes and surfaces in Unreal Engine 5 thanks to the fully integrated bridge. What you may not know is that the Quixel Bridge was designed as a stand-alone asset library, with true one-click export options to other running …

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