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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Materials vs Material Instances in Unreal Engine

When we change a parameter directly on Material in Unreal Engine, you’ll notice that it takes a while for us to preview the effect. That’s because under the hood, UE has to compile our materials before they can be rendered, which is computationally expensive and creatively annoying. Thankfully EPIC have thought of a snazzy solution …

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Using the level’s Post Process Volume while rendering a camera in Unreal Engine

When you tweak effects through a global Post Process volume in Unreal Engine, and then render out one or multiple cameras, you may notice that the effects can look different in the render than they do when previewing or playing the project. That’s because Unreal Engine can coordinate work with multiple Post Process volumes, but …

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Making things float on water in Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2

I’ve seen a couple of good tutorials about how to make things float with the experimental built-in water plugin that came with Unreal Engine 5. Sadly these tips didn’t work in Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 due to a bug that doesn’t install the relevant collision profile on the water body. This causes the floating …

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Creating HDRIs with Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine has a super easy way to render spherical cameras, whose outputs can be used as HDRIs in other applications, or even Unreal Engine itself. This is a great way to make use of the many EPIC freebies we’ve been collecting over the years, without having to know all that much about Unreal Engine …

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How to remove the Streaming Pool warning in Unreal Engine

Do you ever get tired of Unreal Engine screaming at you about the Texture Streaming Pool being over budget? I don’t even know what it means or why it doesn’t solve this automatically. Usually I just ignore it, or type DisableAllScreenMessages in the console and move on with my day. Thankfully there is a fix …

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Combining images in the Blender Compositor

Blender can combine images with its Compositor feature. Although I prefer to do use Photoshop for stills, the Compositor can be a great time saver for animations. Let’s see how we can combine a render with alpha channel and background image. I’ll use the cube with shadow catcher plane from my previous article, and the …

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Creating a Shadow Catcher in Blender (for Cycles and Eevee)

It used to be a major pain to setup a Shadow Catcher in older versions of Blender. Thankfully Cycles makes this a breeze today, but it’s still a little trickier in Eevee. Let’s take a look at both versions in this article. We’ll need two objects to illustrate this: a source object that casts a …

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