In this article I’ll explain how to add gamepad and keyboard navigation to UI Widgets in Unreal Engine. To my surprise, gamepad navigation magically works alongside regular mouse navigation, as long as Keyboard Focus is set appropriately on any of our UI elements. We don’t need to add any special logic to our project. All …
Read moreAdding Gamepad Navigation for Menu Selections in Unreal Engine
I just solved a puzzle that appeared so simple at first: I wanted to replace an image that was a child of a button in a UI widget in Unreal Engine. I had set it in the UI Designer just fine, simply picked it from the drop-down menu as an initial value, but then wanted …
Read moreReplacing a Button Image via Blueprint in Unreal Engine
Blender can define regions in the viewport that should be displayed rendered. That’s useful if we want to focus on a small portion of our scene. Rather than have the whole viewport displayed in rendered view, we can draw a border using CTRL + B, thereby defining a Render Region. This region manifests as that …
Read moreWhat’s the mysterious red dotted line in Blender’s Viewport
You may have seen projects or screenshots of Blender displaying a disturbing view of the timeline, in which rather than a pure 12345 frame count, you get something like 44+2 or 18+16. Something that sends the cold shivers down any animator’s spine. What is this madness you ask, and how can we restore it to …
Read moreSwitch between frame count and seconds in the Blender Timeline
Transparency is handled differently across render engines and file formats. While a PNG, TIF or GIF file can contain transparency data, a JPG image cannot. DAZ Studio’s Iray render engine can’t handle transparency data embedded in such images and requires the use of a special Opacity or Transparency Map. This might sound a little confusing, …
Read moreUsing an Opacity / Transparency Map in DAZ Studio (Iray)
When you’re done with UV Mapping in Blender, you may need to save out a template of your hard work so that you or someone else in your team can get to work on some fabulous textures. In case you ever need to save out such a UV Template, head over to the UV Editing …
Something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me is that Unreal Engine saves its own file format under the hood. For example, a prop or audio file is not stored as .OBJ or .WAV, but as .UASSET file. Perhaps it’s just a wrapper that stores binary data, or maybe it’s some other kind of magic. Be …
I’ve just learnt about a nifty mechanism to change parameters on a material node in Unreal Engine. The niftyness lies in the fact that when we convert static values in the material editor into parameters, which them become the equivalent of public variables that are accessible from other parts of UE4. It sounds way scarier than it is, let me how you how it works in detail and step by step.
Read moreHow to change the colour of a material via Blueprint in Unreal Engine