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 …