Any object in iClone can be attached to a Motion Path, whose position in turn can be animated with a percentage slider on the Timeline. This can be used to make lights, cameras as well as characters follow a path. If we apply an in-place motion to the character, it appears as if said figure …
When we make adjustments to out custom characters’ heads, there comes the point where eye blinks might not work correctly anymore. Take this example, it’s really not a good look for my CC3+ model. Thankfully there’s an extremely helpful tool in Character Creator that makes fixing this (almost) a one-click affair. Take a look at …
To optimise real-time performance, Unreal Engine employs a number of tricks under the hood to make drawing images as fast as possible. One such trick is to replace objects on screen with lower-resolution versions as they are drawn further away from the camera. Those are called LODs (Levels of Detail) and although they’re great when …
Faceform Wrap has quite a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to matching one 3D shape to another. A while ago Brian and I were chatting about the possibility of converting clothing between different characters, and it turns out Wrap can do this thanks to its Lattice Node. I keep forgetting how to …
Whether you open a static mesh, a skeleton or a particle effect, Unreal Engine will show you a mini viewport featuring a HDRI of the the EPIC Campus in North Carolina. That’s fine for most situations, but sometimes we may want to change this to something like a night scene, a different lightning mood or …
When a new window opens in UE, it usually does so as a floating instance, typically occluding your viewport. This can be confusing to newcomers, and it’s annoying to power users too. I typically drag those tabs and dock them next to my main viewport to make adjustments (unless I have a very specific reason …
I love the Daz to Unreal bridge. It’s a terrific tool that lets me bring my Daz content easily into UE and make it come alive. I tend to mix and match Daz and native UE content and I’m having tons of fun, but I hear many users encounter difficulties with the workflow. I grant …
Baked Lighting was a big thing in UE4, and it can still improve performance in UE5. For outdoor lighting it has largely been superseded by Lumen and real time calculations, but older projects and demo levels that come with marketplace assets can have baked lighting by default. This can interfere with real-time solutions, so we …
The base Genesis figure can close their eyes thanks to the Eye Blink Morphs on Genesis 9, and the Eyes Closed Morphs on Genesis 8 respectively. When we create custom character, we need a Morph Corrective Morph to adjust those so that the geometry doesn’t look mangled when said morphs are being used. In this …
I’ve explained how to make your own HDRIs in Unreal Engine and Daz Studio before, but of course Blender can do this as well. I keep forgetting the settings though, so I thought a little article would be beneficial for both of us. Here’s how to do it: That’s it! The resulting HDRIs can be …
Unreal Engine likes to use CTRL+SPACE to bring up the content browser. I’ve never had a Mac powerful enough to run UE5 until recently, and imagine my surprise when that shortcut swapped my keyboard layout from UK to German instead of showing my assets. Turns out macOS has this enabled by default, and I needed …
There’s a somewhat hidden feature in Unreal Engine that lets us change our camera navigation speed in the viewport depending on the size of the object we have selected. This can be helpful when you’re level building and frequently switch between a small object like a rock and a distance object like a mountain range. …
For modelling purposes, armatures can get in the way as you make changes to an object in Blender. Thankfully there’s an easy yet somewhat unintuitive way to remove them, let me show you how to do that. It helps to understand how armatures come into existence in the first place, and knowing that it’ll make …
Did you know that Blender has a handy way for us to navigate larger scenes just like in video games? The standard WASD navigation can be enabled with a single click, let me show you how. Head over to View – Navigation – Walk Navigation and start using the W, A S, and D keys …
Here’s something I didn’t know, until Grant Abbit explained it in this fabulous Rigging and Animation course on GameDev.tv: Blender has a way to show you exactly how much of a weight influence a vertex has if the object is parented to an armature. This can be important if you want to find out what …
We can lock off objects (including cameras) so that they can’t accidentally be moved or pointed into other directions. Fixed cameras are a good example: if you want one or more cameras to always show the same thing, and want to make sure you’re not moving them with transform controls or when they’re selected in …
I had this really flat object whose texture looked OK, but it didn’t have a normal or displacement map. I wanted the object to look a little more interesting, so I applied the base texture as a height map, and that worked well. The question was, how do I export this so that the details …
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 …
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 …
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 …
When you download assets from the UE Marketplace, they’re downloaded into a temporary location called the Vault Cache before being copied into your actual project. This means that by default, you’ll end up with an asset at least twice: once on the Vault Cache, and once in your project. The reasoning is that when you …
We’ve been working with multiple 4K image plates in Unreal Engine, which is a great way to combine live footage with 3D environments without the overhead of a fully fledged virtual studio production. The more plates we used, the slower UE got – much like a video editor would if you stacked more tracks onto …
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 …
When you package a UE project without and special settings, it’ll start itself in full screen mode. This can be confusing to users as there’s no obvious way to move the game to a different screen, or to close it when they’re done. Thankfully there’s a handy blueprint node called Get User Game Settings that …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …