I’ve been experimenting with Groom Hair in Unreal Engine today, first time ever and I currently know almost nothing about it. Groom is UE’s strand-based hair system with real time physics we don’t have to setup from scratch, unlike those horrible cloth weight maps and collision shapes. Groom hair “just works” – I have no …
The latest version of Daz to Unreal supports geoshells (in beta)! That’s great news for objects and rely on them, because we can finally use those in Unreal Engine. Geoshells are a native Daz Studio feature, so they come in as a separate material on top of the figure they’re meant to be used with. …
Control Rigs are Unreal Engine’s “easy” way of letting us animate objects and characters in Sequencer. They allow us to create new and override existing animations directly on the timeline. These things are ever so slightly intimidating to set up, but if you know how they work, you’ll be able to animate any rigged object …
The windows in EPIC’s famous City Sample project are made with HDRIs and a snazzy parallax effect so that it appears there’s depth and geometry behind them. Some windows are illuminated, which is done by making those materials emissive. The default value works well for the daylight scene, but not so well for in night …
The famous City Sample project from The Matrix Awakened has a night mode feature players can switch to from the in-game mini menu. That’s no good though if you want to use the project for rendering scenes via Sequencer. Thankfully there’s an easy way to enable this, let me show you how. First, find BP_Nightmode …
I’ve recently bought an XP Pen Artist Pro 27″ and absolutely love it. It’s replaced my aging Wacom Intuos 4 from over 10 years ago and doubles as my Desktop’s main display. Most apps (aside from Blender) work out of the box, and changing what the pen needs to do works well with the included …
RectLights are light objects that emit light from a plane. They’re great to emulate anything from neon strip lights to regular flat lights like spots or soft boxes. We can position and scale them uniformly, but we cannot scale them along one axis with the regular scale controls, but there some interesting settings under the …
It took me a while to figure out how to mute one or more audio tracks in Unreal Engine. Most documentation explains how to do this in Blueprints, but I was looking for a casual mute button that we get in Premiere. Sadly such an option doesn’t exist, but the next best thing is to …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 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. …
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 …
When you’re using Unreal Engine animations as part of linear keyframe animations in a Level Sequencer, forward motion may become an issue. Depending on the situation, animators like to have the option to have say a walk cycle “in place”, then add the linear forward motion manually to direct a character in a cinematic. Sadly …
Unreal Engine can show us how hard it’s working on things in the background, thanks to several overlays we can peek at. The most common one to keep an eye on is the FPS count (frames per second). We can toggle this with CTRL+SHIFT+L. It’s also accessible from the little hamburger icon at the top …
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 …
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 …