I’ve been tinkering with a flickering light effect. While it is possible to animate the intensity with Blueprint code directly, there’s an easier way that lets us use the intensity as an override and make the light flicker without futzing with variables. The solution is a Light Function. To create one, let’s make a new …
I had this warning in Unreal Engine 5.3 recently when opening a level and didn’t quite know what to make of it: “Spatially loaded actor references a non-spatially loaded actor”. Everything seemed to be working fine, and since it wasn’t an error as such, I didn’t worry too much about it. Curious about what this …
I’ve turned several objects from a pre-built level into a Blueprint, with the intention of spreading it around as duplicates elsewhere in my level. There was no logic involved, it was just a collection of static meshes. I’ve dragged several copies of my Blueprint into the same level, and when I was happy with the …
The other day I needed to make some geometric changes to an object in Blender that relied on my object looking handsome when viewed through a specific camera in Unreal Engine. Hence the best way to work was to export the camera I had setup in UE, and it wasn’t obvious how to do that. …
Here’s another Unreal Engine oddity that many have come across, including myself: some actors in the outliner show as “unloaded”. You can’t navigate to them, you can’t right-click on them and make them show up, they just linger like a ghost. Here’s an example: This only seems to happen when World Partitioning is enabled and …
It took me a while to find the recipe for handsome looking creepy fog results in Unreal Engine with Ultra Dynamic Sky. Here’s how I did it, just so I can reproduce it next time I need it (section in brackets):
Some materials require static boolean inputs to apply effects. They’re easy to setup in base materials, but don’t translate into instances because they’re static. To give users the option to enable such booleans in material instances, we can use Switch Parameters. Here’s how to set them up on the base material: Instead of supplying the …
There is a neat way to turn static meshes into dynamic follower clothing in Unreal Engine! Since 5.3 there’s a Chaos Cloth plugin that ships with the engine, although it’s only really become usable in 5.4. It looks more complicated than it is, so let me walk you through the basic workflow in principle: Let’s …
Some Daz outfits use both a bump and a normal map to create handsome looking details in Daz Studio. Sadly though, by default the current Daz to Unreal bridge only transfers one or the other, which means we’re not getting the same details showing up after the transfer in Unreal Engine. The G9 Summer Bikini …
Sometimes we need objects to fade in and out in our animations, but sadly not every material lets us do this. Those that are designed with any kind of opacity in mind will already have a map plugged into the respective channel, and it’s easy to designate a scalar parameter with a multiply node and …
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 …