Decals let you project a flat image onto existing geometry without touching the underlying material. Here’s the full setup in UE5, why older UE4 tutorials mention options that no longer exist, and how to stop a decal bleeding onto neighbouring geometry.
A creative use of mip maps: blend your texture with a blurred mip of itself to soften pattern detail directly in the material graph – no Substance Painter round-trip, no colour matching, and it costs next to nothing.
Some static meshes render fine in the viewport but vanish in Movie Render Queue, thanks to a LOD0 Screen Size of zero. The Property Matrix can’t fix them in bulk, but a short Python script can. Here’s the one I use, with a dry-run mode.
A ten-minute Sequencer trick to make static crowd characters look alive: an additive FK Control Rig loop with asymmetric breathing timing, desynchronised per character — plus an accidental discovery about copy-pasting whole Control Rig tracks.
After reopening a large exterior project in UE 5.6, white blotches had appeared on the landscape and even on static meshes. The culprit: EasyRain’s world puddle overlay, driven by a Material Parameter Collection that nothing in the scene was initialising.
Setting a pivot offset is easy — until Unreal keeps selecting the object behind your new pivot position when you right-click. Here are three ways around it: clicking the actor’s viewport icon, temporarily hiding objects, and parenting to an empty actor.
How to add a Normal Strength parameter to a master material in Unreal Engine, so you can tone down, boost, or even invert a normal map per instance – no Substance Painter round-trip required.
From empty laptop to a synced, compiling, playtestable UEFN project in a morning — disk space, the 90% login stall, VS Code integration, Lore, the Verse build server, and keeping the machine cool while playtesting.
Narrative Pro has an Interactable_ItemPickup component that can be added to any object to turn it into a pickup. When the player interacts this way, we can add the object (or a representation thereof) into the player’s inventory and do all kinds of other stuff. Let me show you how to create one. We need …
Narrative Pro has an interaction system built-in, which is easy to use with base classes and can be extended to include conditional queries too. In this article I’ll show you how to set one up. For this example, let’s use an old TV set and start with a regular interaction: the player walks in range, …
A really quick and dirty fix to change the effect of roughness maps in Unreal Engine is to use a Multiply node in between the texture and the shader. Add to that a scalar parameter and we can make changes conveniently on the Material Instance. I’ve been using it for years, and while this works …
Unreal Engine’s material graph has an interesting node called Flatten Normal that lets us change how normal maps are interpreted. It can go directly between your normal texture map and the shader input. Add a scalar parameter to it and you can control it from a Material Instance. One slight snag is that 0 means …
I’ve been using Unreal Engine since 2019, and since version 4.22 if memory serves me right. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact start date as it involved a lot of testing, but I hung in there and prevailed, and today it’s one of my favourite 3D apps of all time. I couldn’t do my job …
Sane animation apps typically have a layer system that lets us make non-destructive changes on top of a base motion. Unreal Engine 5 introduced this relatively late in its lifecycle with version 5.5, but it works well if you know how to use it. Let’s take a look at where to find it and how …
When exporting files from Blender for use in Unreal Engine via OBJ, we have to apply some settings for objects to behave correctly. These can be made either on export from Blender, or on Import to UE. Of course I forget how it works when I need it next, and despite the handsome presets I’ve …
The GASP Project is designed with easy extensibility in mind. This means it’s a tad harder to figure out how to amend the project at first, but in this article I’ll show you what to do and where to add your values so your own pawn comes up in the menu. What we’ll need is: …
We wanted to tweak the ever-so-slightly-excessive wind speed that’s part of the procedural grass in Brushify. This took some research, but a video by Joe Garth greatly helped me understand where to look for the setting. Each landscape layer’s layer info gives a clue where to start your reverse-lookup research. Select the landscape, then switch …
We work a lot with animated image plates, typically of rotoscoped actors (Unreal Engine calls them Media Plate Actors). That way we can position and integrate them into the 3D world. One of the hard parts is moving the camera to a different position while leaving the plate sizing intact as we make changes to …
Landscapes in Unreal Engine typically don’t have a lot of detail. For close-up shots, we usually have to place static meshes manually or use foliage painting tools, but it can be time consuming to get right and tricky to change later. PCG Geometry Decals makes this a breeze: These decals project a texture onto a …
Render pipelines typically work by way of using the same colour profile between applications that need to process image data. When you’re working on your own even across multiple applications this is less important as you just grade the final output the way you want. However, if you’re working as part of a team and …
I need vertical sync on at all times, or my monitor gives me bad screen tearing. Thankfully there’s a simple console variable that lets us enable this ad-hoc: Sadly this does not persist between sessions. However, we can patch an Unreal Engine config file that sets this variable every time we launch the editor. This …
The nighttime buildings in EPIC’s City Sample Project are full of functionality. Did you know you can change how many windows appear lit in night mode? Me neither, had it not been for an anonymous reader who asked me about it. Fascinated by this myself, I took a closer look and here’s what I found …
Everyone loves a good UI change for absolutely no reason, and the total waste of time that goes with finding where your everyday features have been hidden. Because EPIC can’t be asked to tell us what’s moved where, I thought I’ll compile a list for us so we can sleep a little easier at night. …
I was working on an oil lantern, to whose interior I wanted to add a flame. There are some nice flame and fire effects in the M5VFX Vol. 2 Pack from the free EPIC collection, and I thought it worked rather well for my project. So I’ve added a Niagara component to my lanterns, and …
Unreal Engine continues to surprise me with idiotic things that shouldn’t happen, like some objects not rendering in Movie Render Queue, for absolutely no obvious reason. I’ve had this before, forgot to make a note, but thankfully remembered a trick that is saving my bacon time and time again. Turns out some assets LOD0 screen …
Mesh Blend is an Unreal Engine plugin that blends materials on intersecting objects, including static and skeletal meshes, as well as landscapes. It’s available for UE 5.5 and up, relatively easy to setup and works beautifully for cinematics as well as real-time gameplay. Let’s take a look at how to get it going. DefaultEngine.ini Tweak …
Narrative Tales is great for creating dialogues with its node-based intuitive workflow. Story Framework is fantastic at everything else – why not bring the two together. But how? Before I forget, here’s how I did it! Adding Plugins In a brand new or existing Story Framework project, let’s add the two plugins we need to …
The brief is simple: you have an object, and we want it to move along a path. Something that many animation apps have built-in by default is not so easy or obvious to implement, unless we code this functionality ourselves in Unreal Engine. Because that’s how hip and cool UE users have to be. Why …
Narrative Tales and Pro have some basic tasks built-in that can be used as part of the Quest System, such as “reach location”, “play dialogue” and of course completing/failing quests. We can design our own custom tasks for things like collecting items, but there are plenty of pitfalls to get it right. Let’s take a …
I wanted to add a character to a GASP project that was made up of multiple pieces using the Character Builder Component. I didn’t quite know how to handle this at first, but thanks to the vendor and EPIC’s documentation I could make it work. Before I forget, here’s how that worked. For reference I’m …