I was working on a scene for which several actors needed to wear long draping robes as they walk slowly across a scene. This proved challenging to Unreal Engine’s native Chaos Cloth solver, which isn’t designed to drape high-res self-colliding cloth. While it can work, the results looked less than stellar as you can see …
I had an interesting issue today with rendering cloth simulations with Movie Render Queue in Unreal Engine: my cloth was either not showing up at all, or it was royally freaking out, as illustrated in the above screenshot. I spent two whole days testing and researching, until I found the issue my animations were having: …
Nanite for Foliage Assets has been available since Unreal Engine 5.1, and there’s an easy way to enable it on multiple assets even if they’re already part of a scene. Since UE 5.5 we often get the yellow “Nanite buffer overflow” warning, which can be eliminated by turning assets including foliage into Nanite meshes. Here’s …
Instead of replacing a landscape layer with a different material, I wanted to add a quick color tint function to Brushify. The Auto Material is a tad complex, so here’s where to go and do that. Open the Landscape Mater Material (M_Landscape) and find the MF_LandscapeLayers function. Double-click the node to open it. Pick the …
I tend to use an 18mm focal length for shooting in Unreal Engine, with a standard 16:9 aspect ratio. I find that it matches well what I see in the default viewport, which gives me roughly 90 degrees field of view. This leads to a relatively deep focus with an object tracked close to the …
I like using iClone as animation front-end for Unreal Engine. Although a lot can be done directly in UE, not everything is as convenient to achieve as it is in iClone. The pipeline is designed with humanoid characters in mind and works well enough, but things get hinky when it comes to non-standard characters like …
When using tileable textures in Unreal Engine, you may need to change the scale of the texture to achieve the intended effect. An example would include a brick texture that appears too big or too small on an object. We can setup texture tiling like this: Multiply a Texture Coordinate node with a Scalar Float …
Unreal Engine doesn’t have a native input for height maps, but it has the next best thing, which is a conversion from height information to normals. We can supply a texture and a strength parameter, then add both to a NormalFromHeightmap node. This can be useful if you only have a base texture for your …
By default, Sky Creator adjusts the exposure of our scenes automatically, and a bit too abrupt. Pitch black night time scenes are being regulated as if it’s the middle of the day and vice versa, which is not great out of the box. There’s an easy way to disable the exposure settings in Sky Creator …
Since Unreal Engine 5.3 we can use static or animated VDBs in our project, thanks to a Heterogenous Volume and a built-in engine material. Here’s how to set this up. I’m using one of the excellent free assets from the JangaFX website. Import the VDB Right-click in your content browser and select “import” to bring …
I’ve recently picked up Sky Creator by Dimitry Karpukhin. It gives much more fine-grained control over cloud creation than what I’m used to from Ultra Dynamic Sky. It also contains rain and surface puddle effects. Naturally I wanted to animate the clouds with sequencer and make sure the way the clouds evolve is the same …
The simplest way to animate a morph target directly in Sequencer is by writing a small helper function that sets the timeline’s value in the Tick Event. The morph targets themselves can be Shape Keys made in Blender, and their names will be retained. It is also possible to import morph targets into our mesh …
If you’re insane like me and have several versions of Unreal Engine installed side-by-side, you’ll notice that the system recognises what version a project was made in. As such, it will open the correct version of Unreal Engine on launch. You may on occasion have to change this, especially when you have multiple versions installed …
This week I had to animate material properties on a number of objects from Sequencer. That’s not a big problem when you can access the object directly, but in my case it was a blueprint that had several child blueprints attached (an array of lightbeam objects, each of which was setup with a dynamic material …
Sometimes you want to assign a material to a portion of an existing asset, but there’s just no zone setup to make that happen. Thankfully the Modelling Tools in Unreal Engine have tools to create and delete material zones from selections. It’s designed to be deliberately unintuitive of course, so here’s a quick guide on …
EPIC have implemented some changes in the way Media Plate actors are handled in Unreal Engine 5.5. In addition to the (still experimental) Media Plate plugin, there’s now a new Holdout Composite plugin/component combo available that’s enabled by default. Due to changes implemented therein, emissive plates can apparently handle image content better and even works …
Here’s the solution to a rather tricky puzzle I’ve spent researching all day. Imagine you had a Blueprint that’s made up of Child Actor Components (potentially other blueprints with their own logic). How do we access parameters on those children, and how do we do this via Sequencer or other blueprint logic? Quite the task …
I was working on my laptop in a doctor’s waiting room the other day, twiddling with the construction script of a Blueprint, when my trackball sort of slipped. Next thing I see is a completely empty construction script gaph, missing its root node. I could still move around drag other nodes in, but without the …
Some plugins can cause trouble and keep the Unreal Editor from starting. When that happens, there’s no way to disable a plugin via the GUI. Thankfully it doesn’t quite mean “game over” just yet, because we can tweak our project’s configuration file to exclude plugins that may prevent a start. Here’s how to do it: …
Flipping or recalculating normals usually requires a round-trip into a modelling app, but thanks to Unreal Engine’s built-in modelling tools, it can also be done “in-Engine” as they say. Let’s see how to do it! It’s a little hard to see from this screenshot, but the object on the right needs its normals flipped for …
Node graphs can get large and insane fast, and often it’s not feasible to drag wires across long distances and into multiple nodes. It’s impossible to decipher relatively simple stuff we’ve done weeks ago, only because the node setup got a little out of hand. That’s where Named Reroute Declaration Nodes come in. They’re really …
When you create a new level in Unreal Engine, chances are that they come with a pre-defined outdoor light setup consisting of the following items: I was wondering how to change the size of the sun disk in the sky to create more dramatic sunset scenes without resorting to a plugin like Ultra Dynamic Sky, …
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 …