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 …
Sometimes you have a tiled material on an object, and the UV tiling isn’t exposed. This means some manual intervention, which had me stumped in Unreal Engine, and here’s how I’ve solved it. On the material, each texture needs a Texture Coordinate node in the UV input for tiling to be changeable. If nothing is …
Nanite is Unreal Engine 5’s new internal mesh format that lets the engine subdivide dense meshes on the fly. Think of it as LODs on steroids. Any static mesh that can potentially be Nanite should be Nanite, and many assets have it enabled by default. We can enable this on a per-object basis, either on …
Unreal Engine has a convenient way to migrate objects from one level to another in the same project. I keep forgetting how to do this so I thought I’d make a note. This is not the simple copy/paste approach, even though that will work: select actors and press CTRL+C in Level A, then open Level …
In my previous article I’ve described how to add and animate a Media Plate actor in Unreal Engine 5.1, but sadly the object doesn’t give us shadows as we got with the traditional image sequence workflow out of the box. Thankfully there’s a fix for that in the form of various tick boxes nobody tells …
The Media Plate actor is a new object that UE 5.1 and above can automatically create when you drag an image sequence into your scene. Most of the heavy lifting is not exposed and happens under the hood, which is why I’ve had some issues playing the sequences back in Sequencer, due to the lack …
There are various ways of re-locating the Unreal Engine installation files on your system: Let’s take a look at all three options and see how they work on Windows 10. I’ve tried them all, and have actually decided to go with the first option as it avoids all possible issues. Deleting, then re-downloading This is …
Most 3D apps have a concept of 2D planes that can show pre-rendered images and videos. They’re often called billboards, splats or simply image planes, they usually involve transparency and they’re a great way to conserve some rendering power. The principle is used with LODs as well, where usually the lowest LOD is a flat …
We can spot tiled textures a mile off, and it’s tricky to avoid this effect on large pieces of geometry like landscapes and oceans. Thankfully there’s a relatively easy trick that can add some variation to the mix with Macro Variations. Those patches on the left hand side of the above image show that with …
Pivot points, origin points, centre points, all of which describe the position at which that 3D manipulator gizmo shows up. Most of the time it shows up in the right place, but every once in a while it does not, and then it’s time for us to change it. Here’s an easy way to do …
Sometimes we get error messages that aren’t exactly descriptive enough for us non-computer-scientist-types to figure out what they mean or what they relate to. The “physical material needs to be rebuilt” it something that had me stumped (but then I was never very good at puzzle games). If you want to figure out this particular …
When we change a parameter directly on Material in Unreal Engine, you’ll notice that it takes a while for us to preview the effect. That’s because under the hood, UE has to compile our materials before they can be rendered, which is computationally expensive and creatively annoying. Thankfully EPIC have thought of a snazzy solution …
When you tweak effects through a global Post Process volume in Unreal Engine, and then render out one or multiple cameras, you may notice that the effects can look different in the render than they do when previewing or playing the project. That’s because Unreal Engine can coordinate work with multiple Post Process volumes, but …
It’s easy to select multiple objects in your scene and turn them into a grouped Blueprint, but it’s not all that easy to find where this functionality has moved to in UE 5. There are two different options, and I’ll discuss both of them here. In UE4 we had the very prominent Blueprints menu, and …
I’ve seen a couple of good tutorials about how to make things float with the experimental built-in water plugin that came with Unreal Engine 5. Sadly these tips didn’t work in Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 due to a bug that doesn’t install the relevant collision profile on the water body. This causes the floating …
Unreal Engine has a super easy way to render spherical cameras, whose outputs can be used as HDRIs in other applications, or even Unreal Engine itself. This is a great way to make use of the many EPIC freebies we’ve been collecting over the years, without having to know all that much about Unreal Engine …
Do you ever get tired of Unreal Engine screaming at you about the Texture Streaming Pool being over budget? I don’t even know what it means or why it doesn’t solve this automatically. Usually I just ignore it, or type DisableAllScreenMessages in the console and move on with my day. Thankfully there is a fix …
We can use a custom material on our Post Process volume to adjust the look and feel of our scenes. Better yet, we can access those properties as parameters and drive changes from Blueprint. Let’s see how to make it happen! First we’ll need to add a Post Process Volume to our level. By default …
Unreal Engine has two handy functions called Get Horizontal Distance To and Get Vertical Distance To. These can be used to see if an actor is in range of something else. Here’s a quick example on how to use them. Imagine a drone that we shoot from a distance, and a blast radius that would …
UE5 has changed some of the menu options that let us package a project for distribution. In UE4 we could find these options under the File Menu, but they’re gone. We now have a brand new entry under the Platforms button at the top. Under Binary Configuration we can now conveniently pick shipping, debug or …
Storing values between game sessions can be done with the Save Game object in Unreal Engine. Much like with other objects, we create a custom subclass of it, give it variables that we want it to remember, then populate those before the game ends (and retrieve from it when our game begins). Let me show …
I’ve often wondered how these “endless runner” type games are made under the hood. Julia and her team have recently released a project like that called Dash and Splat that was made in Core, and I wondered if I can make this work in Unreal Engine. After some research and tinkering, here’s one way to …
Sometimes I use the option to open a new window when preview playing my project in Unreal Engine. That way I can still keep an eye on other goings on in the editor while watching the action. The option comes up on the little three dots menu next to the play button. The new window …
Sometimes it’s the simple things that catch you out, like quick references. Say you wanted to access a property on your animation blueprint for something you’re doing in your player character. I couldn’t remember how to do this, so I thought I’d best make a note of it. Here’s how we can do that: This …
When a character dies, we can play a death animation either as a montage, or via the animation blueprint. In this quick tip I’ll explain the latter principle. We typically have a boolean (like “is dead”) that checks if the character has died, and it’s true, we’ll transition to a new state in our state …
I have a simple class that spawns x amount of enemy characters into my world, but by default they all use the same skeletal mesh. I wanted Unreal Engine to use a different mesh from a random pool of characters. I’ve used an array for this, create a random integer not larger than the array, …