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, …
Typically Animation Blueprints need access to the forward speed of your character. This can be done in a few different ways, and I thought I’d compile a list of options for every eventuality. If you know other approaches, please let me know and I’ll add them here. In your Animation Blueprint The easiest way is …
I’ve been dissecting an old project of mine and couldn’t remember how the projectiles I was shooting happened to magically fly away when they were spawned. They seemed to have an initial velocity or inertia in the forward direction, yet nothing in my Blueprint was causing this. Then I figured it out: we had added …
In a previous article I’ve explained how to trigger an animation with a timeline node. I thought it might be nice to see a different approach to the same problem, so in this article I’ll show you how to do this with a Level Sequence. The concept allows more flexibility on complex animations. In principle …
I was trying to implement an Aim Offset the other day and followed a particularly terrible tutorial on the EPIC site that didn’t work out at all. This tends to happen when we try to do something that’s beyond our understanding. One part in particular left me clueless, which is the process of editing animation …
A few years ago I’ve described how to rotate an actor towards a location with the use of the Lerp node. This thing can interpolate two float values and as such is a very multi-purpose function. I’ve just found out that Unreal Engine has a dedicated “rotation interpolator” node called Rinterp. It takes two rotation …
Animation Montages can be inserted into running animations when we feel something else needs to happen before the previous animation can continue. A good example is weapon recoil that happens as a result of firing a bullet: rather than switching to a completely different animation, we just cut to the montage for a moment before …
In a previous article I’ve explained how to put a gun into your character’s hand using the Attach Component to Component function. This works great if the component in question is a static or skeletal mesh, but it does not work for another blueprint class. Say you had a weapon and it has functionality, there’s …
Blend Spaces can mix animations together depending on value input. This can be used when say your game pad input determines how fast your character can walk, so that an idle animation is blended together with a walking forward animation. That way there’s no pop between each animation. Let’s take a look how to setup …
Unreal Engine 5 offers an exciting way to share animations from UE4 skeletons on the new UE5 skeletons. This works by way of a pre-configured IK Rig and Retargeter specifically made for this purpose, and an export option so that we’ll end up with a set of new animations that are ready to be used …
I’ve been meaning to make a note about the “attach gun” part, because I always forget how to do this. It’s relatively simple when you know, but not… well when you don’t. Let’s fix that! This procedure can also be used to attach other things besides guns into the right places, such as hair and …
The retargeting process has completely changed in Unreal Engine 5. It appears we can now use a system of IK chains that make animations from one skeleton usable on another by way of an IK Rig and IK Retargeter. It took me a while to comprehend this, but I’ve successfully managed to use this system …