I’ve recently found a much easier way to use Unreal Guy’s animations with the Synty (Polygon) characters, thanks to TC Mabe’s video (and his other one too). This is an updated version of what I’ve described back in March, something I was never really happy with, nor did I fully understand all steps involved. The …
I was looking for a way to turn a string value into a Material Instance. I had hoped that Unreal Engine would have a node for that, but alas it does not. Nevertheless, I needed something that like a key/value lookup and came across Map Variables. Those work exactly like a mini-database right inside the …
For character selections, we may want to replace the skeletal mesh of a character according to a user selection. This comes in handy when we want players to be able to select a different character, or the same character wearing a different outfit. Assuming all meshes share the same skeleton, there’s a Blueprint way of …
Swimming mechanics are a tad tricky to get going in Unreal Engine. I’ve pieced this information together from various cowboy tutorials on YouTube, in the hope that I’ll be able to reproduce the principles without having to watch them again. In this article I’ll make the Third Person Character swim, letting him slowly drift up …
I was surprised to see how easy it was to setup cloth animations in Unreal Engine. It’s as simple as selecting part of a character we’d like to turn into cloth, painting a weight map onto the wafty parts, optionally adjust settings to make the cloth behave the way we want, and Unreal Engine handles …
Post Process volumes are actually very simple to use. They are essentially invisible box volumes that can apply a camera effect that becomes visible as soon our camera enters them. For this example I’ll show you how to create a very simple underwater yet super popular underwater effect that will turn our image blueish when …
I’ve explained how to make a character crouch in a previous article. We can use the same principle to make him (or her) sprint by setting the Max Walk Speed on our character movement. Let me show you how it works. Just like before we need: a Character (I’m using the First Person Character) an …
Line Tracing is a technique that can tell us if an object is in the line of sight, and returns all kinds of data when true. First person shooter games use it all the time, and the principle comes in handy on so many occasions. While it’s not actually that difficult to comprehend, I find …
I’ve just learnt how to let a player character crouch. It’s a little complicated so I thought I’d take some notes in the intricacies. All credit for this goes to Mathew Wadstein and his excellent video tutorial. I’ll explain how to implement the whole process using an interface call, and I’ll show how we can …
Blueprints can get so disorganised over time: the more nodes we add to our Event Graph, the more cluttered and difficult to navigate the screen can get. While there is a way to search for an event across the current class, and there’s the option to split graphs into Functions, there’s also a way to …
I’ve been following EPIC’s Behaviour Tree Quick Start guide and delved into the fascinating world of Blackboards and Behaviour Trees (regardless of the missing u). I thought this way of implementing random walk actions in background characters would come in handy for making the game world come alive. In their example, the behaviour tree is …
I’ve been experimenting with AI Controllers and my Unreal Guys walking towards random locations in the game world. As such I needed a way for them to turn smoothly towards said random locations before they starting to walk. Thankfully I found out about the Find Look At Rotation node. It was exactly the missing piece …
Auto-fire means that you can keep holding down a button and a gun in your game keeps firing bullets at a pre-determined rate. No matter how a single-fire mechanism is setup, we can modify it to work automatically. In this article I’ll show you how it works. For this example I’m using the First Person …
Unreal Guy looks grey by default. He’s made up of two material zones, a rather complex one for his body and another one for his UE4 Logo. If you want to make him look a little different without creating a brand new material, we can override the default value for his Body material like this: …
If our AI controlled foes might chase us a little bit too fast, there’s a way to slow them down or speed them up. The value we need to set is called Max Walk Speed. To get access to this node, start by getting a reference to Character Movement. Then drag off that to get …
Did you know there’s a way to specify an Actor object by something other than an a reference? I thought this was a handy trick. iOS has a similar “hack”, and it can save your bacon on occasion. Tagging an Actor in Blueprint In the Class Defaults of your actor object, head over to Actor …
With spawned objects like bullets and projectiles, there’s a danger of creating a memory leak in our projects. This can happen when things are instantiated and added to the game world, but are never removed. Imagine creating a plethora of flying bullets that are only needed for a moment, but when not removed, they’ll keep …
In this article I’ll show you how we can keep a specific number of actors in the game world, and “replenish them” should they be removed. Imagine a game in which you pick flowers, and over time said flowers automatically re-grow but never exceed 10. Or a game in which the player battles against 5 …
Unreal Engine can make pawns to things, like chase down and follow the player. This is known as AI behaviour, for Artificial Intelligence. It works surprisingly well! Here’s how to set it up – in its simplest form. In principle we have to create an AI controller add the AI controller to the pawn define …
I know how to get an element by its index from an array in C, but I had no idea how this simple feat would work in Unreal Engine Blueprints. Turns out it’s a simple Get Node, however drawing it out and finding it is not so simple. Consider this code, which takes the first …
Interfaces are a C thing. They’re a set of functions that one class can implement so that an action is performed on another class of a potentially different type. Rather than calling a function explicitly on another class, we’re sending a message. If the receiving class knows what to do with it, it’ll react. If …
The beauty of Unreal Engine’s node system is that it’s relatively easy to extend your application code visually. At the same time, this can lead to extremely messy code (literally spaghetti code, considering the amount of noodles on the screen). While such code may be working in the heat of the moment, your future self …
I’ve been playing with another type of menu, namely the Generic Radial Menus v2.0 by PolyHavoc (available from the Unreal Marketplace). I picked it up as a freebie when it was on offer, but the current $14.99 asking price is certainly a good deal – considering I’d have no idea where to begin writing this …
I wanted to implement a scrolling selection menu in Unreal Engine, inspired by the one I’ve seen in The Flame in the Flood. It looked a tad complicated to begin with, but I’ve put I did some digging and found a way that works great. This can be combined with my previous article about Gamepad …
In this article I’ll explain how to add gamepad and keyboard navigation to UI Widgets in Unreal Engine. To my surprise, gamepad navigation magically works alongside regular mouse navigation, as long as Keyboard Focus is set appropriately on any of our UI elements. We don’t need to add any special logic to our project. All …
I just solved a puzzle that appeared so simple at first: I wanted to replace an image that was a child of a button in a UI widget in Unreal Engine. I had set it in the UI Designer just fine, simply picked it from the drop-down menu as an initial value, but then wanted …
When we begin a new Unreal Engine project, it’ll always ask us if we’d like to add the Starter Content pack. I was recently working on something and thought, “had I only said YES when I created this”, but alas I did not – and was without the Starter Content. Of course it can be …
I’ve just learnt how to update a counter variable in Unreal Engine. There are several steps to it and some prerequisites, namely: we need to have a variable to read out we need a text field to be updated we need to bind the text field to the variable we need a widget and add …
Something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me is that Unreal Engine saves its own file format under the hood. For example, a prop or audio file is not stored as .OBJ or .WAV, but as .UASSET file. Perhaps it’s just a wrapper that stores binary data, or maybe it’s some other kind of magic. Be …
I’ve just learnt about a nifty mechanism to change parameters on a material node in Unreal Engine. The niftyness lies in the fact that when we convert static values in the material editor into parameters, which then become the equivalent of public variables that are accessible from other parts of UE4. It sounds way scarier than it is, let me show you how it works in detail.