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 …
When I render an EXR sequence in Unreal Engine using ACES, it looks OK in Premiere but way too dark in Resolve. That’s because Premiere sort of brute-forces an OKish look so we can work with the footage, although it’s not properly converted by default. Resolve handles this differently and doesn’t convert the footage at …
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 …
We can use sound clips for effects and music for our iClone projects, although it’s far from intuitive how to do this. You’d think we can import a WAV file, it would appear on the timeline and we’d move it where it needs to go, but that’s of course not how it works. That would …
Material Presets for complex objects like characters and clothing are called Material Plus files in iClone and Character Creator. They can describe several surfaces across several objects in your scene. Imagine the skin shader of a character and attached accessories at the same time, like glasses or hair. They’re not exactly intuitive to do though, …
Have you ever wondered how most 3D apps have an option to export FBX files with embedded textures, except for Blender? There’s usually a very obvious tick box that says something like “embed textures”. Granted the feature isn’t fantastic, because it can only reference the base colour and not a full set of PBR maps …
Matcaps are quick and easy visual previews that let us judge 3D objects without having to setup lights or materials. They’re essentially different ways to make your objects appear while you work on them. This can be helpful if you’re working on something that’s naturally more dull or shiny, darker or lighter, or reflective in …
I’ve discovered an interesting little add-on for Premiere that lets us change people’s facial expressions! Much like a 3D character in CC or Daz Studio, it offers sliders that can adjust the mouth shape, where the eyes look, where the face points and all kinds of other stuff. There’s a free trial version available here. …
I don’t deal with paths all that much in Blender, so I tend to forget the simple things. Case in point: how do we turn two loose ends of a bezier path into a continuos curve? Merge doesn’t work by default as it does with vertex objects (although I hear there’s an add-on for that, …
I ran into a small puzzle while importing Daz clothing into Character Creator using Transformer. The garment in question was a multi-part suit that consisted of a shirt, a vest, pants and a jacket. Although all were named correctly, Transformer displayed random names during import, and as such it was impossible for me to specify …
I remember changing my active highlight colour in Blender a while ago, and naturally can’t remember in which abyss of the menu madness this setting was buried. I did this because by default the highlighted and active object have a very similar shade of orange, making it nearly impossible for my dyslexic brain to see …
Cascadeur can create animation loops, but it’s far from intuitive. It’s also a destructive process, so save your projects before applying them. Here’s how to loop an animation using Interval Edit Mode. Select the first keyframe on the timeline, let’s assume this needs to become the seamless last frame of our animation. Switch into Point …
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 …
We can retarget animations with the Pro version of Cascadeur. As long as the figures are setup to have an auto-posing rig, the app can translate motions between figures. It’s a little cumbersome and unintuitive, and I’ll probably forget, so here’s a quick note for you and my future self. I’ll use my previous Battle …
In this article I’ll show you how to take a character from iClone with an animation applied, import them into Cascadeur to make changes, then bring the animation back into iClone. The official documentation is a little outdated at the time of writing, and thankfully this pipeline has been greatly improved. This works with CC3+ …
With Cartoon Animator 5.3 we got this exciting new feature called Puppet Stage. With it we can trigger pre-defined motions by way of keyboard hotkeys. This is very simple to implement with single objects and characters, but not quite as intuitive when multiple objects come into play. Here’s how to do it. For my simple …
When I import a mocap clip from Rokoko Studio into iClone, it’s usually not coming in aligned to the world centre. It’ll still work, but in target applications it would be helpful to have the pivot point where my character is, and the rotation aligned to where s/he’s facing. Thankfully iClone has us covered in …
The other day I had some rotoscoped footage we wanted to enhance with Topaz Video. The transfer went well, but sadly Topaz Video is very pernickety when it comes to retaining alpha or opacity. Although it’s apparently a feature, I’ve never been able to make it work reliably. Hence I thought I’ll use the original …
Extending a short part of a motion into a longer segment can be tough. Say you had a few steps recorded and you needed the character to walk like this for several seconds, while retaining forward motion and rock solid foot tracking. Thankfully iClone is the perfect tool to get the job done. Of course …
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 …
In the above video I’ll explain how to use depth maps created in 3D rendering software to infer an accurate Depth of Field effect in Photoshop. This can be useful if you want to avoid re-rendering when you want to change the effect, or if your rendering software isn’t accurate enough (looking at you there, …
I’ve been using Premiere Pro since version 5. That was before it became “Pro” or CS. It was just called Premiere back then. At the time of writing that’s been around 25 years ago, perhaps even longer. As such, it really isn’t easy for me to un-learn all that muscle memory. Premiere is such a …
It’s rather painful that the 3D industry hasn’t come to a consensus for a “sane set” of viewport controls that’s applicable in every app. Developers seemingly go out of their way to confuse users by inventing their own control scheme, likely laughing behind out backs while we get ever more frustrated when we have to …