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Creating Morph Sliders in Character Creator

I had never created a morph in an external app for Character Creator before, but I managed to make it work after a few false starts. Just before that fleeting knowledge escapes me again, here’s how to do it. I’m comparing it to the Morph Loader dialogue in Daz Studio and will use comparable terminology …

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How to scale a RectLight in Unreal Engine (and other properties)

RectLights are light objects that emit light from a plane. They’re great to emulate anything from neon strip lights to regular flat lights like spots or soft boxes. We can position and scale them uniformly, but we cannot scale them along one axis with the regular scale controls, but there some interesting settings under the …

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How to make a Character follow a Path in iClone

Any object in iClone can be attached to a Motion Path, whose position in turn can be animated with a percentage slider on the Timeline. This can be used to make lights, cameras as well as characters follow a path. If we apply an in-place motion to the character, it appears as if said figure …

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How to correct Eye Blink morphs in Character Creator

When we make adjustments to out custom characters’ heads, there comes the point where eye blinks might not work correctly anymore. Take this example, it’s really not a good look for my CC3+ model. Thankfully there’s an extremely helpful tool in Character Creator that makes fixing this (almost) a one-click affair. Take a look at …

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Avoid missing foliage with Cinematic Renders in Unreal Engine

To optimise real-time performance, Unreal Engine employs a number of tricks under the hood to make drawing images as fast as possible. One such trick is to replace objects on screen with lower-resolution versions as they are drawn further away from the camera. Those are called LODs (Levels of Detail) and although they’re great when …

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Converting Clothing with Faceform Wrap

Faceform Wrap has quite a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to matching one 3D shape to another. A while ago Brian and I were chatting about the possibility of converting clothing between different characters, and it turns out Wrap can do this thanks to its Lattice Node. I keep forgetting how to …

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How to remove or reset Baked Lighting in Unreal Engine

Baked Lighting was a big thing in UE4, and it can still improve performance in UE5. For outdoor lighting it has largely been superseded by Lumen and real time calculations, but older projects and demo levels that come with marketplace assets can have baked lighting by default. This can interfere with real-time solutions, so we …

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Creating a direct shortcut for CLIP Studio Paint

By default, Celsys let you launch the CLIP Studio app, which is sort of a launcher app to manage your services with them. In there is an option to launch CLIP Studio Paint, but some of us prefer a one-click solution to the actual painting app. Thankfully that’s doable, you just need to know where …

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How to fix Eye Blink Morphs on a custom Daz Character

The base Genesis figure can close their eyes thanks to the Eye Blink Morphs on Genesis 9, and the Eyes Closed Morphs on Genesis 8 respectively. When we create custom character, we need a Morph Corrective Morph to adjust those so that the geometry doesn’t look mangled when said morphs are being used. In this …

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Creating a HDRI from a scene in Blender

I’ve explained how to make your own HDRIs in Unreal Engine and Daz Studio before, but of course Blender can do this as well. I keep forgetting the settings though, so I thought a little article would be beneficial for both of us. Here’s how to do it: That’s it! The resulting HDRIs can be …

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How to disable the CTRL+SPACE default shortcut on macOS

Unreal Engine likes to use CTRL+SPACE to bring up the content browser. I’ve never had a Mac powerful enough to run UE5 until recently, and imagine my surprise when that shortcut swapped my keyboard layout from UK to German instead of showing my assets. Turns out macOS has this enabled by default, and I needed …

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How to remove the Armature from a Rigged Object in Blender

For modelling purposes, armatures can get in the way as you make changes to an object in Blender. Thankfully there’s an easy yet somewhat unintuitive way to remove them, let me show you how to do that. It helps to understand how armatures come into existence in the first place, and knowing that it’ll make …

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How to use WASD Mouse/Keyboard Navigation in Blender

Did you know that Blender has a handy way for us to navigate larger scenes just like in video games? The standard WASD navigation can be enabled with a single click, let me show you how. Head over to View – Navigation – Walk Navigation and start using the W, A S, and D keys …

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How to lock off a camera position in Unreal Engine

We can lock off objects (including cameras) so that they can’t accidentally be moved or pointed into other directions. Fixed cameras are a good example: if you want one or more cameras to always show the same thing, and want to make sure you’re not moving them with transform controls or when they’re selected in …

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How to adjust Normal Map Strength in Unreal Engine

It’s nice to have adjustment options on our normal maps. Sometimes the strength that works in another DCC doesn’t work for the final look, something I frequently encounter with the base colour channel. Typically I add a Vector 3 and Multiply nodes before the final output, but for non-colour data this doesn’t work. Instead we …

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How to change the Timeline Default Duration in iClone

By default, an iClone Project comes in with a duration of 1800 frames (0-1799) and a frame rate of 60fps. Being a new user and all, it’s impossible for my brain to remember where to change this, as it’s in an incredibly tricky to find place called Project Settings. Here’s how we get there: The …

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How to set the path to Blender in Godot

I’ve been checking out Godot recently, and as it turns out it uses the Blender executable under the hood for many of its operations. You wouldn’t even notice, but having Blender installed is a major advantage, and as such the path to Blender needs to be set correctly for the app to find it. Godot …

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Working with Takes and Shots in Unreal Engine

I’ve previously talked about using Shot Tracks in the UE Sequencer. There’s a related feature called Takes that I’ve just found out about. It can make life easier as you try things out while you work with animations and adds an “alternate” shot that can be swapped out without destroying the original. Each take is …

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How to keyframe Cloud Movement in Sequencer with Ultra Dynamic Sky

By default, Ultra Dynamic Sky calculates cloud movement continuously, no matter if you’re running game mode, simulation mode or if you’re working with a Level Sequence. There is a way to make sure the clouds form the same way as you move the playhead so that we get predictable results in our cinematic keyframe animations. …

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