I was wondering if we could bake normal detail into the 3D mesh, for either printing or further refinement during sculpting or whatnot. Turns out Blender has a relatively easy way to make it happen, although the process is not without flaws (after all, normal maps are rendering fake rather than an archival data storage …
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 …
Blender can hold various image files like textures and masks, making it easy to share a single file and include everything that’s necessary to render and work with it on another system. I wanted to work with a set of texture files that came with a character, but I didn’t want to manually export every …
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 …
I had this issue with an empty Logitech Options window popping up whenever I launch Premiere Pro. The window does nothing and just sits there on top of other windows when Premiere is in focus. I don’t use that integration at all, and wanted to get rid of it. Turns out there’s an easy fix …
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 …
Quixel Megascans assets are a pure marvel of detail and flexibility. I’m having great fun using 3D meshes and surfaces in Unreal Engine 5 thanks to the fully integrated bridge. What you may not know is that the Quixel Bridge was designed as a stand-alone asset library, with true one-click export options to other running …
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 …
Blender can combine images with its Compositor feature. Although I prefer to do use Photoshop for stills, the Compositor can be a great time saver for animations. Let’s see how we can combine a render with alpha channel and background image. I’ll use the cube with shadow catcher plane from my previous article, and the …
It used to be a major pain to setup a Shadow Catcher in older versions of Blender. Thankfully Cycles makes this a breeze today, but it’s still a little trickier in Eevee. Let’s take a look at both versions in this article. We’ll need two objects to illustrate this: a source object that casts a …
Scaling a HDRI requires the same node setup as rotating a HDRI in Blender: You can scale on both other axis as well to expand the HDRI horizontally and vertically, but overall scale is achieved just with the Y axis.
Hexagon has some nice sculpting tools built-in, but it’s impossible to see how they perform out of the box due to the brush preview that seems to get drawn hundreds of times in the process, obscuring our object (see above). Thankfully there’s an easy trick to disable this under Now you can use the inflate, …
Blender has this helpful/annoying feature that any user interface customisations are stored with a file. This means that any window and workspace changes are saved with the .blend file, and this also means that if someone shares such a file with you, the UI may look completely different to what you’re used to. I’ve seen …