Unreal Engine doesn’t have a native input for height maps, but it has the next best thing, which is a conversion from height information to normals. We can supply a texture and a strength parameter, then add both to a NormalFromHeightmap node. This can be useful if you only have a base texture for your …
Vertex Colour information is great and all, but not if you have to be in Vertex Paint mode to actually see it. If only there was a way to display it in Blender’s Object Mode, ey? Thankfully there is! Head over to the Viewport Shading options (that little drop-down menu next to the Viewport Render …
Spring Effects in iClone are “faux physics” if you will, something that lets a skeletal mesh bounce as it moves. We can create this from scratch on custom figures, and it’s a little finnickety to setup, but very straightforward if you know how to do it. These effects are not baked to the timeline (like …
It’s easy to setup rigid body physics in Blender, although far from obvious. I don’t do it often enough to remember by heart, so here are the basics: Physics Objects I’ll create a plane and an icosphere for this example, then move the sphere up above the plane by a few meters. Both objects need …
Alembic cache files play back automatically in Blender. At first it seems we have very little control over how this happens, but when we take a closer look at the Modifiers Tab, we’ll see that that’s the place where all the magic happens: We’ll see some path information and a Time section. Expand it to …
Let’s take a look at recovering badly saved or crashed files in Blender, and a quick setting that will improve the likelihood of recovery. It’s inspired by an incident at the coffee shop the other day, and I thought I’d share it with you and my future self. So while I was out at a …
By default, Sky Creator adjusts the exposure of our scenes automatically, and a bit too abrupt. Pitch black night time scenes are being regulated as if it’s the middle of the day and vice versa, which is not great out of the box. There’s an easy way to disable the exposure settings in Sky Creator …
Since Unreal Engine 5.3 we can use static or animated VDBs in our project, thanks to a Heterogenous Volume and a built-in engine material. Here’s how to set this up. I’m using one of the excellent free assets from the JangaFX website. Import the VDB Right-click in your content browser and select “import” to bring …
You might have been as surprised to see Smart UV Project missing at first glance in Blender 4.3. If you’re used to the menu from 4.2 and before, you had expected to see something like this: Yet when you’re trying to use the same menu in 4.3 and above, all we see is this: What …
I’ve recently picked up Sky Creator by Dimitry Karpukhin. It gives much more fine-grained control over cloud creation than what I’m used to from Ultra Dynamic Sky. It also contains rain and surface puddle effects. Naturally I wanted to animate the clouds with sequencer and make sure the way the clouds evolve is the same …
The simplest way to animate a morph target directly in Sequencer is by writing a small helper function that sets the timeline’s value in the Tick Event. The morph targets themselves can be Shape Keys made in Blender, and their names will be retained. It is also possible to import morph targets into our mesh …
If you’re insane like me and have several versions of Unreal Engine installed side-by-side, you’ll notice that the system recognises what version a project was made in. As such, it will open the correct version of Unreal Engine on launch. You may on occasion have to change this, especially when you have multiple versions installed …
This week I had to animate material properties on a number of objects from Sequencer. That’s not a big problem when you can access the object directly, but in my case it was a blueprint that had several child blueprints attached (an array of lightbeam objects, each of which was setup with a dynamic material …
Sometimes you want to assign a material to a portion of an existing asset, but there’s just no zone setup to make that happen. Thankfully the Modelling Tools in Unreal Engine have tools to create and delete material zones from selections. It’s designed to be deliberately unintuitive of course, so here’s a quick guide on …
EPIC have implemented some changes in the way Media Plate actors are handled in Unreal Engine 5.5. In addition to the (still experimental) Media Plate plugin, there’s now a new Holdout Composite plugin/component combo available that’s enabled by default. Due to changes implemented therein, emissive plates can apparently handle image content better and even works …
Here’s the solution to a rather tricky puzzle I’ve spent researching all day. Imagine you had a Blueprint that’s made up of Child Actor Components (potentially other blueprints with their own logic). How do we access parameters on those children, and how do we do this via Sequencer or other blueprint logic? Quite the task …
I was working on my laptop in a doctor’s waiting room the other day, twiddling with the construction script of a Blueprint, when my trackball sort of slipped. Next thing I see is a completely empty construction script gaph, missing its root node. I could still move around drag other nodes in, but without the …
I had worked on the packed UV layout of a figure with the intention of using the resulting textures on the original model in Daz Studio. Trouble was, there was no way for me to import the new packed UV layout into the Genesis figure because I had modified the base model, so it didn’t …
I’ve just learnt how to override height information caused by a lower layer in the stack in Substance Painter. It’s an extremely simple trick I thought was worth mentioning. Let’s take this creepy mannequin character I’m working on as an example. It has metal caps on its arms, and although the colour looks OK, we …
I’ve recently worked out how to properly use the ZRemesher in ZBrush. It ccan create handsome topology from somewhat messy meshes. I had previously assumed it’s a one-click magic button, but learnt the hard way that it actually distorts meshes to the point of not being able to recognise them afterwards. Turns out ZRemeshing is …
Some plugins can cause trouble and keep the Unreal Editor from starting. When that happens, there’s no way to disable a plugin via the GUI. Thankfully it doesn’t quite mean “game over” just yet, because we can tweak our project’s configuration file to exclude plugins that may prevent a start. Here’s how to do it: …
Complex figures like humans are best UV unwrapped when they’re split into multiple parts, like arms, legs, head and so forth. When we’re working with Genesis or Reallusion figures, the heavy lifting has already been done for us, but when it comes to creating these splits from scratch it can be tricky. Here’s a way …
FilaToon is a new shader that’s been introduced in Daz Studio 4.23. The actual render engine to make this possible (Filament) has not changed and was actually introduced sometime in 2019, but it never did anything other than auto-translate Iray shaders under the hood for faster scene previews in the viewport. With FilaToon, the developers …
Last week I wanted to add a table cloth to a table and add a lace trim, so that it would match an existing item of furniture in our scene. I went through several iterations until I came up with a good workflow, and thought I’d share it with you. This took much longer on …
Flipping or recalculating normals usually requires a round-trip into a modelling app, but thanks to Unreal Engine’s built-in modelling tools, it can also be done “in-Engine” as they say. Let’s see how to do it! It’s a little hard to see from this screenshot, but the object on the right needs its normals flipped for …
Node graphs can get large and insane fast, and often it’s not feasible to drag wires across long distances and into multiple nodes. It’s impossible to decipher relatively simple stuff we’ve done weeks ago, only because the node setup got a little out of hand. That’s where Named Reroute Declaration Nodes come in. They’re really …
If you’re looking for the new Daz Premier Subscription features (aka the ManFriday Subscription), here’s where to find them. You’ll need Daz Studio 4.23 or higher, and an active Daz Premier subscription to use these. Search Install Manager for “premier” and install the currently five packages that show up and restart Daz Studio. Here’s where …
When you create a new level in Unreal Engine, chances are that they come with a pre-defined outdoor light setup consisting of the following items: I was wondering how to change the size of the sun disk in the sky to create more dramatic sunset scenes without resorting to a plugin like Ultra Dynamic Sky, …
Character Creator has a similar workflow to Daz Studio when it comes to importing and rigging clothing. We export the avatar, model/fit clothing in MD, export an un-rigged OBJ and transfer the skeleton and weight maps. Pitfalls lurk at every corner of course, so I thought I’d make some notes before I forget it all …
I’ve been tinkering with a flickering light effect. While it is possible to animate the intensity with Blueprint code directly, there’s an easier way that lets us use the intensity as an override and make the light flicker without futzing with variables. The solution is a Light Function. To create one, let’s make a new …