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 …
It took me a while to figure out how to mute one or more audio tracks in Unreal Engine. Most documentation explains how to do this in Blueprints, but I was looking for a casual mute button that we get in Premiere. Sadly such an option doesn’t exist, but the next best thing is to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
If you copy and paste a layer, Photoshop will just create another layer. It essentially adds it to the current viewport. If we have something like a black and white image and want to use this to mask some off an existing layer, we need to view the layer mask first, then paste so that …
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 …
Whether you open a static mesh, a skeleton or a particle effect, Unreal Engine will show you a mini viewport featuring a HDRI of the the EPIC Campus in North Carolina. That’s fine for most situations, but sometimes we may want to change this to something like a night scene, a different lightning mood or …
When a new window opens in UE, it usually does so as a floating instance, typically occluding your viewport. This can be confusing to newcomers, and it’s annoying to power users too. I typically drag those tabs and dock them next to my main viewport to make adjustments (unless I have a very specific reason …
I love the Daz to Unreal bridge. It’s a terrific tool that lets me bring my Daz content easily into UE and make it come alive. I tend to mix and match Daz and native UE content and I’m having tons of fun, but I hear many users encounter difficulties with the workflow. I grant …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …