Jay Versluis 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 …
Blender has a neat way to transfer all vertex groups from one object to another. In this example I have a prepared pair of trousers on the left with vertex groups, and another pair without any groups. To transfer, I select the target object first (the one without groups), then SHIFT select the source object …
In this article I’ll show you how to bake out a Normal Map from details that have been sculpted in ZBrush. We’ll use this map to apply the high-res details to an object in Daz Studio for this example, but it will work with any target application. Typically we have a low-ish resolution object that …
Transpose is an old-skool tool in ZBrush that can be used to pose characters and move parts of objects. It used to be insanely difficult to comprehend (like everything in ZBrush), but when used together with masking, what you can accomplish is quite remarkable. Blender has a similar tool called the Pose Brush, which is …
This has been puzzling me for a while: how do we tell ZBrush to create Polygroups if we import an OBJ that already has material zones? Turns out the Polygroups menu is not where we need to go to make that change. Instead, head over to Preferences – ImportExport and enable Import Mat as Groups. …
We can use a custom material on our Post Process volume to adjust the look and feel of our scenes. Better yet, we can access those properties as parameters and drive changes from Blueprint. Let’s see how to make it happen! First we’ll need to add a Post Process Volume to our level. By default …
Unreal Engine has two handy functions called Get Horizontal Distance To and Get Vertical Distance To. These can be used to see if an actor is in range of something else. Here’s a quick example on how to use them. Imagine a drone that we shoot from a distance, and a blast radius that would …
UE5 has changed some of the menu options that let us package a project for distribution. In UE4 we could find these options under the File Menu, but they’re gone. We now have a brand new entry under the Platforms button at the top. Under Binary Configuration we can now conveniently pick shipping, debug or …
Storing values between game sessions can be done with the Save Game object in Unreal Engine. Much like with other objects, we create a custom subclass of it, give it variables that we want it to remember, then populate those before the game ends (and retrieve from it when our game begins). Let me show …
ZBrush has an overwhelming amount of brushes available, but many are just variations of things artists have created over time. Typically we don’t need to use more than a handful, and as such it might be useful to switch between them faster than using the default key sequences (like BST or BMV). Many users prefer …
I’ve just tried ChatGPT for the first time and though I’d share its output with you. The prompt was “write a short story about an ice cream shop in the desert”, and what I got back was beyond my imagination. It simply blew me away, and that’s after a single use. I’ve added a Midjourney …
I’ve often wondered how these “endless runner” type games are made under the hood. Julia and her team have recently released a project like that called Dash and Splat that was made in Core, and I wondered if I can make this work in Unreal Engine. After some research and tinkering, here’s one way to …