Sometimes we need objects to fade in and out in our animations, but sadly not every material lets us do this. Those that are designed with any kind of opacity in mind will already have a map plugged into the respective channel, and it’s easy to designate a scalar parameter with a multiply node and …
I’ve been experimenting with Groom Hair in Unreal Engine today, first time ever and I currently know almost nothing about it. Groom is UE’s strand-based hair system with real time physics we don’t have to setup from scratch, unlike those horrible cloth weight maps and collision shapes. Groom hair “just works” – I have no …
The latest version of Daz to Unreal supports geoshells (in beta)! That’s great news for objects and rely on them, because we can finally use those in Unreal Engine. Geoshells are a native Daz Studio feature, so they come in as a separate material on top of the figure they’re meant to be used with. …
Control Rigs are Unreal Engine’s “easy” way of letting us animate objects and characters in Sequencer. They allow us to create new and override existing animations directly on the timeline. These things are ever so slightly intimidating to set up, but if you know how they work, you’ll be able to animate any rigged object …
Anytime I need to change the value of a slider in Blender, it works fine when I use my mouse and it doesn’t work when I use any of my tablet devices. Why is that, shockingly terrible design perhaps? Or a simple tick box nobody tells you about? Perhaps a bit of both! Thankfully I’ve …
The windows in EPIC’s famous City Sample project are made with HDRIs and a snazzy parallax effect so that it appears there’s depth and geometry behind them. Some windows are illuminated, which is done by making those materials emissive. The default value works well for the daylight scene, but not so well for in night …
The famous City Sample project from The Matrix Awakened has a night mode feature players can switch to from the in-game mini menu. That’s no good though if you want to use the project for rendering scenes via Sequencer. Thankfully there’s an easy way to enable this, let me show you how. First, find BP_Nightmode …
I’ve just started watching An Introduction to Sculpting in Blender by Flipped Normals, which was available as part of a fantastic Humble Bundle this month. Henning has a lot of good tips, including tablet setup and frequently used brushes. Of course I forget these things every second of the day, and every time I open …
Ever since I’ve explained how to convert Genesis figure shapes between character generations in several videos, many of you have been asking the same question: How to we transfer the textures? Rather than typing a variation of the same answer out every time, I thought I’ll explain all the options in one handy article that …
I’ve recently bought an XP Pen Artist Pro 27″ and absolutely love it. It’s replaced my aging Wacom Intuos 4 from over 10 years ago and doubles as my Desktop’s main display. Most apps (aside from Blender) work out of the box, and changing what the pen needs to do works well with the included …
iClone has two concepts of parenting one object to another: Link and Attach. They’re slightly different. Attach is like traditional scene hierarchy parenting and good if you want to marry one object permanently to another (the parent moves, the child also moves). Linking is similar but can be animated for durations, so a bottle on …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
There’s a somewhat hidden feature in Unreal Engine that lets us change our camera navigation speed in the viewport depending on the size of the object we have selected. This can be helpful when you’re level building and frequently switch between a small object like a rock and a distance object like a mountain range. …
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 …
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 …
Here’s something I didn’t know, until Grant Abbit explained it in this fabulous Rigging and Animation course on GameDev.tv: Blender has a way to show you exactly how much of a weight influence a vertex has if the object is parented to an armature. This can be important if you want to find out what …
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 …