Timelines are behind a lot of the animation magic in Unreal Engine Blueprints. I’ve been implementing one to make my plants grow on Jay’s Farm, but I needed a functionality that would let me change the duration of my parent timeline with a variable. That way different seeds could grow with different rates. There’s no …
Depth of Field is extremely difficult to judge in Unreal Engine, at least visually in the preview. It’s also a little intimidating to setup, and I don’t mind telling you that it was very difficult for me to grasp the concept. Yet like so many things in Unreal Engine, there is method behind the madness, …
I wanted to setup some portrait lights the way I’m used to doing it in Blender and DAZ Studio. In those apps, we usually have a way to point a light source at an object so that when we move either of them around, the other one follows. The above GIF is a good example …
The Tick Event is a somewhat special event that is called every time a frame is drawn in Unreal Engine. Many actions are derived from it in a running project. Sometimes we may need to drive things while we’re editing a project though, without being able to press play. Sadly we can’t use the Tick …
EPIC have recently introduced something called the Movie Render Queue to aide us in exporting stills and animations from Unreal Engine. The previous method (Movie Scene Capture) was a tad clunky, and is – as we live in such dramatically fast times – already being deprecated. Although Movie Render Queue is working great, it’s not …
The other day I thought it would be a hoot to bring in some of the wonderfully modelled low-res Synty Assets and use them together with the high-res characters in DAZ Studio. With access to the source OBJ files this worked out rather well, but it’s a time consuming process importing, shading and saving each …
I’ve just figured out a small mystery that I thought I’d share with you. It’s about enabling soft shadows in Unreal Engine, specifically with the Movable Light type. It’s the “expensive to calculate” variety, especially when enabling soft shadows. I’d like to use them to get real time good looking shadows for still images and …
I’ve had various requests and discussions with supporters recently about what might be a good configuration for a DAZ Studio and/or rendering computer. It’s a good question, and with so many systems and components on the market, I thought I’d compile this article as a starting point. Feel free to ask specific questions in the …
Sometimes I forget the simplest things, the ones you think you don’t need to make a note of. It’s those very things that can trip you up sometime in the future when you forgot the very basics that only a month ago were so engrained in your brain. True story, it happened to me today. …
I had to calculate the length of a vector recently, and had no idea where to begin. In my little farm/planting project, I’ve used Line Tracing to plant a vegetable on the floor. However, I needed a limitation as to where the player can plant things. They should not be allowed to plant directly underneath …
I’m having great fun with the City Park Environment in Unreal Engine. I picked it up the moment it was released and have never regretted the amount of time I spent with it. Having done so, I understand that it’s not easy to get started with it when you’re a novice. The set takes long …
I’ve imported a mesh model as FBX that was setup with an opacity map. Most of the simple material was created for me by Unreal Engine, but the opacity (transparency) texture was not imported. I had no idea how to do this, but figured it out. Here’s what it should look like and how it …
During yesterday’s Twitch Stream, I’ve built a camera animation with the Urban Future 6 set in Unreal Engine. I was wondering how to show the camera full screen while I was positioning it and found out this morning. That’s what a good night’s sleep can do to you 🙂 I thought I’d share it with …
It appears that most Synty Polygon packs share the same skeleton. Therefore we can mix and match characters from various packs and use them in the same project, without the need to retarget our characters again. I’ve explained in a previous post how to retarget a Synty skeleton to the Unreal Skeleton, however if we …
Unreal Engine has a nice feature that lets us build distributables (packages) for Linux on a Windows system. It’s a magic known as Cross Compiling. This doesn’t work out of the box, but it’s easy to implement with any Windows version of Unreal Engine. It’s not exactly oblivious how to get started with this magic …
Today I’ve learnt about something called the Game Instance. This is an object that exists only once in our games, is created when the game starts, and torn down only when it ends. It persists across level changes, making it the ideal candidate for storing variables across level loads. It’s one of the first things …
Every language has a way to modify strings: add something to the end, search for something in the middle, concatenate two pieces of text, that sort of thing. C++ is no exception, and Unreal Engine exposes that functionality in Blueprint. Let me give you an example: I wanted to find the name of a material …
I found a very elegant way to animate various properties of the UI widgets we can add to the screen in Unreal Engine. Anything from animating their position to opacity and all kinds of other things can be confined to a mini timeline, then queued programmatically when necessary. Let’s take a look how I’ve animated …
I’ve recently found a much easier way to use Unreal Guy’s animations with the Synty (Polygon) characters, thanks to TC Mabe’s video (and his other one too). This is an updated version of what I’ve described back in March, something I was never really happy with, nor did I fully understand all steps involved. The …
I was looking for a way to turn a string value into a Material Instance. I had hoped that Unreal Engine would have a node for that, but alas it does not. Nevertheless, I needed something that like a key/value lookup and came across Map Variables. Those work exactly like a mini-database right inside the …
For character selections, we may want to replace the skeletal mesh of a character according to a user selection. This comes in handy when we want players to be able to select a different character, or the same character wearing a different outfit. Assuming all meshes share the same skeleton, there’s a Blueprint way of …
Swimming mechanics are a tad tricky to get going in Unreal Engine. I’ve pieced this information together from various cowboy tutorials on YouTube, in the hope that I’ll be able to reproduce the principles without having to watch them again. In this article I’ll make the Third Person Character swim, letting him slowly drift up …
I was surprised to see how easy it was to setup cloth animations in Unreal Engine. It’s as simple as selecting part of a character we’d like to turn into cloth, painting a weight map onto the wafty parts, optionally adjust settings to make the cloth behave the way we want, and Unreal Engine handles …
Post Process volumes are actually very simple to use. They are essentially invisible box volumes that can apply a camera effect that becomes visible as soon our camera enters them. For this example I’ll show you how to create a very simple underwater yet super popular underwater effect that will turn our image blueish when …
I’ve explained how to make a character crouch in a previous article. We can use the same principle to make him (or her) sprint by setting the Max Walk Speed on our character movement. Let me show you how it works. Just like before we need: a Character (I’m using the First Person Character) an …
Line Tracing is a technique that can tell us if an object is in the line of sight, and returns all kinds of data when true. First person shooter games use it all the time, and the principle comes in handy on so many occasions. While it’s not actually that difficult to comprehend, I find …
I’ve just learnt how to let a player character crouch. It’s a little complicated so I thought I’d take some notes in the intricacies. All credit for this goes to Mathew Wadstein and his excellent video tutorial. I’ll explain how to implement the whole process using an interface call, and I’ll show how we can …
Blueprints can get so disorganised over time: the more nodes we add to our Event Graph, the more cluttered and difficult to navigate the screen can get. While there is a way to search for an event across the current class, and there’s the option to split graphs into Functions, there’s also a way to …
I’ve been following EPIC’s Behaviour Tree Quick Start guide and delved into the fascinating world of Blackboards and Behaviour Trees (regardless of the missing u). I thought this way of implementing random walk actions in background characters would come in handy for making the game world come alive. In their example, the behaviour tree is …
I’ve been experimenting with AI Controllers and my Unreal Guys walking towards random locations in the game world. As such I needed a way for them to turn smoothly towards said random locations before they starting to walk. Thankfully I found out about the Find Look At Rotation node. It was exactly the missing piece …