Unreal Engine 5 Archives

Unreal Engine 5 differs in many respects from UE4, so much so that it warrants its own category. Many of the previous principles still apply, and these are my notes on the new version. I’ve started using it in 2023.

How to invert normals on an object in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to create a flickering light with a Light Function in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to fix “spatilally loaded Actor references non-spatilally loaded actor” in Unreal Engine

I had this warning in Unreal Engine 5.3 recently when opening a level and didn’t quite know what to make of it: “Spatially loaded actor references a non-spatially loaded actor”. Everything seemed to be working fine, and since it wasn’t an error as such, I didn’t worry too much about it. Curious about what this …

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How to export cameras from Unreal Engine

The other day I needed to make some geometric changes to an object in Blender that relied on my object looking handsome when viewed through a specific camera in Unreal Engine. Hence the best way to work was to export the camera I had setup in UE, and it wasn’t obvious how to do that. …

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Fixed: Unloaded Actors in the Unreal Engine Outliner

Here’s another Unreal Engine oddity that many have come across, including myself: some actors in the outliner show as “unloaded”. You can’t navigate to them, you can’t right-click on them and make them show up, they just linger like a ghost. Here’s an example: This only seems to happen when World Partitioning is enabled and …

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Creating Follower Clothing with Chaos Cloth in Unreal Engine 5.4

There is a neat way to turn static meshes into dynamic follower clothing in Unreal Engine! Since 5.3 there’s a Chaos Cloth plugin that ships with the engine, although it’s only really become usable in 5.4. It looks more complicated than it is, so let me walk you through the basic workflow in principle: Let’s …

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Combining Bump and Normal Maps in Daz to Unreal

Some Daz outfits use both a bump and a normal map to create handsome looking details in Daz Studio. Sadly though, by default the current Daz to Unreal bridge only transfers one or the other, which means we’re not getting the same details showing up after the transfer in Unreal Engine. The G9 Summer Bikini …

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Turning Daz Hair into Groom Hair for Unreal Engine

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 …

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Fixing Geoshell Transparency in Unreal Engine

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. …

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Creating a Control Rig from scratch in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to scale a RectLight in Unreal Engine (and other properties)

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 …

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Avoid missing foliage with Cinematic Renders in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to remove or reset Baked Lighting in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to disable the CTRL+SPACE default shortcut on macOS

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 …

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How to lock off a camera position in Unreal Engine

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 …

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How to adjust Normal Map Strength in Unreal Engine

It’s nice to have adjustment options on our normal maps. Sometimes the strength that works in another DCC doesn’t work for the final look, something I frequently encounter with the base colour channel. Typically I add a Vector 3 and Multiply nodes before the final output, but for non-colour data this doesn’t work. Instead we …

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