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. …
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 …
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 …
When you download assets from the UE Marketplace, they’re downloaded into a temporary location called the Vault Cache before being copied into your actual project. This means that by default, you’ll end up with an asset at least twice: once on the Vault Cache, and once in your project. The reasoning is that when you …
We’ve been working with multiple 4K image plates in Unreal Engine, which is a great way to combine live footage with 3D environments without the overhead of a fully fledged virtual studio production. The more plates we used, the slower UE got – much like a video editor would if you stacked more tracks onto …
I’ve previously talked about using Shot Tracks in the UE Sequencer. There’s a related feature called Takes that I’ve just found out about. It can make life easier as you try things out while you work with animations and adds an “alternate” shot that can be swapped out without destroying the original. Each take is …
When you package a UE project without and special settings, it’ll start itself in full screen mode. This can be confusing to users as there’s no obvious way to move the game to a different screen, or to close it when they’re done. Thankfully there’s a handy blueprint node called Get User Game Settings that …
By default, Ultra Dynamic Sky calculates cloud movement continuously, no matter if you’re running game mode, simulation mode or if you’re working with a Level Sequence. There is a way to make sure the clouds form the same way as you move the playhead so that we get predictable results in our cinematic keyframe animations. …
I’ve been puzzling over the best way to render out multiple camera sequences from Unreal Engine. This is useful if you had a switched camera cut track for preview purposes in your project, but would like additional post production effects to be applied during editing (say dissolves or wipes between cameras). By default, Unreal Engine …
When you move objects around in your content browser for re-organisation, you may end up with empty folders that you want to delete. However, often times Unreal Engine comes up with a message telling you that the folder is NOT empty, and all kinds of terrible things would happen when you delete it anyway. Here’s …
Imagine you’ve animated an object with keyframes as part of a Level Sequence, and now you want to have multiple copies of that object doing the same thing. Like the cube in the above GIF. Unreal Engine has a quasi non-linear animation feature we can use that lets us queue a sequence from another sequence. …
Sometimes, and despite out best efforts, or as a result of copy/paste actions, actor references in Level Sequences can break. Anything that may have been tracked and properly working last time is shown in white (like the audio above), while things that have broken references are shown in red. It’s annoying when this happens, but …
When you’re using Unreal Engine animations as part of linear keyframe animations in a Level Sequencer, forward motion may become an issue. Depending on the situation, animators like to have the option to have say a walk cycle “in place”, then add the linear forward motion manually to direct a character in a cinematic. Sadly …
Unreal Engine can show us how hard it’s working on things in the background, thanks to several overlays we can peek at. The most common one to keep an eye on is the FPS count (frames per second). We can toggle this with CTRL+SHIFT+L. It’s also accessible from the little hamburger icon at the top …
I’ve finally worked out how to properly create and render animations from Unreal Engine. The concept is very elegant, but also very different from most other 3D applications that I’m familiar with. This threw me on more than one occasion and lead to multiple frustrations, so let me share what I’ve learnt and explain the …
Sometimes you have a tiled material on an object, and the UV tiling isn’t exposed. This means some manual intervention, which had me stumped in Unreal Engine, and here’s how I’ve solved it. On the material, each texture needs a Texture Coordinate node in the UV input for tiling to be changeable. If nothing is …
Nanite is Unreal Engine 5’s new internal mesh format that lets the engine subdivide dense meshes on the fly. Think of it as LODs on steroids. Any static mesh that can potentially be Nanite should be Nanite, and many assets have it enabled by default. We can enable this on a per-object basis, either on …
Unreal Engine has a convenient way to migrate objects from one level to another in the same project. I keep forgetting how to do this so I thought I’d make a note. This is not the simple copy/paste approach, even though that will work: select actors and press CTRL+C in Level A, then open Level …
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 …
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 …