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#UnrealEngine #UE4 #UE5 #UETips
Here's one WPO trick I used to create this night sky.
The challenge was to create subtle per-star lens flares that would always face the camera and remain straight, exactly like billboards. 🧵⬇️
Here's one WPO trick I used to create this night sky.
The challenge was to create subtle per-star lens flares that would always face the camera and remain straight, exactly like billboards. 🧵⬇️
To create star billboards, each star would need to rotate around their own pivot point to face the camera but pivots are all lost once exported to a single mesh... :(
... I could bake pivots in UVs but that'd actually be overkill here! I don't actually care about the precise XYZ position of each star... 🧐
#UnrealEngine #UETips #UE5
You can use a Procedural Mesh Component or Geometry Scripting to iteratively slice a given mesh, render the generated cap and composite the result into an atlas texture to generate a distance field/volume texture ⬇️
You can use a Procedural Mesh Component or Geometry Scripting to iteratively slice a given mesh, render the generated cap and composite the result into an atlas texture to generate a distance field/volume texture ⬇️
I was lazy and used the good old procedural mesh component because it's what I know and it's easy. Do a loop and slice a mesh a little bit further each time (based on the object's bounding box and amount of slices to generate). Capture the cap using a scene capture component...
...and composite the captured texture into the atlas render target using an additive material that renders that texture at a specific XY tile.
Did you know @UnrealEngine 4.26 brought in the ability to extend editor menus and toolbars using Blueprints?
#UETips #UnrealEngine
#UETips #UnrealEngine
1. Create an editor utility BP using the EditorUtilityToolMenuEntry class. This BP will allow us to specify where our button is created, its labels, and its behaviour. There's a little more functionality, but we'll focus on toolbar buttons for now.
2. Set the name and label of your button, and if making a toolbar extension, set the entry type to "Tool Bar Button"
Struggling to keep track of name/string values in @UnrealEngine for your game logic? Need a lightweight way to standardise those tags? Check out Gameplay Tags!
#UETips
#UETips
Any added tag can be viewed from the Gameplay Tags window in Project Settings. Any tag that you add will be stored centrally, promoting reuse and will prevent you (or your team) from any pesky spelling mistakes. You can even store them in separate .ini files!
If later, you decide "Nah, that was a terrible name!", you can just rename the tag, and let the system redirect any assets using the old tag to the new one!
Volumetric Fog in @UnrealEngine isn't limited to just one generic density slider. You can actually apply the properties to a material and use objects or particles to set up little artistic fog regions! It's a great way to quickly add a bit of character to an area. #UETips
Here's the #UE4 material! I'm using the radius of the sphere for one mask and I'm also using the Distance To Nearest Surface to keep the fog clinging to actors in the scene. The Volume Texture is just Voronoi noise from the built in Volumetrics Plugin.
You'll still need the ExponentialHeightFog actor in your scene with Volumetric Fog enabled. Even if the density is 0! To use DistanceToNearestSurface you'll need Distance Fields enabled in the Project Settings. If you want the fog to still be visible in the dark add some emissive
Don't know what #UE4's Asset Registry is? Wondering how to query asset data _without_ the cost of loading that asset?! Well, look no further, time for a #UETips tweetorial!
The Asset Registry caches metadata about assets under the hood of UE, and can be used to query this metadata without loading assets.
The editor uses it for gathering references, data validation, the content browser's advanced search syntax (linked), etc.
docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/C…
The editor uses it for gathering references, data validation, the content browser's advanced search syntax (linked), etc.
docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/C…
However, the Asset Registry can be used at runtime! When your game is cooked, asset registry data is serialised with your packages; when a package is mounted, the asset registry will load that data.
In fact, Robo Recall uses the asset registry to query packaged mods!
In fact, Robo Recall uses the asset registry to query packaged mods!
If you want to nicely fade out an object close to the camera in #UE4 just set the Material to Masked and run a Distance Blend into a DitheredTemporalAA node. It's a commonly overlooked technique that efficiently adds polish and it's only 4 nodes! #UETips
If you're looking to fade out an entire object or fade between LODs then use Dithered LOD Transitions with a simple checkbox. Really helps foliage!
One little "gotcha" that might pop up from using camera based fading is that shadows will now *also* fade out when close to the object. You can use a ShadowPassSwitch node to get around that.
If your characters have the same general skeleton, but different proportions, don't feel like you need to make new animations. You can use Runtime Retargeting in @UnrealEngine to automatically scale selected bone movement in the animation. A little hidden away though! #UETips
Remember to keep your bone rotations the same wherever possible, just try and change translations. You can even add additional bones, like pony tails! A really useful way to debug it is the ability to show the non-retargeted animation underneath the existing one like this.
If your characters have different skeletons, but they look like they should still generally work, you can check out the Animation Retargeting in #UE4 which will then try and match the two together. Results may vary! Info for that is available here.
docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/A…
docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/A…
Creating an outdoor environment is both easy and hard. Getting the basics down pat is easy but if you want to make the best possible scene you're going to need to want to learn to use some of the systems built to handle them within @UnrealEngine. Time for a tweetorial! #UETips
Creating an outdoor environment doesn't start with the world, it starts with the project settings. Head to Project Settings->Rendering. Static lighting? Kill it. Having it enabled while using dynamic lighting adds overhead and you won't want lightmaps for a world that big.
We're going to have a whole lot of foliage and that would normally mean overdraw but we can enable an Early Z Pass. It works by caching the pixel distance in a pre-pass to skip occluded primitives. Setting "Mask Material only in early Z Pass" *really* helps with dense foliage.
