Chris Murphy
@HighlySpammable
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Senior Tech Artist on the @UnrealEngine Evangelism team working in Aus/NZ/SE Asia. Have a tendency to rant. I'm HighlySpammable in the other social spaces.
Melbourne, Victoria
Joined November 2011
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If you're not using them already: Enable Runtime Virtual Textures in
@UnrealEngine
to have your foliage/environment sample the landscape beneath it to nicely blend and remove asset seams. It's really only a little bit of work to do it! Let's check out how.
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If you're set dressing in
@UnrealEngine
and want things placed in a more realistic way, don't forget you can enable physics on the objects, simulate them and press "k" to save their final state back into the editor!
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One thing I'm super keen on in the
#UE5
Early Access is that Lumen lets emissive objects actually light the scene! This is just a static mesh with an emissive material. Little objects adding small lighting touches to the scene without effort is going to be great.
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You know when you're like "This cliff is great but I sure wish I could put a door/corridor into it but I can't because there's no hole there already"? NO MORE! The new Mesh Boolean feature in
@UnrealEngine
4.26 lets you subtract one mesh from another in the editor.
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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
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This building may not look like much but it's just a cube that assesses it's own size and adds the correct number of windows through the material. Not only that but the interiors are all just cube map projections! Let's take a deep dive into how to make something like this.
#UE4
.
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The UE4 worldbuilding tools are getting a bit ridiculous. Built in atmosphere, cloud, landmass and river systems all make it easy to smash out environments with non-destructive setups. This is 5 minutes of me tinkering with them from a blank scene.
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A really, really cool aspect of the new water system in Unreal Engine 4.26 is that it handles the water line and the post processing above/below it automatically. Really pumped for these.
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If you're moving around the editor a lot it's a good idea to add bookmarks in
#UE4
to easily jump around the space. Ctrl + [a number] will save your current screen location and tapping that number will bring you back there!
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I combined the moveable post process technique I was fooling around with and the procedural environment to create a simple spawn effect for new area tiles to look like they're materializing.
#UE4
#screenshotsaturday
#gamedev
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Folks know about Debug Sphere and Debug Text but do you know about Debug Float History? It automatically makes a nice graph of any float value and plots them on a graph for you! Just use Add Float History Sample and Draw Debug Float History to graph any float you want!
#UETips
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Have something that clearly needs to be rotated around a location that isn't the default pivot location? Use Alt + Middle click to temporarily shift the pivot to wherever you want!
#UETips
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In
@UnrealEngine
there's a console command called "abtest" that automatically randomly switches between variables until you type 'abtest stop'. The log then outputs the performance difference and the chance of the result being due to noise. Use this instead of your gut!
#UETips
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gamedev is weird because you can have a button that says 'destroy all child actors' and everyone will just be *fine* with it.
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So
@UnrealEngine
now has Multiplayer in it. As in, you can connect to other people and edit levels and such together. Collaboratively. And it's rad. Early access right now but it'll get way better in the future!
I made sure not to post this on April Fools.
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Control Rig and FullBody IK in
#UE5
are nuts. 8 nodes and you have a working setup to animate in engine. You can then create linked Animations from Sequencer Animations and tweak them in engine! The workflow is ultra straightforward and I can't wait for this to be 'the norm'.
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The new Scriptable Tools Editor Mode in
@UnrealEngine
5.2 is really, really cool. It's a framework to easily create new drag/click/widget based tools! Can't wait to see what folks do with it. Here I made a simple Vine Painter tool to drop Vine Blueprints into the scene.
#UETips
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There's a really nice Texture Variation node in UE4 4.26 that cheaply mixes up the UVs to remove texture tiling.
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Just a reminder folks: when you're shipping an Unreal Engine title you need to fill out the Release form *before* you release. It's literally only a couple of lines and affects your royalty exemption on the first $1 million USD.
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An FYI to character artists: the documentation for Digital Humans in
@UnrealEngine
is absolutely solid and covers a massive spread of information from hair card techniques and hairline blending to correctly setting up eyeball refraction. So good!
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Simple little
#techart
trick: Instead of using a timeline or setting a variable in Tick() you can read in the start time as a variable into the material and let it lerp itself. This saves having to tick your Blueprint actor! On footstep decals and such this can be major perf win.
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If you hold V while dragging a mesh you can snap the pivot of one mesh to the nearest vertex of another. Pretty powerful when you just can't be bothered dealing with grids.
#UE4
.
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You can take a screenshot from
@UnrealEngine
, bring it into Photoshop/GIMP then bring those visual changes *back* into your project with only a few clicks using LUTs! For more info and the default LUT texture check out the docs here:
#UETips
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Foliage doesn't have to just be static meshes anymore: in
#UE4
4.23 you can now paint Actors as foliage. In this scene every tree is actually it's own Blueprint and will stay in place even if the environment it's been painted onto is moved.
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This is rad. They're displacing a plane then cutting out the 0 values with a plane cut to make low effort, but high quality, decorative meshes from heightmaps in
#UE5
.
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A lot of the time people use the "Is Valid" macro when in reality it's much quicker to change the get function into a "Validated Get". Please do this. I have to read these things.
#UE4
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Here's a cool
@UnrealEngine
feature that most don't know about: you can search by any of the metadata you see when you highlight an asset! In this case I'm typing (NaniteEnabled = False) AND (Triangles > 75000) to get any large meshes that still don't have nanite enabled.
#UETips
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Mixing Exponential Height Fog with a Sky Atmosphere in Unreal? Remember that the Fog Inscattering Color values are *additive*. Turning them down results in a more naturally lit fog! Also make sure you have "Support Sky Atmosphere Affecting Height Fog" enabled.
#UETips
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Worked with
@JKashaar
and got a proof of concept of the meteor from Paragon working. Surprisingly straightforward in
@UnrealEngine
!
#gamedev
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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
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You can mix Distance Fields with Niagara Mesh Reproductions to break away parts of your character on contact with surfaces! Takes about 15 minutes to setup in
#UE4
and it's a nice little effect for a phantom/ghost.
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Not sure if you've *heard* about this one but you don't need to individually place biome sounds anymore! There's a tag based plugin in UE5 called Soundscape that dynamically spawns audio around you. It can even do things like trace the sound spawns to the ground or roof!
#UETips
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BoundingBoxBased_0-1_UVW is the best node you've never heard of in
@UnrealEngine
. It automatically gives you a 0-1 mask of the X, Y and Z axis which is *super* useful for various tech art wizardry.
#UETips
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Started fooling around with accessing the Global Distance Field in Niagara. A cool aspect of doing so is pulling particles toward (or pushing particles away from) the environment.
#UE4
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Adding Splitscreen Multiplayer takes literally 20 seconds in
#UE4
. Remember this for your next game jam! Props to
@yingtastic
for being Player 2.
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If you're not doing mobile platform development you can shave 15 to 20 gigs off of your
@UnrealEngine
install by disabling them in the options. Highly recommended if you're keeping a few versions going at a time!
#UETips
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So because Lumen in UE5 takes lighting from emissives there's a weird side effect of your widget shining a rainbow into the scene whenever you select something which.. I kinda love?
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I put together a tutorial on Niagara VFX in
@UnrealEngine
that covers the fundamentals through to how to dynamically dissolve a character when they touch a surface. All covered in under 30 minutes so give it a dabble!
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If you're an artist that traditionally stays in their DCC you should really do yourself a favour and check out Blueprint Construction Scripts in
#UE4
. It takes about 90s to create a mesh that curves itself along a spline fitting what the level designer needs without reexporting.
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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
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Two *incredibly* useful shortcuts that change up your
#UE5
workflow are Ctrl Space for Content Drawer and F10 to Sidebar All Tabs. These free up a ton of screen space for what you actually want but give you easy access to controls and content when you need it!
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If your shadows are a bit strange outside the main cascade distance there's a chance you don't have any Far Cascades enabled. This gets missed in most tutorials and will generally fix some landscape wonkiness!
#UETips
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At GDC I delivered a talk on Stylization in Unreal Engine 5. We covered Post Processes, Material Overlays, using RVTs for pretty looking grass and a paint-the-world style effect. You can find the talk as well as the graphs I made here!
#UETips
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A feature that has been in
#UE4
for a while now that doesn't get enough love is volumetric fog particles. You can control them and their properties through Niagara! As of 4.25 Niagara can access camera params so you can even gently have the fog part around your camera position.
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Today in awfully-specific-nodes-in-Unreal: SkyAtmosphereImage. This node automatically projects a texture onto your sky sphere. Great for stylized suns or for moons! As an aside, you can use Ctrl + L + Mouse Movement to move your sun without clicking on it.
#UETips
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As of today my official job title is Senior Technical Artist at
@UnrealEngine
instead of Evangelist. It's been a bit of a quirk that I've never had the official title of TA despite being reasonably well known for it. Don't fret, I'm still on the Evangelism team and helping folks!
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One cool thing with RVTs in
#UE4
4.24 is setting up your assets to look at the water level of the world and automatically apply wetness below and *just* above that for a nice blend. Takes about 60 seconds to setup, looks great and makes your environmental artists lives better!
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One of my favourite effects to demo the advanced aspects of Niagara in
@UnrealEngine
is a dynamic hologram based off of a camera in the scene. A cool thing I was tinkering with today though is a second emitter acting as the projector that spawns the hologram!
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4.23 (Experimental) feature that everyone missed:
@UnrealEngine
now has Runtime Virtual Textures in it. How do they work? It renders the pixels (including projected textures like these) and if it's already rendered it before it just looks it back up! Mad savings on landscapes.
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There's a system built into
@UnrealEngine
called Quartz that lets you sync up sounds and play them against an internal metronome. That means you can ensure sound effects stay in time with your music for some really incredible results! Check it out! Sound on for this one!
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UE5 has Named Reroute nodes. That's it. That's the tweet.
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"ray tracing doesn't solve anything" says man who has never manually placed and fine tuned reflection captures across a large environment
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Characters not feeling like they're really *in* the scene? You may not have enabled Capsule Indirect Shadows! They'll give that little bit of ambient darkness around your character, even when in an existing shadow. Just create a shadow Physics Asset, assign it and enable!
#UETips
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So the new Sky Atmosphere in
#UE4
automatically gives you a physically accurate atmospheric fog. How accurate? This accurate. I can zoom into space.
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Often I see folks creating Blueprints for Decals in
@UnrealEngine
to control lifetime and fade but there's actually a "Decal Lifetime Opacity" node built in to do just that along with Fade In/Fade Out parameters and a lifetime to auto destroy the decal at the end. Use 'em!
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You can read data from a mesh into Niagara Simulation Stages and then out to a Render Target. In this case I'm tracking the average velocity and feeding it back into a Black Body node in the material. Here's a quick rundown!
#UETips
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Heads up to Tech Artists for
#UE4
4.23: you can now choose to store material params on the primitive instead of in the material itself. Why's that useful? Well now it means they'll all batch together into a single draw call, even if the primitives have different values. Rad.
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Looking to get a complete match between Substance and UE5? There's a great write up and a downloadable LUT here! As an aside, with OCIO support in Substance I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it these days but it's still a great fix for right now.
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If you have elements of a material that you don't want casting shadows you can use the Shadow Pass Switch! This allows you to separate the instructions for the shadow and the standard material.
#UETips
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Of the 860 folks that responded 63.5% of
#gamedev
students weren't taught Version Control at school, yet it's essential in the industry. I personally think students should get repo's day one and have every single project and prototype version controlled through to graduation.
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If you're new to gamedev and you're "bad at maths" don't stress: you'll get better by learning it in a more practical way. If school had have put equations for blowing up red team with a rocket instead of "when will the boat pass the fisherman" you'd have learned it way earlier.
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In
#UE4
4.24 you can hold Ctrl + L to rotate the scenes Sun light really quickly and easily. I'm diggin' it.
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Make a mistake and need to go back to the saved version of a specific file? Don't restart the editor! Right Click -> Asset Actions -> Reload and
@UnrealEngine
will ditch the unsaved version and replace it with the version on disk! It even works for maps!
#UETips
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A lot of folks know about the Volumetric Cloud painting that's in UE4.26 but somehow the Cloud Composite Objects get overlooked. Super cool stuff! You can just drag around cloud actors in your scene to nail the look. Can't wait to see folks build more robust systems from it!
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So normally when you have LODs they pop, right? Enable Dithered LOD Transitions in your Material properties and it'll automatically fade that material when popping in the new one. Feels good.
#UE4
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Virtual Production is taking off with
@UnrealEngine
and it's pretty crazy. One of the latest things that's been spinning up are LED walls. No green screen: they're walls that adapt to the camera position to create realistic reflections and environments the actors can actually see
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A surprising number of people are sleeping on Ctrl + E. Click on something and hit Ctrl + E to edit the asset selected! As of 5.0 Ctrl + E on a Landscape will open the Material for it, which is a nice QOL feature.
#UETips
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A cool little feature I came across in the
@UnrealEngine
4.26 Preview is the Actor Palette Plugin. It lets you load other levels up and drag actors from them into your current one! Should be great if you work with Zoo or Showcase environments.
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Hey
@UnrealEngine
devs! What's something you could do in 5 to 10 minutes on a new developers project that would add easy polish?
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There's actually a disabled experimental Procedural Forest system built into
@UnrealEngine
. You can set up trees, seed dispersal, whether they survive in shade and how much of a shadow they cast. The engine then procedurally 'grows' them. Use Foliage painting mode for touch ups!
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If you Alt + Middle Mouse click an actor in
#UE4
you can temporarily change the pivot to rotate/translate it. Pivot resets when selected again. Super useful when trying to line stuff up and some artist designed it with a pivot for another purpose in mind!
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Frequently working with materials in
#UE4
? Set "Start Previewing Node" to a hotkey and rejoice. I use space bar. Now you just tap space to preview it from that point in the graph instead of right clicking and selecting it. A small saving in a frequent action saves a lot of time!
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Unreal has a built in feature called Low Latency Frame Syncing that you can enable if your game requires really tight input times (fighting games, ARPGs, etc) and, while it's a lesser known feature, it can really improve how a game feels. This thread dives into that and more!
A
#gamedev
thread on Nintendo Switch input latency for
@UnrealEngine
(
#UE4
) games.
Featuring
@DreamscaperGame
, our
#indiegame
leaving Early Access in August. It is a deceptively simple game that uses low-poly models & textures but hi-fidelity shading and post-processing.
(1/X)
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You know those hours you lovingly wasted away on character creators in RPGs? Well this is one for gamedev and realtime in film and it's absolutely bonkers quality. Free to use with
@UnrealEngine
.
Introducing MetaHumans—the next-generation of digital humans.
#UE4
Animation and mocap-ready,
#MetaHumans
will be created by you, using the new easy-to-use MetaHuman Creator.
Get a sneak peak at this groundbreaking new tool:
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Really little QoL thing in Unreal Engine 4.26: when setting up inputs you don't need to pull them from a dropdown anymore, you can just press the key.
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Holding backslash in
#UE4
summons a preview mesh at your cursor. Press shift backslash to cycle through other custom static meshes that are set in the Editor Preferences window. Super useful for quickly sizing up doorways and such!
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