Realtime Distance Field Textures in Unreal Engine 4

For a long time I wanted to be able to generate Distance Field textures on the fly to create various visual effects. Lately I needed this effect to replicate the Photoshop “glow” filter that you can add on layers. The goal was to apply a “bloom” or “glow” on the UI I’m designing for my current project. This article was written based on Unreal Engine 4.20 Distance Field ? Quick recap for people who don’t know what distance fields areRead more

Setting up Perforce with Docker for Unreal Engine 4

This guide explains how to setup a Perforce server on a Synology NAS via Docker to be used with Unreal Engine 4. That’s something I wanted to do for a while and I finally took the time for it. I’m therefor writing this guide as a reminder for me but it will probably be useful for others as well. (Cover image from Unsplash) Disclaimer : I’m just a technical artist. My knowledge of network software, IT and anything related isRead more

True First Person Camera in Unreal Engine 4

I decided to share the method I use in my current project to handle my true first person camera. There is little to no documentation on this specific type of first person view, so after looking into the subject for a while I wanted to write about it. Especially since I had a few issues which took me a bit of time to resolve. The end result looks something like that : True First Person ? What do we callRead more

UE4 : Specify default monitor location at launch

As I recently moved from a two screens to three screens setup for my desktop computer I met a little annoyance in the way the Unreal Engine 4 create its game window (everything is fine with the editor). By default the engine will create a new game window on the first screen it finds, probably because the Operating System sort them in a specific order and the engine parse the list as-is. My main problem is that the first screenRead more

Anamorphic bloom with Unreal Engine 4

The goal of this blog post is to describe how to modify the UE4 default bloom shape. This is possible with a specific console command but also by modifying the source of the engine. Usually a bloom effect is used to simulate an artifact from a camera. The part producing the artifact is the lens and not all of them behave the same way. The most common shape is a circle but some can bleed in other ways depending ofRead more

Face Skin in Substance Painter

I wanted to share my method for painting somewhat realistic skin in Substance Painter. It’s far from perfect but it gives good result when rendered in Real-time with the Unreal Engine 4. Following is the step by step process (more or less). 🙂 Note that this tutorial was based on Substance Painter 2.1. Baking First step before starting to paint is to setup your additional maps (baked textures) in Substance Painter. I mostly use the default baking settings as theyRead more

UE4 : My Engine/C++ modifications

I did several changes in the UE4 engine, mostly personal changes. Some choices made by Epic doesn’t always fit my needs. I believe some people would also be interested those. Also this post will be useful for me too to track all my modifications. 🙂 Comments are open if you have questions ! I will keep this post updated when I will change my version or that I edit some other parts of the engine code. Currently the code belowRead more

xNormal 3.18.3 : Offset mesh tutorial

A few weeks ago I asked the integration of a feature in xNormal : the ability to offset an High-poly mesh during a bake to avoid intersections. Before that, xNormal was able to reduce the intersections artifacts by using an anti-aliasing setting, however this setting increase a lot the render time (the computation is logarithmic). There is also the solution to bake one piece at time, but this process multiply the number of textures that you have to bake andRead more

[maya] froRetopo 3.5 : a fast and easy retopology tool

There is a know issue when using the “edge extrude” from the tool in recent Maya versions. To avoid the problem use the following command in Maya (in the script editor or in the mel command) : I’m releasing today a script that I was working on since a very long time (1 or 2 years). I got a little boost in the development with the help of Chris Cunningham (aka Passerby). I started this script because I was lookingRead more

*UPDATED* | FBX exporter for UDK (Maya to Blender fix)

**UPDATE** This post was updated the 15 August 2013. When UDK imports any FBX it tries to find any smoothing group. With Maya there is no smoothing groups but the FBX exporter is in charge to make them. Smoothing group while defined by faces in any softwares supporting this system are stored per vertex from what I know. In Maya there is multiple ways to manipulate normals, the most commons are : -Set to Face/Average normals or -Harden/Soften edge normalsRead more

[code] Custom gravity on props (kActor)

Some people ask me often how I released this effect : I use a inherited class from kActors to achieve this. Then inside a custom tick you simply push a props with a gravity effect. That’s why in the video when I grab a barrel with the gravity gun, the barrel is shifted. This code is old, something like 2 years old, and I never updated it after I posted the video above. Still, it might interest some guys outRead more

[Breakdown] Assassin’s Creed II

The past days I did a new breakdown this time about Assassin’s creed II. A game I still love today ! The amazing website “Mapcore” kindly hosted me to explain my thoughts about the game, you can read it all of it here : >> [Technical breakdown] Assassin’s Creed II on Mapcore.org It was very interesting to do, especially when you compare the game to Assassin’s Creed II which comes out some month ago. It’s nice to compare the progressRead more