In case anyone was planning on making a retro doom-style game; I just released a system for that!

It’s an actor component that handles the rendering of the eight directional sprites, written in C++.

• One character animation (with all eight angles) is neatly stored in one data asset, so you can organise your content browser better

• Exposed functions to blueprint so it’s easy to prototype with, while keeping calculations hidden in the background

• It supports both animated characters and static objects (e.g barrels, items, etc..)

It’s free + under MIT license on itch.io!

It comes with just the source code or an example project, which ever you prefer!

Note: rule 3 (no other marketplace unless it’s free). I hope this passes that exception! :)

Hi, i was curious if 5.5 has any noticeable improvements to Lumen/VSM artifacts and noise. I'm specifically talking about the lumen noise we see with softer shadows. Aswell as VSM flickering in dense geometry environments. (Shrubs, Forests)

I have read through the patch notes but I'm honestly curious about people's first hand experience.

If not, have there been any mention of improvements to these systems for 5.6?

Hello! I'm making a racing game where all of my in-game objects are represented by sprites, in the style of something like OutRun or Power Drift. I decided that the best way of doing this was to use Billboard Imposters, where you generate a flipbook texture of your object from all angles around it, and then set up a material that displays a flat billboard showing the correct sprite based on your viewing angle.

Unreal Engine has a couple of methods for doing this. The first, older method looks like it was introduced in around 2015 as part of the RenderToTexture toolkit, and is pretty bare-bones, but basically does what I need it to do. It can be found in Editor Content > Art Tools > RenderToTexture > Blueprints > RenderToTexture_LevelBP. It takes a static mesh as input and then arranges instances of that mesh at various rotations in a grid, which you then take a high-resolution screenshot of, along with other render channels like Normals, Base Colour etc. You then create a material and make use of the ImposterUVs node to display the right part of the texture based on viewing angle. The baking process looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/DghhqsU.png

The newer method is known as Octahedral Impostors, and was developed for Fortnite. It was made for a specific purpose, which is replacing large numbers of meshes at low LODs, but is further away from what I'm trying to do than the older method, because it does a lot of work interpolating between the different angles and smoothing the transitions, things that I don't need. You need to enable the ImpostorBaker plugin, and the baking process for this method looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/5ndGj8L.png . I've not had very convincing results, even before trying to remove all of the functionality I don't need from the rendering method; the detail on the object is really patchy, even at high resolutions, and the interpolation looks weird as you move around the object.

So, I think the first method is going to be better for my project, and I've got it largely working as I want it to, but it's not quite right, no doubt because the code driving it is long since deprecated. Here's the output from the RenderToTexture method: https://i.imgur.com/a6UdDRz.png . And here's what the results look like: https://imgur.com/c9euufs

The main problem is that the angle that the car is displayed at is wrong, both horizontally and vertically. For example, I would expect this screenshot, where the camera is pointing directly along the grid line below, to show a straight-on back view of the car: https://i.imgur.com/GkWsbeq.png . There's also the fact that rotating the plane that the material is applied to has no effect on the rotation of the object. The ImposterUVs node has an input for rotation (seen here: https://i.imgur.com/D3F4qYo.png ), which I imagine you should be able to hook up to use the rotation value from the object the material is applied to (though I'm not well-versed enough with materials to know how to do this). Even then, though, this only affects 'horizontal' rotation, around the Z axis, and not vertical rotation. One of the benefits of the Octahedral Impostors is that the materials that get generated do take object rotation into account; I thought I might be able to figure out what part of the 'Impostor' material function is doing this, but it was a bit beyond me.

One final thing that doesn't look right is how the sprite warps when it's close to the camera; you can see this at the end of the video above. This is presumably caused by Unreal's emulation of a camera lens, but ideally I'd like to bypass that, and just essentially a draw a sprite to the screen exactly as appears in the spritesheet, but scaled to the right size.

So, to summarise, I'm trying to adapt Unreal's older, deprecated method of baking and rendering Billboard Impostors so that it a) displays objects at the correct angle, b) takes the rotation of the object the material is applied to into account, and c) bypasses Unreal's camera lens emulation and draws the sprite exactly as it appears in the spritesheet. Is any of this doable? If so, any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Hello I'm an artist and solo dev from Mumbai, I've been working on a creepy crawler titled 'distributed mind test', here's my first weird devlog where I get into the mythology and Worldbuilding of game, would love to know what you think :)

Hi all, Ive got an AI character and i have got some retargeted animations for attack etc working fine but i cant find how to replace the movement animations with the new ones ive got ready to use? ive tried opening every thing i can in the blue print but i cant find anything that references any movement animations.

Hello. I have made a cutscene using Level Sequencer with a Cine Camera Actor. It mostly looks fine, but the Cine Camera is weirdly zoomed in compared to a normal camera. The settings options for the Cine Camera are way different than those for a normal Camera Component (which has FOV, Projection Mode, and Aspect Ratio).. here there are far more options and they're pretty confusing. I already disabled the cropping, but I want it to also not have this zoomed in effect. What settings do I need to change to make the view from this camera identical to an out-of-the-box default CameraComponent?

Thanks!

I've been trying all day to make this work, but I have no idea what I'm doing.

My first trouble is how do I import a Skeletal Mesh properly, because every time I try, it just crashes the game engine. I just a mtrying to import a cloak mesh into Unreal Engine, and try out the cloth physics with hthe cloak, on my character. Do I need to be adding something into the mesh in Maya itself, or is it the Unreal Engine that's causing the problem?

I am looking for a simple free project that would be a good start to practice cinematography with the sequencer. Any suggestions would be appreciated Thank you

I'm creating a replicated inventory, and I'm adding functionality for the object to attach to the socket by taking it from the "get" function. Similarly, the character performs the animation based on the object using "overlay." In the console, I get several errors, but if I remove "socket name" and "overlay," the errors disappear. However, the animations and the object attaching to the socket no longer work. Any advice?

Error 1
Error 2

Additional notes: The error also occurs in standalone mode, and if I remove the "select" node and connect "object mesh" directly to "held item," the error reappears even without "socket" and "overlay" present. So, I think I should somehow create a "==" and a "select" for "overlay" and "socket name," just like the one that already exists for "object mesh."

Hello

I have noticed that when I turn on HW ray tracing I get around 10fps less - around 80fps in total

with HW ray tracing off I get around 90fps

I have lumen ON, nanite ON even megalights ON

I have AMD 7900XTX card with latest drivers

does anyone have idea why is this happening, or what kind of settings can I try? I was expecting the HW ray tracing will perform better

thank you

Hello,

Recently I decided to try and make a game of my own for the first time, choosing UE5 as my first engine due to blueprint coding. After a bit of a break I came back to my little project and tried adding an item pick-up/drop system. I'm currently having an issue with my BPI_ItemPickUp interface. I'm trying to get it to send item mesh to my player controller, but I encountered a little obstacle in form of interface target reference (screenshots below). My interaction system basically calculates a vector line from camera, when it hits a compontent it checks whether is it interactable or not. Interaction itself works fine, but after the break I tried sending interacted item's mesh to player controller so they can hold it, the issue is when I called in for my function that I can't exactly select it's Target as Hit Actor, any suggestions as to how could I fix it?
I'm incredibly new to coding so I apologize in advance if my ramblings aren't as precise as they should be

My blueprints thus far
https://imgur.com/a/pfwhK3g

I am kind of new to using animation sequences in sequencer for cinematics, and I’m running into an issue I can’t find an answer to.

I have some animals from a pack that are all skeletal meshes with skeletons and animation sequences for each one. All of the walking animations have a root motion variant, which I believe is supposed to allow it to not snap back to the origin when the walk cycle completes. For the life of me I cannot figure out how to make them not snap back. I’ve tried enabling/disabling root motion, looping the animation, and also just trying to use the animation sequence directly in the scene rather than assigning it to the skeletal mesh. Still no change. I don’t understand.

Also, I had a problem in my scene where the fps had unexpectedly dropped to 6-12 fps unless I rebuild geometry, after which the fps would go back up to 45+. However, if I rebuild geometry, animation sequences don’t play at all in the sequencer unless I hit Simulate. I have almost no experience with this, so I just don’t know where to start.

I stayed away from using Fab to give it some time to settle down, but now I want to use Megascan assets again. However, I can't find a height or displacement map anywhere in the texture I downloaded, even if I download the entire texture set. I do however have a bump and cavity map, so I tried using both of these individually but that is unfortunately not it. I also tried looking online but couldn't find anything to help me. What am I missing?

As far as I have read, you still have to restart the editor after changes to header.

Hi guys, I'm having a problem when rendering an animation using lumen. I tried both render queue and legacy and every time some lights keep turning on and off and this doesn't happen when I'm only working in the scene.

Am I missing something here?