LogInThomas Harle allowed us to share his recent article with a number of tips and tricks for Unreal Engine 4 users.
Thomas Harle allowed us to share his recent article with a number of tips and tricks for Unreal Engine 4 users. These tips help you save some time, so let’s study the post and discuss it.
CAMERA BOOKMARKS
One of my favorite features in Unreal 4 – Camera Bookmarks.
When you’re working on a scene if you press Ctrl + 1, Unreal will save the current Camera position. Then when you press 1 again it jumps right back to that location. You can save up to 10 Camera Positions this way, which makes navigating huge scenes so much easier – no more flying around the level for ages trying to get to the places you need. Even when I’m just working on a small single effect, I’ll set up near, far, top views etc. so make things quick and easy.
BOOLEAN SEARCH BARS
The filter search bars are already amazing but what if you could search for 2 things at once, or only for things that include 2 keywords – well you can! Using the | and & operators.
| is called a vertical pipe I believe, not a capital I – it’s typed by Shift
Here Fog or Light is amazingly useful for a lighting artist who doesn’t want an outliner full of Environment Art things.
SELECT ALL AND REPLACE
Have a placeholder mesh in your scene and you want to replace it with a Blueprint you’ve just made – easy when you know how.
Note the Recently Placed part of the Replace menu dynamically updates with what you’ve just made – so just make a single copy of the BP, delete it, then select all and Replace – simple.
AUTO SCREENSHOTTER
This is a little more involved but great for Env Artists who want to document their progress.
Firstly set up a Level Sequence with Cameras for all the Screenshots you want to take.
Then create a Custom Event in your Level Blueprint that calls a Console command for a screenshot. The documentation for that is here.
Finally, add an Event Track to your Level Sequence so that it calls the Custom Event when you want to take screenshots – voila! Now, whenever you play that Sequence (set it to Autoplay and just Play in Editor) it will take all of your screenshots automatically, much easier than doing it manually, plus they’re all going to be from the same camera position which makes it really easy to make a nice progression gif etc.
Thomas Harle
The article was originally published here.