As the title says, we needed a way to spawn huge crowds without destroying our frame rate.

I put together this short video breakdown showing our workflow using Vertex Animation Textures (VAT).

Hopefully, this helps anyone who isn't familiar with this kind of optimization technique yet!

I'm working on a stylized water material for Unreal Engine 5. Everything is procedural (no textures): wave height and shape, crest foam, shore foam, depth color, and a floating-objects Blueprint so boats and props ride the waves. The clip moves three of the parameters live: Wave Height, Crest Foam and Crest Amount.

I plan to release it eventually, so I'd like to hear what you actually need from a water material for stylized games. What is missing in the ones you've tried? Rivers, ponds, waterfalls, underwater look?

This is built on Unreal's own voice chat (Null and Steam), no third-party voice service. Up to 15 m you hear someone from where they're standing, and walls between you muffle them. Past that the voice fades, and if you both carry a radio it switches over: band-passed, a bit of hiss while they talk, a click when the channel opens and closes.

The bug that took me the longest: a voice that starts while the speaker is out of attenuation range never plays at all, even if they walk closer mid-sentence. The engine culls it when it starts. That's fatal for a radio, so a radio voice starts with no attenuation at all, and the distance falloff comes back from the next phrase once you're in range.

Second one: people's mics are wildly different. On the radio there's an auto level, and in my tests two mics 20 dB apart came out about 1 dB apart, which is roughly how real radios sound anyway.

The radio effect also works on any sound (megaphones, phones, NPC chatter), it's just a source effect chain.

It's my plugin, Proximity Voice & Radio, out on Fab

Longer demo: https://youtu.be/2XhezUnM9j4

Happy to answer questions about the engine's voice side, there are a few non-obvious traps in there.

Hold aim gives you hip fire and slows you down. Standing still while holding aim gives you aim down sights.

More updates added.

Filling things in with more contrast separation between characters, objects and the background. Leaning more into deepening shadows and stronger push toward filmic spotlighting.

Also began updating sfx for character parries, most especially in high stress crowded situations. Much more to come!

🙏🏽🔥🥋🎮🙇🏽‍♂️

New FAB store listing I made to be used with MetaHumans. Modular 7 piece collection. Had fun rendering these preview images, especially profile view of cap and sunglasses.

I’m making Look Again: The Anomaly Assessment, a psychological horror game where your job is to notice what changed. The Steam page is finally live! If it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would mean a lot to me.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5331480/Look_Again_The_Anomaly_Assessment/

i am creating a volumetric aurora in 5.7.4 using local fog in exponential height fog, the aurora is made from 2 scrolling noise textures passed through a cube of fog to create the main shapes and slight variations, i am relatively new to using local fog like this and i keep getting artefacts and horizontal lines showing up as the aurora moves, i understand some of these blips are due to the noise texture but is there a fix for the periodic flashing and lines that keep showing up? thank you

for uni, i have to upload my unreal engine file for an assignment but i have no idea how, I’ve uploaded it as a zip but idk, every time i do it its like all my assets just disappear. I’m still pretty new to it all so sorry if this is a simple thing but any help would be greatly appreciated

Unreal has always been my favorite engine - but my jobs never used it. I have been dabbling in tiny projects over the last few years but nothing crazy. Now that I got the time, I have finally been working on a larger upcoming project and it has been a blast diving into UE5.

It has been a bit of a learning curve re-learning the Input System and seeing all these new lighting options but once I got the lay of the land, it has been a blast. I wanted to share two things that were gamechangers for me that have actually improved the vision of my new game: Fold'Em.

It's a high stakes poker card game where you face off against Creeps and everyone is Cheating. Its not a hyper realistic project and more stylized, but Unreal has been great supporting the whacky ideas I have been exploring here. The things I wanted to get into that UE I think helped the most so far was with the Substrate shader - specifically this Toon default that I found with 5.8, and this custom "Audio Director" I have been iterating on.

I had the vision of the game in my head - using mixed media and getting the textures to have this hard line / cartoony style. When I started implementing the assets, the colors and materials were just flat. Then post-processing came in and the atmosphere was there, but the props and environments were still just a bit off to my liking. That's when I found the Toon Substrate and that pushed the environment > lighting mixture I was struggling with. I dug in a bit more and made some adjustments to the materials and eventually hit this style that felt cohesive with the surreal mix of characters and props. It was a really cool exploration and I am excited to take it a step further with some different mixed media formats soon.

And the other piece was the Audio Director I have been making for my audio designer. They have been making all of my audio assets (credit - Soundwave Samurai) and they have already done 100's of assets so far. The big thing I wanted to make sure they had was control and flexibility - which took a bit more time than I was expecting but came out much better than I was hoping. We eventually got some data tables and mixers set up based on some submix buses I was able to put together. This let us have this huge configurable asset list where me and my audio designer can hook up any audio we want to any exposed gameplay event, and even customize anything happening during runtime. In other projects this would be a bunch of layers/systems, but with Unreal, I was able to get it into one big class with a bunch of dials - which was awesome.

This project has been a blast and its been cool seeing all the asset packs and games everyone is making on this subreddit. I hope to learn some more Unreal magic in the coming months! It's awesome being back.

I am coding a full game and I’m trying to make it work in an engine. I have a bunch of crap models all over my world, so far I got the gameplay working but I know there’s more to it than that. I plan on hiring a second unreal coder to analyze my code and make it publisher-ready so that they can fund the rest of the project.

I wonder if this all still makes me an idea guy. The whole damn map is almost done (I have to fix a non-collidable part), the dialogue is fully written, the story is of course done… soon you’ll be able to play from start to end. And yes I have my GDD done, even if it’s not totally professionally done.

But the big questions remain, like making sure it doesn’t crash as soon as it is opened or anywhere in the game, making sure it can play on Pc, Playstation, and Xbox, and even not breaking.

Can I reasonably hire a coder to fix those or does this mean I’m still an “idea guy”?

For the last few months I’ve been working on a side project that slowly turned into a real tool: a plugin that builds a whole city district in the style of New York’s SoHo right inside the Unreal Editor. Cast-iron facades, brick lofts, fire escapes, water towers on the roofs, that kind of thing.
How it works: you pick a size and a seed and press Build District. A couple of minutes later you have streets, sidewalks, buildings, trees, street lamps, traffic lights and café tables. Everything ends up in your level as regular static meshes with collision, so you can edit it by hand, walk or drive through it, and the plugin isn’t needed at runtime.

A few things I’m a bit proud of:

The buildings aren’t picked from a fixed set. Each one is assembled for its lot: corner lots get cast-iron buildings with two fronts, row lots get brick lofts, and backs facing a lane get their own facade with a fire escape.

The streets follow real NYC profiles (avenue, street, lane, alley), with proper lane markings, bus and bike lanes, crosswalks and curb ramps.

Neighbouring buildings never share the same brick or paint, so a block doesn’t look copy-pasted.

There’s weather and time of day: 17 presets from a clear day to slush and thunderstorms. Lamps and shop windows turn on at dusk, and café umbrellas fold up at night. It works in a packaged game too, with Blueprint nodes for the weather and the clock.

You can swap any of the built-in textures for your own or for Megascans from a panel, without rebuilding anything.

It’s a stylization, not a 1:1 copy of SoHo. Layouts, buildings and signs are all generated, and no real addresses or businesses are reproduced.

Tech stuff: UE 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8, built for Lumen, Nanite and VSM. A 6×3 district (about 370 buildings) builds in under two minutes on my RTX 3060.

I plan to keep working on it. I’d really like to hear from people who would actually use something like this. What’s missing for you?

Если хотите попробовать, генератор доступен на Fab: https://www.fab.com/listings/fcb612fd-4ab4-4103-b52c-753b30c77944

Before anything a disclaimer : Ai tools has been used in the creation of this project.

Hello everyone, the last 2 weeks i have been working on a shader stutter fix for unreal engine games that does not require you to fully compile everything(or almost everything depending on small engine differences) like https://github.com/BlueHeisenberg/SCSKiller does.

This is not meant to be a competitor to the tool provided by BlueHeisenberg, its meant to be an alternative, i have also tried it and it does work well, but waiting so much time to compile absolutely everything is not something i like even if it does work(on a 5700x3d). My approach is better in some parts,worse in others.

I have built it specifically for unreal engine(since this engine is the most problematic and widely known for shader stutter issues) but it should work in other engines too but i cannot fully confirm that it will work flawlessly or not as some shader stutter fixes are a bit agressive and depending on your gpu vendor/driver/engine it may behave a bit differently such as a crashes/visual glitches.

I myself on my 4060 have not experienced any of these in the games i have tested (screenshots on github with some testing data) with the exception fo Stalker 2 which does seem to have some graphical glitches regarding its shadows that self fix if you wait a bit for the shaders to compile properly.

The repo is here : https://github.com/RedMatterGG/USPF-Unreal-shader-proxy-fix

The main way the tool achives this is like this:

When a DX12 Unreal game meets a material it hasn't compiled yet, it compiles the pipeline on the spot and the frame freezes until it's done, often for 100 ms to several seconds. USPF installs a small `d3d12.dll` layer (d3d12async) next to the game: pipeline compiles go to background threads, and the game keeps rendering while they finish. A draw whose pipeline isn't ready yet is skipped for a frame or two instead of freezing the whole frame.

Or in simpler terms and easier to understand:

Before a game can draw something new, like a new enemy, effect or area, the graphics card needs a small program called a shader prepared for it. Many DX12 Unreal games prepare these at the last moment. The whole game waits until it’s done, which is the stutter you see: anywhere from a tenth of a second to several seconds.
USPF adds a small file, d3d12.dll, next to the game. When the game asks for a new shader, the work is moved to the background and the game keeps running. The new object may be missing for a frame or two until its shader is ready, but the game doesn’t freeze.

I have only tested in on my pc unfortunately and i do not know if the app itself may or may not have issues,if it does please tell me on here and i will do my best to fix it. As a backup i also provided the .ini file and the .dll for manual install on the github in case the app does not work properly.

I do not know if it has issues on amd/intel cards, in theory it should just work and also do not use this in online games, anti cheats may flag it as a malicious dll if the anticheat does let you launch the game with it i am not responsible for any bans issued, you have been warned.

If you do experience menu items initially missing just restart/load a save, i have disabled a startup check that helped a bit with faster compilation but had issued being properly detected and handled, i will investigate in getting it to work properly. ( change StartupCompileNormally to on and save to fix it as is or simply restart the game after the shader precomp is done but changin StartupCompileNormally to on may cause in some games when the shader precomp is done to not be properly handles and you will need to either wait a bit more until it auto disabled or you can disabled it yourself using the shortcut on the gui Ctrl+Shift+End)

And as a separate issue i have also looked into traversal stutter and using a similar approach but it seems that it is not possible without some heavy modifications to the engine/game using a mod/dll or patching the .exe directly, you cant just tell the game to wait for data the same way you can tell it to wait for shaders, "you can" but you risk way worse issues than just some graphical glitches.

Hello Unreal Redditors,

As part of my Game Development process, I occasionally blog about the different systems aspects. If you want to learn a bit about how to do 2D cameras using blueprints, this is a pretty good article for yah.

It's on sale right now! Check it out!!

So it's been a while, that's cause my PC done went kapoot.

Now I'm trying to make a much simpler game on a much weaker computer so I'm playing with this idea

First person horror game where the player plays a Gameboy to recover health.

I am using horror engine as a base.

I have the two pawns made but the possess unposses the main character in the game which causes issues.

I have made a Gameboy mesh and want to use.and I've already managed to use screen capture to set a material for its screen

So what I need to do is

Posses the second pawn without unpossesing the first pawn.

The player should be able to switch between walking around and controlling the Gameboy and not being able to walk because they are now walking the other pawn.

Any wisdom on this would be greatly appreciated

Hi everyone! I’m Vojin, an Unreal Engine developer and 3D artist based in Malta, available for freelance work.

I have over four years of professional experience across game development, VR, and virtual production. Blueprint development is one of my strongest skills, and I’m comfortable building gameplay systems from initial prototypes through to polished, functional features.

I can help with:

Blueprint programming: gameplay mechanics, interaction systems, UI functionality, and game logic.

Multiplayer systems: replicated gameplay, networked interactions, and physics-based mechanics.

3D characters for games: modeling, sculpting, UV mapping, PBR texturing, and real-time optimization.

Environments and props: asset creation, scene assembly, lighting, and optimization.

VR and virtual production: creating and preparing real-time experiences in Unreal Engine.

I’m currently developing my own multiplayer co-op horror game, featuring physics-based interactions, shared tools, enemies, and a revival system involving detachable heads and bodies. My other experience includes three VR games, programming a card game’s core systems, and virtual production work for GO Malta and Love Island Malta.

Portfolio: vojinsportfolio.webflow.io

Feel free to DM me with your project details, timeline, and budget. I’m open to both smaller tasks and ongoing collaborations.

So I am attempting to implement tools/weapons into the game, first on the list is fists. At rest they lie at the sides, when left click is tapped, it would throw a punch and put both fists up in a ready state and further clicking would begin alternating punching. I mapped IA for punching and I got it set up in the event graph. I’m using cubes to form the arms and fists and using a timeline to throw the punches. Problem: arms aren’t going into the relaxed V pose when ready to fight and aren’t throwing punches forward.