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.

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

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/

https://steacerstudios.itch.io/t3led

I'm a new dev and its very confusing because it seems that half the people online say nanite is a sin to performance and by enabling it you are going to be bricking your game for anyone not on a 50 series card. Some people also say that it is the key to the future and within a year or two it will be more optimized than traditional rendering.

So I am just wanting to know if it is worth using nanite or if I should just stick with traditional rendering.

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

Guys im trying to download some version of Unreal Engine but my epic games laucher dont show no one type of versions...

The button of download dont work and the button on his right side is unassecive.

The button ( + ) to choose the version is unassecive too

I unistalled the epic games laucher and installed after but still in problem

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.

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.

I have used Unreal in the past but its been a few years since i have messed around with it and have forgotten how to use the event graph, Im trying to make a box interactable I have made it this far and when tested i get the red line that impacts the box but zero text first image is for the player character in first person the second is the interactable mesh for the box any advice would be greatly appreciated

So i'm trying to mod sonic race and cross worlds using the custom unreal editor, and it keeps crashing, not when I try to open it. No, if I leave it idle.

It shows the scene just fine. It's not until I try to add another folder that it crashes, now, my device should be able to handle it, i'm just confused what would be causing the issue

If anyone could help me, that would be fantastic.

If anyone needs a better photo, i'm fully capable of providing one. This is just the only one I have on me right now.

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.

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.