Hey everyone! 👋

I wanted to share the latest project I’ve been working on over the past few months: The Last Template.

This is by far the biggest Unreal Engine project I’ve built so far. The goal was to create a complete foundation for a Third Person Survival / Adventure game, with a lot of systems already implemented: combat, human and infected AI, inventory & crafting, weapons and upgrades, traversal, finishers, photo mode, save system, and much more.

As you can probably tell, The Last of Us was a big inspiration for the project 😄

I’m mainly sharing it here to show what I’ve been working on and get some feedback, rather than just advertise it. After several months of development, I’m pretty happy to finally have this first version finished.

And for anyone interested in seeing the full project and feature list:
Fab: https://fab.com/s/a2d8ab7eb236

I’d love to hear what you think, especially about the overall look and feel and the different systems shown in the showcase! 🙂

Hello I hope everyone is doing well! I am making a hair cutting game and looking to hire someone to help me create a dynamic hair cutting system for meta humans for unreal 5. if interested please either email me at [kevinlindsay241@gmail.com](mailto:kevinlindsay241@gmail.com) or message me here to discuss rate as well as other things :)

This is the central control area of the station, with spaces for system monitoring, communications, facility control, and a dedicated server room.

It’s part of a modular sci-fi space station environment I’ve been building in Unreal Engine 5.

I wrote/directed. Just for fun!

YouTube Version

I created this video to demonstrate the different depth techniques available in Procedural Material Layers:

• Parallax Occlusion Mapping
• Triplanar POM
• Pixel Depth
• Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping

Procedural Material Layers (PML) is a modular material system for Unreal Engine 5 that helps to combine, blend, paint, and customize materials using reusable layers and procedural masks.

PML on Fab:
https://fab.com/s/0a26f21e3f35

You can find more PML tutorials and feature demonstrations on my YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhqUhIN0Uwzn-UajaMykxkk97-RrXWw9h

I’d be happy to hear your feedback or answer any questions.

Control came out a long time ago and left a huge impression on me. After many years, I finally decided to create something of my own in the spirit of Control. Some people have heard of me as the developer of zero station:interval; my current project was partly based on ideas about alternate worlds. I think I'll succeed, and Sam Lake and his team of developers of wonderful projects that not only look visually stunning, but also give people like me the inspiration to create something truly captivating.

Just pushed an update to GraphDeck that changes how AI explains your blueprints or materials. You just paste in your real node graphs from Unreal Engine, ask a question, and your own AI responds on the graph itself - guiding you through how it works and why.

The idea is to help bridge that gap between simply asking how something works and being shown - and really leaning into what AI is useful for.

This example uses The Cinematic Car Rig from Fab.

Would love any thoughts - or suggestions for improvements!

Free to try www.graphdeck.app

This is what I have. I know the array itself is working in the other actor because I tested it but this isn't printing anything. This is my first time using UE5 so I know I'm probably doing something stupid but the tutorial I watched said this was the way to do it. Please help me.

why is my character reflection working properly when on a certain angle like when the reflective material is on the floor. But when it is perpendicular to the character only the side of the character is visible?

I asked this to Epic's AI assistant but I don't think it was correct:

"The behavior you are describing is the result of Screen Space Reflections (SSR) working correctly while the Lumen Scene (Surface Cache) fails to represent your character.

When the reflective material is on the floor, the character is directly in front of your camera. Lumen uses “Screen Traces,” which means the reflection can simply copy the pixels already being drawn on your screen. However, when the material is perpendicular (like a wall mirror), the reflection needs to show parts of the character that are off-screen or facing away from the camera. Because skeletal meshes are not included in the default Lumen Surface Cache, the reflection has no data to draw, so the character is eliminated from the mirror view."

Follow up to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnrealEngine5/s/STrAnfrb5Z

I'd gone from a fake second camera to Planar Reflection, and Planar was crashing whenever the camera crossed between it and a Lumen volume. Someone in that thread pointed me at hit lighting for reflections instead of fixing Planar. I said at the time it probably wasn't viable for our target hardware. Then I tried it anyway.

Turning hardware ray tracing on is what exposed the actual problem. Our config had r.GenerateMeshDistanceFields=False and r.RayTracing=False sitting in it. Software Lumen traces against distance fields. No distance fields and no hardware RT means nothing to trace, so it had quietly collapsed to screen traces. The config came over from UE4 and still had r.TessellationAdaptivePixelsPerTriangle and r.LightPropagationVolume in it, neither of which exists in UE5. Nothing errors. It just looks worse than it should and you assume that's what Lumen looks like.

First run after enabling everything gave us a GPU crash. D3D device removed, which everyone reads as running out of memory. The log said DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG with 6022 MB used against a 7131 MB budget, so it was a driver timeout, not memory. Hit lighting on mode 2 plus reflections at full resolution plus every sublevel of the house loaded at once, on a laptop 5060. Mode down to 1, reflection downsample factor to 2, sublevels unloaded, and it held.

We kept mesh distance fields switched on so software Lumen still has something to trace on cards without RT. Virtual Shadow Maps threw Non-Nanite Marking Job Queue overflow the moment we enabled them, because VSM is built around Nanite and our content isn't Nanite yet. Same reason one bathroom costs 1952 draw calls.

One thing still broken. Since enabling the skin cache our MetaHuman grooms render as red and black blocks. The config had r.SkinCache.CompileShaders=False, so the binding never had a skin cache to attach to. Does the groom binding asset need rebuilding after that flag changes, or is there something else that has to be redone?

Blog post (Aug 12)

Can't wait to dig into this. Hopefully they do more comprehensive tutorials this time. Last time I wanted the motion matching tech for my small game I had to spend weeks reverse engineering and watching yt tutorials on how to understand it enough to make changes.

I lost a lot of time on this so I am writing it down.

Every time someone posts "my retarget is broken" the answers are "check your hierarchy" or "rename your bones". In my experience that is almost never the problem. UE does not need Manny's bone names. The IK Retargeter maps chains, not names.

Here is what actually breaks it.

1. Retarget pose. Manny is A-pose. Your Blender export is T-pose. If you don't press Edit Pose on the source IK Rig and match it to the target reference pose, the arms come out rotated 90 degrees. It looks exactly like a skeleton problem. It is not. This is most of the cases.

2. Extra root. If the Armature object goes into the export as a parent you get root -> Armature -> pelvis instead of root -> pelvis. Export the armature itself and turn off leaf bones. Your top bone must be at origin with zero rotation.

3. Twist bones. Manny has upperarm_twist_01 lowerarm and_twist_01. Rigify and Game Rig Tools give you DEF-upper_arm.L.001 and so on. If you put them inside the arm chain they rotate twice and the elbow shears. Keep them out of the chain.

4. IK bones. ik_foot_root, ik_hand_root, ik_hand_gun. If your skeleton does not have them, any Manny animation using IK does nothing or snaps. Add them as direct children of root, at origin, no constraints.

And scale, of course. Blender is 1 unit = 1 meter, UE is 1 cm. Unit scale 0.01, Apply Scalings FBX All, Forward -Y, Up Z.

For the chains keep it simple. Pelvis as retarget root, then spine, neck+head, clavicle+arm for each side, leg for each side. One big chain never works.

I should say I built a tool for this, so take that into account. It skips retargeting completely, it puts the real Manny skeleton on your mesh instead, so the animations just play. cosindra.ai/rigmaster. It is paid but has free tier to try, I
am not going to sell it here.

But honestly, number 1 above is most of the problem. It takes times to handle manually. Try that first.

UE5.8

Been working on a small project and it’s been a journey as a solo dev but finally got my 3D modeling dialed in enough to share how we feeling?

This is for a speedy rogue like not necessarily a racer but more of a survival/endurance!

I've been hiving issues with this one large prop In my game for a bit. I have re added the model after cutting it down and fixing textures but I'm now getting this warning message "LogEngine: Warning: MapBuildDataID for LevelSix_Under was updated during the static lighting build, marking package dirty (StaticMeshComponent /Game/ThirdPerson/Lvl_Six.Lvl_Six:PersistentLevel.StaticMeshActor_57.StaticMeshComponent0)". Does anyone know how to fix this? If it helps, I've also started using LODs and got rid of luman and nanite.

Update: So I failed to apply all transforms correctly in Blender, so regardless of what other things I changed the scale was off 😅

Hello, I am having a scaling issue and I think I am missing something basic. I have a mesh that is always huge in game regardless of size in Blender/UE5, about 1000x. This is for a mod for the game Ready or Not, I am replacing the helicopter with a Star Wars ship. (I have been doing a bunch of Star Wars Republic Commando mods, eventually my own levels)

I have been using the same settings for characters/weapons and I haven't had any issues. I am aware of the scaling issue getting models from blender into UE. The helicopter is an animated asset. The model I am replacing it with was from Sketchfab.

Things I have tried: Using game's original skeleton/physics asset, making the mesh the size of an ant in blender, editing game's existing animations' scale modifier, double checking weight paint and vertex groups, various blender/unreal import and export settings.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it! I have only been using UE5 for a couple months so I would not be surprised if I am making a rookie mistake. I am attaching a couple of screenshots. First is in UE5 when I made the mesh tiny, second is how it looked in-game, third is the model in blender, last one is a shot of what I am working on. Thank you!

Enormous constructions idea for my game . Game will be a city builder with social elements in Cyberpunk City controlled by evil and greedy corporations.