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UE3 Home > Unreal Engine 3 Basics > Unreal Engine Content Creation Blog

Unreal Engine Content Creation Blog

Overview

This blog-like page is an experiment to allow folks to share nuggets of information in an easy and convenient way without having to worry about updating it once it becomes outdated. Unlike regular documentation, blogs can't be outdated - the only danger is being abandoned. Our hope is that we'll be able to get enough momentum behind this by replacing it as our main way of sharing tips & tricks internally, replacing emails to our content creation alias. Long term it would be nice if everyone, including licensees, contributed to it and helped us improving our documentation and knowledge-sharing this way.

Why a blog? The main goal is to reduce the effort required to share useful information and make it easy to share the updates with a lot of people. The current format has a very low update effort, encouraging quick blurbs about newly added features, newfound knowledge or just general tips & tricks.

What to post? Pretty much anything goes as long as it would be useful to someone. Tried an optimization and it didn't work out? Please let us know with a bit of detail why it didn't work. Obviously the same goes for one that worked. ;-) Found a useful plugin or tool? Please post an entry. Know a good way to speed up the import pipeline? Please post!

Why not a real blog? Mostly due to technical limitations, though we might look into overcoming those if it takes off.

The plan is for us to regularly go over this page and make sure that all tips & tricks on here are reflected in the actual documentation.

Blog Entries

March 2012

Improved Texture Blending with mask textures on mobile platforms

posted on 2012/03/21 by Gerke Max Preussner

Beginning with the April 2012 QA approved build, texture blending on mobile platforms has changed slightly when using the mask texture as the blending source. Content developers may have to update existing materials, as this is a breaking change.

Previously, only the first MobileDetailTexture was usable in this mode, and the mask texture's alpha channel provided the blend factor that determined how much of the detail texture was to be blended in with the base texture.

It is now possible to use all three detail textures for texture blending. While the mask texture's alpha channel is no longer used, its RGB values now determine the blend factors. The Red channel is mapped to MobileDetailTexture, the Green channel to MobileDetailTexture2, and the Blue channel to MobileDetailTexture3.

Texture Blending on Mobile Platforms

December 2011

Color Grading on mobile platforms

posted on 2011/12/22 by Gerke Max Preussner

A simplified, formula based implementation of color grading is now available on mobile platforms. A matching material function for the Mobile Emulation feature in UnrealEd is provided as well. Check out the ColorGrading page for further details.

Color Grading for Mobile Platforms

August 2011

Fixing specular highlights when using X and Y symmetrical texture mirroring

posted on 2011/8/15

Texturing mirroring is useful for reusing texture memory, but it can lead to problems with specular lighting. Here a mesh is composed of four parts which uses the same UV coordinates.

As you can see, a white spot appears.

By simply moving the other meshes UV coordinates to use UV coordinate range of 1.f to 2.f...

The issue is now gone!

Cropped Emissive Assistant

posted on 2011/8/12

The Cropped Emissive Assistant is a Photoshop tool that assists in the process of making cropped emissive textures for use in Unreal Engine 3. The tool's purpose is to reduce the time and hands-on math required to convert wasteful emissive textures into smaller ones, by providing a means to automatically save out a chunk at the proper resolution, save your selection, and provide the float values required by a special Material Function to place the cropped texture in the appropriate place.

Movie Capture

posted on 2011/8/9

Do you want to capture your matinees to avi movies or do you want to capture in-game movies? Read more about it here.

July 2011

Viewing FBX files in Quick Time

posted on 2011/7/27

Did you know it's possible to quickly view FBX files in Quick Time on the PC? Read more about it here.

Post Processing Anti Aliasing

posted on 2011/7/12 by Martin Mittring Documentation here: PostProcessAA.

May 2011

Exponential Height Fog Optimization

posted on 2011/5/13 Martin Mittring Documentation here (bottom of the page): HeightFog

Exponential Height Fog got optimized by culling pixels that are nearer than some some start distance. The start value can be set by level designers.

April 2011

Creating Clean Lightmaps

posted on 2011/4/15

The Unwrapping UVs for Ligthmaps page has been updated with some info on techniques for creating clean lightmaps.

(Click for full size)

Texture Optimization Techniques

posted on 2011/4/15

There is a new UDN page on Texture Optimization Techniques.

Optimizing levels for Splitscreen

posted on 2011/4/14 by Daniel Wright

There's a new UDN page on split screen profiling tools.

March 2011

Profiling Effects with PIX

posted on 2011/3/21 by Daniel Wright

There's a new UDN page that describes how technical artists can use PIX to profile effects on Xbox 360.

Editor preview player mode

posted on 2011/3/17 by Pete Bennett

We recently added an editor feature to preview player height in the world. This feature will enable users to visualize a predefined mesh in the world without having to add the mesh to the world. Currently, the feature only allows static meshes to be previewed. You may specify as many preview meshes as you wish. At Epic, artists use this feature to compare the height of an object in relation to a player mesh, such as Marcus. However, this feature can use any static mesh of your choosing.

Usage:
To activate the preview mesh, hold down the backspace (\) key while the editor viewport has focus. Release the backspace key when you are finished previewing.

To cycle to the next preview mesh, hold down shift and press the backspace key.

Specifying Preview Meshes
You can add or remove preview meshes in (YourGameName)UserSettings.ini file. Meshes must be listed under the [EditorPreviewMesh] category. The default mesh for the engine is set to the TexPropCubes mesh, as such:
PreviewMeshNames=" EditorMeshes.TexPropCubes "

UDKGame overrides the TexPropCubes mesh in DefaultEditorUserSettings.ini to point to the warrior statue, as such:
PreviewMeshNames=" ASC_Deco_Statue.SM.Mesh.S_ASC_Deco_SM_Statue_Warrior_BASEPOSE "