Setting up UE4 Character jumps

A trajectory of some random UE4 character jump

The game I currently am working on is quite heavy on all kinds of jumps, so I dedicated some time to investigate how to configure UE4 character jumps properly. Some random values I put in Jumping / Falling section of Character Movement component did not work well for me:

I drew a trajectory of my jumps before I started tweaking the config values. You may notice that they are not symmetrical – the reason for that is the character (a lamp in my case) speeding up horizontally during a jump. This does not make sense for projectile motion. Read More

Orthographic camera projection in UE4

  • 2d platformer with orthographic projection

In some games or game genres, a typical 3d perspective camera projection does not really work. For example, classic 2d platformers (2d by definition does not have a perspective) or top-down shooters. And since UE4 is a 3D engine in the first place, one gets a question: how to implement an orthographic camera in UE4?

Orthographic camera

Fortunately, Unreal Engine has an option for such camera mode. You can enable it in Camera Settings for a Camera Actor: Read More

Custom Depth and Custom Depth Stencil in UE4

Ever wondered how to implement occlusion masking in UE4? I wanted this effect for my game – so I spent some time googling and ended up in Post Process material section of Unreal Engine Documentation. You might be too. There is plenty of tutorials about the use of Custom Depth and Custom Depth Stencil Value material nodes on the Internet. I personally find this youtube video quite helpful:

Tom Looman’s tutorials are pretty good too: https://www.tomlooman.com/the-many-uses-of-custom-depth-in-unreal-4/ Read More

Working with Animation Starter Pack in UE4

Animation Starter Pack

While developing a prototype for a new game I am working on right now, I decided to use free assets as much as possible. For animations I found Animation Starter Pack by Epic Games very useful. You probably don’t want to use it in your actual game – but it’s really good for answering a lot of questions about your gameplay. And it is a perfect placeholder for future production-quality animations.

I just finished another iteration of my project where paid a lot of attention to polishing the main character animations. This is how it looks so far: Read More