Defining Custom Material Nodes with C++ and HLSL
Ever wonder how you can create your own custom material expression nodes in Unreal? Not material functions, but the actual green-border material expression n...
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2025
2024
PCG Difference Node: Detailed Breakdown
If you have spent any time using Unreal Engine’s Procedural Content Generation (PCG) system, you may have noticed that the difference node doesn’t always qui...
Maya: How to Uniformly Move Two Objects Towards Each Other
Here’s a quick trick for when you have two objects in maya and you want them to move towards each other by exactly the same distance:
Unreal Engine: How to Set Up Custom Actor Billboards From C++
Ever wonder how to set a custom actor billboard from C++? Here’s a step by step guide.
How to Fix: Unreal Landscape Material Layers Not Showing Up
When using the Unreal Engine landscape material system, each landscape layer must be associated with a corresponding “LayerInfo” data asset (you can read mor...
Techniques for Hiding Repetitive Terrain Textures In Unreal
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with terrain textures. One of the biggest challenges with texturing terrain is getting the textures to look good both up close and...
PSA: UE_LOG_REF is Deprecated
I was recently browsing through the UE 5.2 logging macros, and I noticed that UE_LOG_REF has been marked with “DO NOT USE”:
PSA: Houdini Engine Applies Gamma Correction to Vertex Colors
I was recently working on some improvements to my river generator, and I ran into an interesting issue: somehow, my flowmaps had experienced some kind of reg...
Project Breakdown: Wrought Iron Fence Generator
I’ve had on my TODO list for quite some time a task to create a basic fence generator in Houdini. This is a classic use for Houdini in a gamedev context, bec...
Houdini Trim Sheet Tools: Issues and Improvements
As I continue to work with procedural modeling in Houdini, a nagging question has been lurking in the back corner of my mind: What is a good workflow for UVs...
Custom Node: Pattern Filemerge
I recently ran into a situation where I needed to load a bunch of geometry data from multiple files, but the filenames did not match the required pattern for...
How to adjust heightmap black levels with Python
Recently when I was playing around with exporting heightmap data from Gaea to Unreal, I spent some time solving a small problem with my landscape height. I w...
Unreal Engine: Understanding TexCoord and Flowmaps
One of the more mysterious elements in the Unreal Engine material graph is the TexCoord node.
Custom Houdini Nodes: Node Combine and Node Split
Occasionally, you may run into a case where you need to combine two separate node networks into one. I ran into this issue recently where I wanted to output ...
Custom Houdini Node: Delete Outliers
A while back I ran into a situation where I wanted to delete all prims with an abnormal length.
Blending Landscape Materials in Unreal Engine
A common workflow when creating terrain in Unreal Engine is to create a complex master material that allows you to combine the various elements of your lands...
World Partition Regions Won’t Unload: How to Fix
I recently ran into this bug in UE 5.3 where unreal refused to unload my landscape that I had imported via a heightmap from Gaea. This is especially strange ...
What Exactly does ‘Compute Skin Cache’ Do?
In order to enable HWRT (Hardware Ray Tracing) in UE5, a somewhat mysterious setting must be enabled: Support Compute Skin Cache.
Creating a JSON Driven Topnet in Houdini
Last week I put together a project as a proof of concept for how to set up data driven PDG networks in Houdini. The general goal was to create a tool in Houd...
2023
UE Stats System Woes
I’m frustrated.
Handgun Project: Troubleshooting
I recently completed Eugene Petrov’s excellent 3D tutorial for a 9mm handgun (available on Gumroad or Flipped Normals). This post is a dump of all the notes ...
Project Diary: Creating a Donut with Procedural Sprinkles
In this project diary, I am going to be exploring a 3d workflow for game development. My goal here was to explore a full 3D workflow by creating a donut mode...
UE Widget Focus vs Hover States
One major confusion I’ve had while working with Unreal Engine widgets is how UE handles widget focus vs widget hover states. If you’ve spent any time working...
Gameplay Ability System (GAS) in UE5
At the start of this year, I spent several months studying the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) in UE5. I wanted to evaluate its usefulness for both singleplaye...
A (Semi) Comprehensive Breakdown of Unreal Engine Input Routing
One major frustration I’ve had is understanding how UE’s input routing system works. Earlier this year, I took a crack at trying to understand how it works e...
UE5 - How to Fix C++ Defined Gameplay Tags Disappearing from Project Settings
Stop reading if you are not interested in:
Setting up an Autorigger for Metahumans
Here’s a quick project I threw together to learn how writing plugins for Maya works:
2022
2022 Epic Mega Jam
Last week, I participated in my first game jam- the 2022 Epic Mega Jam which is the official game jam of Unreal Engine. The theme for this year’s jam was as ...
My First Unity Game
I recently spent some time putting together this Lunar Lander clone in unity. I made the lander sprite and the animated star sprites in aseprite.