A while back I started working on a few custom viewport tools for Blender and Houdini, but I just can’t find the time these days to give them the attention they need.A few have approached me for tutorials or commissions based on these as well, but I don’t have time for that either. So rather…
As Software Developers we don’t always have the luxury of working alongside a designer and despite our best efforts there is often a communication barrier between us and the users we are ultimately responsible for…
This is a casual guide for those who know Qt and C++ and are looking to get started writing custom Editor Plugins for UnrealEngine. Quick Disclaimer: I am not an Unreal developer and am still quite new to this myself, but given the lack of Slate training resources out there perhaps this guide will be…
It’s finally time for me to learn the python side of Unreal Engine, so naturally to get started I have to write a custom Python Script Editor…Honestly it baffles me that Epic haven’t added one, leaving developers with just a plain text command line input.I guess python isn’t particularly high on their priority lists. I’ll…
Almost every animator I spoke to said “There is no timeline”There is, but on further investigation I discovered what they meant was:“I can’t tear off and re-dock the timeline” As a developer this didn’t make sense to me, why would you want to separate the timeline from the sequencer?So I watched them work and found…
A core tool for both Animators and Riggers is Constraints. Now Unreal does provide “Attachments” which essentially act as animatable re-parenting, as great as that is it is hard to set up and not very flexible. My first approach to this was to create an interface around the existing Attachment system, but I ran into…
Moving on to a more complex tool, the Channel Box. As I primarily use Maya I have decided to more or less copy the structure there as a start, it can be refined later on depending on user experience. The ChannelBox is high up on my list because in Unreal there is a strong disconnect…
Starting the Anim Toolkit off nice and simple with a ControlRig selector.This is implemented as a Slate Editor Plugin for convenience. I split my requirements into “Minimal” and “Production-Ready”. This allows me to know the minimum viable feature set for both my own testing and beta reviews as well as what is required for it…
This year I have started learning Unreal Engine on the side as a fun project. Something that really struck a cord with me is the new ControlRig animation system. To be honest, this opens some some amazing opportunities for VFX, but I can’t help but feel like it is more of an afterthought than full…