Unreal Possibilities

The next experiment in this series is similar in setup to the shockwave pulse, but this time we're going to create a ripple effect that expands outwards across a plane. To get started, the material domain needs to be set to Surface , blend mode to Translucent , and shading model to Unlit . For parameters, we want one vector parameter, Pulse Color , and four scalar parameters, Pulse Speed , Ring Spacing , Pulse Sharpness , and Fade Radius . I'm setting default values of 25 for Pulse Speed , 20 for Ring Spacing , 8 for Pulse Sharpness , and 250 for Fade Radius . Starting on the node graph, we add an Absolute World Position node and this time instead of a separate origin parameter, we're going to use an Object Position node masked to its XY channels as the origin. The Object Position is subtracted from the World Position and the result is passed through a Length node to get the distance from each pixel to the plane center. Next we add a Time node and multiply it by the ...

Unreal Engine Tips: How to use Keyboard Inputs when Input Mode is set to UI Only

I had recently migrated some of the HUD workflow from Prototype Menu System to Tower Defense Starter Kit. While going through the HUD blueprints, I noticed that the Input Mode was being set to Game and UI when activating the Pause Menu. Since I didn't want the player to have the option to interact with the game outside of the menu in this state, I went ahead and changed it to UI Only, only to find out that the Escape button could no longer be used to quit the Pause Menu (in spite of it being set to Execute when Paused). It turns out that setting the Input Mode to UI Only also prevents us from interacting with the UI using keyboard. At first, it seemed like I'd have to revert it back to Set Input Mode Game & UI. But further inspection led to a workaround to tackle the issue: Handling the keyboard input directly through the widget itself instead of the player controller. The first step is to ensure that the widget can be focused. We can do this by setting its IsFocusable ...

Unreal Engine Tutorial: Create Circular Ring Material without Textures

Hi, welcome back for another tutorial. It's been quite a while since I put up a tutorial as I've been busy working on toolkits for the Marketplace. One of my earlier tutorials [link: Unit Selection Decals for RTS Games ] had focused on how to create ring materials using textures, as well as using them to display unit selection decals for RTS games. However, a drawback associated with using textures was that it prevented the user from changing the inner & outer radius of the ring. And during prototyping stages of a product, it's far better to implement structures that can be changed easily from within the engine so that you don't have to create a new asset from an external package every time you need to test out a new idea. I've found this approach quite useful while working on my own products. Hence, this tutorial focuses on creating a ring material that can be adjusted both from within the material editor as well as dynamically at runtime. Alright before...

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