005: Build Your Own Paradise, An Animation Masterclass and Narrative Unreal Tools

Welcome back to the Outpost. It’s the 6th July 2024.

Whether you are firing up the grill, celebrating various independences or seeing whether Niagara really can make realistic fireworks. Here are some new stories and tools for you this week.

If you have a great story that you want to tell, a new plugin you want to share or art you want to show off, reach out to me here.

The Latest

It’s A New Month, Get Your Free Assets

It has finally turned July which means there are new assets on the table as usual from Epic. This month we’ve got some magic VFX, a lush island biome and Mediterranean Coast for you to build into.

Learn Animation In Unreal Engine From An Ex-Dreamworks Educator

If you’ve been around the online creation space a while you have probably come across Wade Neistadt for his Maya and general animation tutorials. He’s recently started digging into Unreal Engine and is putting out some very useful pointers and paths for both new animators or animators coming from other DCCs.

If you are looking for a great onboarding to Unreal from an animators perspective this is a great place to start.

Toolbox

The Outpost’s Toolbox is for new or updated tools to help make your Unreal Engine experience a little bit easier.

Inkpot

From The Chinese Room (creators of last week’s Still Wakes The Deep and Dear Esther) comes an implementation of Ink for Unreal Engine. Ink is a scripting and markup tool for creating branching narratives and has been used across a wide array of visual novels, adventure games and mobile games. If you are building out a narrative heavy game it’s both a great way to start and organise your story.

Inkpot brings an implementation of Ink into the Engine allowing you to both interface with the markup, but also call the relevant information into your Blueprints when you need them.

UnrealSharp

Unreal Sharp has released a new version. Unreal Sharp allows you to use C Sharp in Unreal 5+ projects. While you aren’t going to be able to port your Unity projects over, it may provide some familiarity and opportunities to port your projects over from other engines.

Pinboard

Check out the latest art we have been keeping a lookout for this week.

This week on the Pinboard we have Nicola Liso’s Shell Shock. There’s a lot to dig in to here with screens and video walkthroughs but in Nicola’s own words:

“Shell Shock was created with the idea of representing the pain and trauma of war, aiming to amplify the sensations of a battlefield worn down by conflict. To best capture these feelings, I pushed the graphical elements to enhance the sense of immersion in the environment.”

That’s it from the outpost this week, we’ll be back with more from the horizon next weekend.

Want to see your work featured in Unreal Outpost. Reach out to Ollie here.