How to Use Emissive Materials to Light Up Your Levels in UE4 with Blender and Substance Designer

In Unreal Engine you can use emissive materials to help give your meshes some character and light up your game. Basically, if you want your material to give off some light without having to add a lamp to your scene you're going to be working with emissives. This is going to be a short and relatively simple tutorial on how to create meshes in Blender and texture them in Substance Designer so that they can light up in Unreal Engine 4 using emissive materials.

How to Change Parameters in Dynamic Materials at Runtime in UE4 using Substance Designer and Blueprints

Substance Designer is an all-around great tool for texturing 3D models, but one of the features that I'm most excited about in my game development is Substance integration in UE4. Allegorithmic had already integrated with Unreal back in the UDK and UE3 days (I guess technically you can still use UDK and UE3), but they've only recently released a plugin for UE4 that doesn't require recompiling the engine for it to work.

The Substance integration is huge because not only does it mean that you can save time importing textures and creating materials by simply dragging and dropping an SBSAR file into your game, it also means that you can dynamically change any values that you've "exposed" in your Substance graph at runtime.

This is a tutorial on how to manipulate your exposed Substance variables at runtime in your game using a key press.

UDK Landscapes Part 2: Importing Heightmaps and Weightmaps into UDK

You can either create your game landscape inside UDK using the landscape editor or by using an external program and importing those heightmaps into UDK. In our last post I detailed how to use one such external program called Terresculptor to generate height and weight maps for your landscape. This tutorial will show you how to import those maps into UDK.