UCLan Portfolio Blog

Getting Started Following a tutorial from Epic Games, I managed to create an editor utility (widget) that changes the transform location of a selected asset within the currently loaded level. Now that I have grasped the functionality and programming structure of Editor Utilities and how they differ from standard actor blueprints I can start working through the list of ideas for tools I have from my classmates. How can I share this code? Additionally I did some research looking into how I would be able to share these tools such as my practice transform & rotate tool into other Unreal Engine editor installs and other Unreal Engine Projects. As it turns out the best route to take is to enable "Source Control" on the PC systems within your development studio then add the necessary code & dependencies needed for your custom editor tools to work into the source folder for Unreal Engine and have the level designers (or other development staff) remote into that version of the...

What Is a Utility? An "Editor Utility" is a blueprint visual script of code that can only be used within the Unreal Engine project editor and will be ignored upon packaging. This allows studios to add custom tools or functions to their projects containing actions that unreal engine already has. The value in this is by adding a tool onto the context menu of, lets say a static mesh, the individual developer can for example, set a series of LOD's for a large group of static meshes all with much more ease as the alternative is to open each of the static mesh assets 1 by 1 then manually add each individual LOD. These tools can be incredibly powerful as not only can they do anything a regular actor blueprint in Unreal Engine can do but they can also retrieve functions and options from within the engine's subsystems (which a regular blueprint can't always do), meaning that any of the options seen by a development staff member in the details panel or various context menu...