So, you’re composing shots in Unreal, and you’re having trouble guessing where those pesky thirds lines have run off to. You’re jealous because CAs have a camera that can show third lines that adjust to their screen size. Further, you can’t make a thirds plane and attach it to your camera and use that in the editor.
Fear Not! We’ll turn this simple, boring, composition-tool-lacking UDK file into something useful!
First, we need some things:
Make a square texture with colored lines on each third (for a 512 map that’s at 170px and 340px), it’ll look like this:
You can also add title and action safes to this texture in the proper proportions, 7.5% of width from each side should do it.
Import that texture into a new package in Unreal (because you’ll want to keep using this after your current project is done, right?)
Next, copy in a post process chain of your choosing from UDK, or make a new one of your own.
Label it as a “clean” post process, or whatever you wish.
Right click that one and make a copy of it, calling that one “ruleOfThirds_PP”
Before we go fiddling with the post process chains, we need a material! Quite simply, make this with your thirds line texture:
It is an Unlit, Masked material. Changing the Opacity Mask Clip Value determines at what grayscale value the mask will be on or off.
Plug the RGB output of your map into Emissive.
Make a new Desaturation node, and plug a constant value of 1 into the “Percent” input and your map’s RGB output into the top. This fully desaturates your map.
Make a new “Math -> OneMinus”, and plug the output of Desturation into that.
Plug the output of the OneMinus into OpacityMask
NOW we can go into the PostProcess Chain. Open up your ruleOfThirds_PP.
You see this, it is a copy of your clean post process chain. I used one from my thesis which is fairly simple.
Right click and select “Material Effect”
Drop this into the chain anywhere you like. A PostProcess Chain isn’t like Kismet in that something can have multiple inputs and outputs, so be sure to drag from OUT to IN
With the new material effect selected, insert the material you just made.
Next, go to View -> World Properties and scroll down to World Info. Toward the bottom of this is “World PostProcess Chain”. With your rule of thirds PostProcessChain selected, hit the green arrow to insert it.
And you get this!
This is, admittedly, a little clunky in its execution. Until I can make an editor hotkey, this’ll have to do.
2 replies on “Rule of Thirds Camera – UDK”
is that working like snow?
if i have snow material
I can imagine implementing a snow or any weather effect as a material effect in the post-process chain, yes. You’d have to be sure to set it up as an additive or translucent material that’s unlit. If you want to give the impression of a world filled with snow, you’d have to find a way to give the impression of layers of snow falling, and make sure they always fell in -Z relative to the world, as opposed to down the camera. At that point it might be worthwhile to make a bunch of planes with your falling snow texture that you place throughout the world, or make a particle emitter to drop snow.