29 tools
Tools I’ve built, or led my team in building, for Evil Eye Pictures’ Unreal Engine pipeline. Each one solved a real production problem on a Fortnite trailer.
Case study: level creation workflow
[GIF: split screen of a duplicated game map and a rebuilt level, with actor count and frame time on screen]
Problem
Every new trailer started from a duplicate of the full Fortnite game map, with thousands of assets the show didn’t need. Cleaning it up took tens of hours, and artists worked in a slow, heavy level.
Solution
A workflow that rebuilds the map with only what the show needs, using three supporting tools. Hoover copies actors between levels with their transforms, materials and other data. Mesh Merger turns building level instances into lightweight static or proxy meshes. POI Processor runs Mesh Merger across many level instances at once.
Result
17 trailers, an estimated 200+ hours of cleanup saved. Used at the start of every Evil Eye trailer. Epic Games and Halon adopted it for their own trailers.
Featured tools
ProjectileFX
Builds a weapon’s muzzle flash, tracers, impacts, shell casings and smoke from a template for its weapon type, and attaches them to the weapon. A companion tool, Auto Muzzle Lighter, keys a light to every shot.
Several hundred hours saved for FX, and about as much for lighting.
[GIF: pick a template, fire it in Sequencer, lights flicker in sync]
Cine AutoUpres
Pulls a character’s source files from Perforce, upreses them in Maya and swaps them back into the engine.
A workday or more → about 1 hour per character, across 30–50 characters in nine trailers.
[GIF: low-res character swaps to high-res]
CrowdCreator
A vertex-animated static mesh toolkit for placing crowds of characters at a fraction of the GPU cost.
[GIF: a stadium filling with a crowd, GPU time on screen]
CINE Foliage PCG
PCG tools that cover large areas, lay out farm rows automatically, and include or exclude meshes by tag.
[GIF: a field filling with crop rows along a spline]
Cine Hologen
A Niagara and material system for building hologram effects quickly.
[GIF: a character switching to a hologram]
Witness Cam Manager
Attaches witness cameras to any actor and cycles through their views in a widget panel, without moving your main viewport.
[GIF: cycling through angles on a moving character]
Scene Auditor
Checks every master sequence and subsequence for start/end-frame and frame-rate mismatches.
[GIF: the report flagging a bad shot]
Spline Builder
Builds splines from any mesh, with smooth or hard transitions between the pieces.
[GIF: drawing a fence, toggling the transitions]
Skeletal Forest
Places objects on every bone of a skeletal mesh, with a Maya Python script that builds the skeleton from your selection.
[GIF: objects riding an animated skeleton]
Delmar Vehicle System
A Blueprint system that brought Fortnite’s character (CID) setup to vehicles for the Rocket Racing trailers.
[GIF: swapping a car setup across a show]
Asset Fork
Copies game assets into a show’s folder structure, renamed and organized from the tool’s settings.
[GIF: before and after in the Content Browser]
Carpet Bomber
Spawns actors and attaches them to whatever is below, such as grass on surfaces you can’t paint foliage onto.
[GIF: grass spraying across a vehicle]
REC
A UE5 plugin, written mostly in C++, that records viewports and windows to disk or streams them over RTMP or SRT, in the editor and in game, at up to 2K. Released free on Fab by Evil Eye Labs.
[GIF: start a recording in the viewport, then the clip plays back]
Also built
VAT Keyer · Sequencer Keyframe Shifter · Smart Frame · NoCollision! · De-Nanite · NoWPO · Actor Auditor · CID/Name Scraper · Crash Log Remover · LootHunter · Foliage+ · Spline Fog Card · Cinematic Export Tool cleanup
Tutorials and docs
I’ve trained about 20 artists from the lighting, layout, FX, animation and environment teams in Unreal and Blueprint, through workshops, documentation, video tutorials and one-on-one sessions where we build a tool they need together.
[Video: building a Blueprint editor tool from scratch]
[Doc: a tool documentation sample, studio details removed]