Koppel Stepan - Interactive Book – Dynamic Page-Flip System: Old foliant

Old Foliant combines an antique book aesthetic with realistic page turning, interactive content, and physical page inserts. With book logic built entirely in optimized Blueprints, it provides a flexible foundation for grimoires, forgotten chronicles, quest journals, bestiaries, and other readable objects in fantasy and story-driven games.

The book features a realistic page-flip mechanism with dynamic stacking. Each turned page adds its thickness to the opposite stack, allowing the spine and page block to change naturally as you read. Flip smoothly through 200+ pages, with configurations tested from 50 to 400 pages.


The system is semi-procedural: it combines a prebuilt book model with runtime-generated pages and a configurable page count. Physical inserts, automatic surface variation, and customizable torn edges help give individual pages their own character.


Key Features:

  • Smooth, Realistic Page Flips: Turn pages individually or script navigation to a specific page with natural page-stack splitting. Dynamic stacking updates the spine and page block as pages move from one side to the other.

  • Fully Interactive Pages: Each page is rendered through a UMG widget component, supporting dynamic text, images, video, interactive widgets, and even mini-games. Build readable lore, interactive journals, or puzzles directly into the book.

  • Bookmarks — Physical Pages & Inserts: Assign physical page meshes and inserts to specific pages in the book. Each bookmark sits in the page stack, layered over its corresponding runtime-generated page. Add torn paper extending beyond the stack, pressed plants for a herbarium, or a letter tucked into the book at a chosen page. Torn-page, herbarium, and letter models are included.

  • Automatic Page Surface Variation: Introduce variety into the paper’s normal-map detail through rotation and optional mirroring. Included material functions support four rotation variants and four additional mirrored variants, with normal-direction correction. This helps reduce visible repetition while reusing the same textures.

  • Torn-Edge Generator: Create varied torn-paper silhouettes for your Bookmarks using the included material system and edge-profile texture atlas. Combine different tear profiles along the top, bottom, left, and right sides, and adjust the edge width to control the appearance of the damage. Blueprint setup automatically assigns edge combinations based on the page position.

  • Optimized Blueprint Design: Book logic is implemented entirely in Blueprints, with optimized geometry and no heavy Tick logic. Configure and extend the system through familiar Blueprint workflows.

  • Customizable Appearance & Content: Customize covers, page designs, materials, and UI to suit your setting. Create custom page-edge textures or place markings and player hints along the side of the page stack.

  • Astrologer’s Library Demo Scene: The included scene presents the book on a wooden desk illuminated by a warm lantern, surrounded by scrolls, writing tools, and astronomical props. Dark stonework and arched windows establish the atmosphere of an old astrologer’s library.

  • Easy Setup: Drop BP_BookSpawner into your scene and configure your pages and UI. Documentation, example widgets, and two opening animations—for standing and lying-flat book presentations—help you get started quickly.


Included:

  • Old Foliant book model and Unreal Engine Blueprint assets.

  • Bookmark models, including torn pages, herbarium elements, and letters.

  • Material functions for UV variation and normal-direction correction.

  • Torn-edge material generator and edge-profile texture atlas.

  • Astrologer’s library demo scene and supporting demo content.

  • Example UMG widgets and documentation.

  • Two book-opening animations.

A new update is coming! (Waiting for Epic to approve)

  • Fixed a bug with glitching/clipping pages during the open/close animation:

If you encounter any glitches, please feel free to write me here or to my email:
koppel.stores+fab@gmail.com

Hi,

Im having issues migrating it to another project.
The book opens up but the widget button on the first page is never detected by my mouse and can not continue to second page.
UITrace channel is added accordingly but it was added after the migration itself - wondering where and what needs to be set correctly for it to work!

1 Like

Hello! Do you try to run multiplayer?

By default, the book should not interfere with multiplayer, but in UE5 widgets are ignored if you run the multiplayer inside the editor.

So widgets have to be separated from the host and client. To separate code and all features “physically”, go to the

Edit
→ Editor Preferences
→ Level Editor
→ Play
→ Multiplayer Options

and disable Run Under One Process; this will make your client and host different games rather than different instances of the same game. You may need to wait until shaders compile, as the client has to run separately

There are no other things you need to do; just Run Under One Process == false

Book is spawned locally for client and host and not cross-showing inside each other’s window. If you need one book to be interactable inside multiplayer, you may need to change some blueprints, as this is a more in-depth scenario than a regular multiplayer run.

If this is not your scenario, please share a bit more information about your project:

  • What UE version do you use

  • What is really different in terms of settings between default scene that is downloaded from FAB and your new project