As a VFX artist who spends countless hours immersed in Unreal and Niagara, I’ve come across a handful of UI quirks that tend to make the workflow a bit less comfortable than it could be. These aren’t massive issues, but they do add up, and I can’t help but feel that addressing them would bring some significant quality-of-life improvements. Each of these seems like a relatively small fix, but together, they could make Unreal much smoother and more enjoyable, not just for me, but for everyone who uses it daily. With a little polish, it could truly shine.
So here is the list in order of importance, starting with UI:
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UE doesn’t quite remember window and child window placement after a restart. I use a single 48 inch 4K monitor and all my windows are displayed at once on the same screen. After each restart, I have to place manually each window because they ever so slightly move and resize over each other and under windows taskbar. It’s driving me bananas.
For reference I snap them using windows Fancyzones. Dunno if that’s relevant. -
Not all windows can be tabbed next to each other. E.g: A sequencer cannot be a tabbed next to a material editor. An Outliner cannot be tabbed next to a material editor. On a related note, the material editors and Niagara Editors don’t reopen automatically after a restart. It would be great if they could reopen with an empty system or material in it.
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The Application Scale (Ctrl+Shift+W) value is not persistent after a restart. As previously mentioned, I use a 48 inch monitor and so I use the application Scale to reduce the scale of all fonts and I have to reset it to 0.875 every time I start Unreal.
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Nodes are lacking documentation and easiness to access it. I’m gonna take the nodes “BlendAngleCorrectedNormals” in the material editor and “Sample Vector Field” in the niagara editor as exemples. Both Nodes can be quite complex to understand and would greatly benefit from a detailed documentation page. Additionally, the desired behavior of pressing F1 with a node selected would open the corresponding documentation page matching the node but it doesn’t. The documentation website either doesn’t exist or isn’t linked to it or both. For example pressing F1 on the “Object Pivot Point” node in the material editor opens up the root “Materials” page of Unreal documentation.
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“Ctrl-Z” behaves weirdly in the engine. If I’m changing a value from 0.5 to 1 and press “ctrl-z”, nothing happens. I have to exit the typing mode and click on the parameter to select it and then press “ctrl-z”. Additionally, if I press “ctrl-z” with a parameter selected, the parameter gets unselected and all the niagara emitters disappear. This seems to be just a simple display bug because zooming in and out makes all the emitters reappear.
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Pressing the “F” key to “Focus Selected” on a selected object often pulls back the camera kilometers away because one of the objects inside of a blueprint has the “Bounds Scale” parameter set to “100”. This feels a bit counterintuitive because the user expects “Focus Selected” to focus on “visible” geometry, not “rendereable” geometry.
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Node snapping isn’t very permissive. While trying to snap nodes together, it often lands in the just a few pixels to far from the pins and doesn’t snap properly, instead opening up the nodes menu.
In comparison, node snapping in Houdini feels much more “snappier”.
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Naming convention is not consistent between parts of Unreal. While working in one part of Unreal, I can become used to the way things are named so when I try to do the same thing elsewhere, I tend to search for the same name but things are named differently in different parts of Unreal. For example, the break vector into floats is called “Break Vector” in scratch pads but “BreakOutFloat3Components” inside the material editor. The modulo node is called “Modulo” in scratch pads, “%” in blueprints and “Frac” in the material editor. This can be very confusing for newcomers and I think it could be solved by at least adding parentheses with the same name beside every shared nodes while searching.
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Word Search of nodes often doesn’t have any results even if all the keywords are correct. If you want to search for “Vector to position”, you won’t find anything until you’re done typing the entire thing.
If you want to separate 3 floats out of a vector, you will probably type “float” and find nothing because the node is called “break vector”. It would be super useful if the search worked with the “most relevant context” instead of “closest word match” or however google does it
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The “Lock Viewport to camera Cuts” button is only visible from the main sequence and disappears while inside subsequences.
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While inside a blueprint editor, there is no way to hide all the gizmos and icons like in the normal viewport.
Blueprints can become very crowded and it’s difficult to place and move objects inside with all the icons in the way. -
It would be awesome to have the ability to “cut” links with the mouse just like in houdini:
Missing features:
There is no way to have a “PerObjectRandom” in the material editor to have a random float per static mesh. It works with particles and instances with “particlerandom” and “perinstancerandom” but not with static meshes. The workaround is to use the object pivot location but it introduces random flickering when moving the object. A “PerObjectRandom” node would be really useful.
These are more issues related to Niagara specifically:
- The Niagara attribute Spreadsheet is only for the system running in the Niagara Editor. There is no ability to see attribute spreadsheets of systems running in a gym or in a map.
- One feature missing in Niagara that would be super duper useful is a new module that would “print string” just like in blueprints for debugging and print values to viewport. This module would allow users to print one or several particle attributes to test on screen for a few seconds. This would be super useful to quickly debug if values are working as expected instead of having to dig them out of an attribute spreadsheet.
- Enabling Tesselation in ribbon renderers often causes visual glitches. (I suspect it’s when niagara is trying to interpolate nan positions)
In conclusion, while these UI quirks can sometimes disrupt the flow of work, I recognize that Unreal is a complex tool, and it’s possible that solutions or workarounds for some of these issues already exist that I’m not yet aware of. If that’s the case, I’d be happy to learn from others in the community. Regardless, I believe that addressing even a few of these points would make Unreal more intuitive and enjoyable for everyone. After all, a few small tweaks could make an already powerful engine even more of a joy to use!
Thanks for coming to my ted talk!