Had an absolute blast translating our FOAD characters from UE5 to #UEFN for our #fortnite island FOAD LANE WARS 🌴4197-4768-0702 . Here’s a mini-dive into what makes a FOAD and how we build them. 🧵

FOADs come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. They have tons of different attributes that allow customization across body types, materials, eyes, mouths, shoes, stickers and more.

Each FOAD type is setup as a Blueprint Prop created in UEFN. This allows us to define individual health via attributes and lets us set custom sounds and our own Niagara VFX upon death.

At a FOAD’s core is a customizable set of materials that allows us to assign a color palette to our characters within the editor. We create an RGB color mask in Painter, which lets us to pick and choose where the colors are overlayed.

This allows us to homogenize the elements together for a consistent, art directed look within the editor which saves a lot of time and cuts down on resources since we can use the same textures across multiple FOADs.

I’m super proud of our Eye Material. The material drives all of the movement for the pupil, blinking, and squash + stretch. It has a ton of parameters for fine tuning too like pupil type, size, blink speed, and sleepiness factor.

FOAD Mouths are rigged and animated using the control rig. Being able to animate within the editor is absolutely AWESOME. Getting realtime feedback without having to jump back into a DCC is such a time saver.

Lastly we have our Leg setup. The legs drive the entier animation of the FOAD. We socket all the pieces to the legs at the root of our FOAD Prop. The legs are also skinned meshes animated with Control Rig.

And that's how you🔧build a FOAD! Let me know if ya’ll have any questions or want me to dive deeper on the core setup. Next I’m going to do some posts on our process for exploding the FOADs and our movement system. ✌️

🤠 We're a small indie team making a Space Western game that mix together cRPGs like the original Fallout and top-down shooters like Ruiner. Featuring real-time combat, organic roleplay, and a deep narrative with different endings 🚀 👉 Wishlist on Steam

Would love to see how you have setup the awesome explosions for each FOAD death! The left behind shoes and faces after they’re eliminated are absolutely epic!

Thanks so much Hayley. We’ve been having so much fun with Niagara. I will absolutely cover our setup in a post soon!