The Star Wars™ content includes its own vehicle props that can be used to create cinematics for your projects. These cinematic vehicles have been specially designed with parts that can be animated like their film counterparts, with movable wings, landing gears, rotating turrets, and more. You can animate these with Sequencer to create cinematics and animations that play out during gameplay.
Before You Begin
Familiarize yourself with the camera and Sequencer documentation to better understand the different camera devices and effects available in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). Review the Animation and Cinematics documentation for information on how to move the camera and different effects you can add to your cinematics, such as gameplay events, camera shakes, and more.
For more in depth information about animation and advanced recording techniques, refer to the Animating Characters and Objects section of the Unreal Engine documentation.
Finding and Placing Cinematic Vehicle Props
You can find the Star Wars vehicles in two locations under the Star Wars™ Content folder:
> Cinematic Vehicles
> Cinematic Vehicles > AT-AT
These props and meshes can be dragged and dropped directly into the worlds you create.
Cinematic Vehicle Props
The following Star Wars vehicles have been set up to include parts that can be animated making it easier to create cinematic events for your Star Wars themed games:
X-wing
Millennium Falcon
Imperial TIE Fighter
First Order TIE Fighter
Razor Crest
Naboo N-1 Starfighter
Low Altitude Assault Transport (LAAT)
Lambda Shuttle
Imperial Troop Transport (ITT)
Flight Crew Transport
DF.9 Turret
Turbolaser Turret
Sandcrawler
Skeletal Mesh Vehicles
The Star Wars™ Content folder includes the following rigged skeletal meshes you can animate. These include Control Rig, Skeleton, and Skeletal Mesh assets for each vehicle type in this folder.
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AT-AT |
Anatomy of a Vehicle Prop Item Definition
The Star Wars vehicle prop item definition assets are a collection of static meshes that can be placed as-is in your scene. However, because their parts are assembled in a parent-child hierarchy, you can use Sequencer to animate parts of these cinematic vehicles in a Level Sequence.
Before we dive into animating them in Sequencer, let’s take a better look at one of these cinematic vehicle props and how their component hierarchy is assembled. We can do this by looking directly at the asset itself in its own editor’s Components panel or on an instance of it placed in the level using the level’s Details panel.
The example below shows the component hierarchy of the Turbolaser Turret cinematic vehicle and where each component panel resides.
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Blueprint Class with Components Panel | Level Details Panel |
The component hierarchy shows the list of individual components that make up the vehicle. These parts are organized in the hierarchy to make animating them simpler using the transform tools to rotate and move them. This vehicle includes three parts: the base, the turret, and the lasers. The lasers are a child of the turret, meaning that rotating the turret rotates and moves the guns automatically with it. Rotating the lasers by themselves doesn’t affect the turret or base.
Animating a Vehicle Prop with Sequencer
To start animating the cinematic vehicles in Sequencer, this is the general workflow you’ll use:
Create a Level Sequence
Add a Cinematic Vehicle to the Timeline
Add Tracks for the Components you want to animate
Key your animations on the timeline
Follow these steps to animate the Star Wars cinematic vehicles:
In the Content Browser, right-click and add a Level Sequence and give it a name.
Double-click to open the Level Sequence.
Drag and Drop the Star Wars cinematic vehicle you want to animate from the Content Browser or the scene Outliner into the Timeline of the Level Sequence.
Click the Add Track icon and select a Component to animate. In this, we’ll use the following components for this example:
LandingGear_RFlap_Front_LFlap_Front_RFlap_Back_LFlap_Back_RLandingGear_L
Click the Add Track again and select a track to add. This example uses Transform since we want to move and animate components of this mesh.
This adds a Transform track for the selected Component to animate the Location, Rotation, and Scale of the mesh.
Continue reading the sections below for best practices when working with the Star Wars content and to understand how to use it more specifically within Sequencer to achieve certain effects for your cinematics and gameplay events.
Create Your Own Child Blueprint Class
The Star Wars content doesn’t allow you to make direct edits to any of its content. However, with these cinematic vehicles, you’ll want to add your own components, such as visual effects, to them to animate in Sequencer efficiently without having to set them up every time for each individual instance.
Ideally, the way to go about this is to create a child Blueprint of the asset you want to edit — the cinematic vehicle in this case — especially if it’s one you’ll want to reuse multiple times across your project or have multiple instances set up within your scene.
To create a child Blueprint, follow these steps:
In the Star Wars™ Content > Cinematic Vehicles folder, select a cinematic vehicle you want to use.
Right-click on the cinematic vehicle asset and from the context menu, choose Create a Child Blueprint Class.
The Save Asset As window will pop up. Select or create a location in your game content folder to save this Blueprint. Give the asset a Name or leave it as-is with the post fix
*_Child.Click Save.
Adding Visual Effects
The Star Wars™ Content folder includes visual effects that you can use with these cinematic vehicles. These include effects for vehicles like dust and thrusters, and effects for weapons like explosions, impacts, and projectiles.
Because you’ll want to use these effects and trigger them through Sequencer, you can add them to the components hierarchy so that they are triggered in the correct spot and move and rotate with the vehicle appropriately as it moves.
For the Turbolaser, you can add the muzzle flash effect NS_NebulaColelction_Muzzle as a child of TurboLaser_Guns to animate the flash of the muzzle in the correct position when the lasers are fired.
For Niagara effects like the muzzle flash that are not constantly playing, you can press the / (Forward slash) key to trigger them to play.
To add any new components, such as these visual effects, to the component hierarchy, you can drag them in from the Content Browser directly into the Components panel to place them as a child of any component. You’ll need to use the transform tools to move the visual effect into place where you want it to play.
For more information on using Star Wars visual effects in your projects, see
Thrusters Component
Some of the Star Wars cinematic vehicles include a Thrusters component, such as the Millennium Falcon, Lambda Shuttle, and the Razor Crest.
The Thruster component is a material with controllable parameters that can be initialized and animated in Sequencer. The material parameters control the visibility (opacity), color and emissive intensity of the engine burn and they can be keyed on the timeline just like any other animated component.
When adding them as a track in Sequencer, do the following:
Click Add Track on the parent and select Thrusters from the context menu.
Click Add Track on the Thrusters component and choose Material Slot: Thrusters.
Click Add Track on the Material Slot: Thrusters track and choose which material parameter you want to use: Color, Emissive Intensity, or Opacity.
