How to take screenshots from the game

Document Summary: This document explains how to take in-game screenshots from an Unreal Engine game project.

Document Changelog: Created and updated by Niklas Smedberg.

Overview

There are many ways of taking in-game screenshots of your Unreal Engine game project. This document covers some of them and their uses.

Tiledshot

The cross-platform, hi-res tiled screenshot feature is accessed via a console command called tiledshot.

It can generate screenshots at any size that are a multiple of the screen resolution (or window resolution if the game is running in window mode). Tiledshot does this by rendering the game frame multiple times, one tile at a time at full resolution and concatenating all tiles into a single image file.

The default behavior is to take a screenshot with a resolution 4 times greater than the game resolution and create an image file in the Screenshot folder. When running the game thru the editor (PIE) or as standalone, open the command console by hitting either <Tab> or <~> (tilde) and type:

tiledshot

Parameters

The tiledshot console command takes two optional parameters. The first parameter is an integer number that is a multiplier of the current game's resolution. As mentioned above, the default value is 4.

Typing the following will take a screenshot that is twice as big as the screen resolution:

tiledshot 2

Similarly, taking a screenshot with the normal screen resolution:

tiledshot 1

The second parameter is the tile overlap in pixels. Each tile actually overlaps a little bit to ensure that fullscreen blurring or distortion post-process effects will match. The default value is 64 pixels. For instance, if you're using a post-process effect that blurs a lot, you may want to increase this parameter.

The following command will generate a screenshot with 6x6 times the screen resolution and using an overlap area of 128 pixels for each tile:

tiledshot 6 128

Caveats

Note that blurring effects and other screenspace effects that cover a number pixels will have a smaller impact in the screenshot, since the relative area covered by the same number pixels is much smaller in an image of very high resolution, compared to an image of low resolution. You can compensate this by modifying the effect to affect a larger area. Also note that UI elements may show up repeatedly in each tile in the saved screenshot. Use the togglescreenshotmode command as described below to hide all UI.

Shot

The standard screenshot feature is accessed via a console command called shot (default keybinding is F9). It can generate screenshots at the size of the screen resolution (or window resolution if the game is running in windowed mode).

Toggling UI elements

To toggle UI elements for taking screenshots, use the following:

togglescreenshotmode