Scripted Editor Screenshot

This Unreal plugin allows you to take screenshots of editor windows based on a description file. Its use case is primarily for tool developers who want to automate creating screenshots of their tools.

The goal is to reproduce solid screenshots for documentation purposes that can deal with changes in the tool's UI.

Usage

To capture a screenshot, run the ScriptedEditorScreenshot.CaptureFile <File> command. This command expects a path to a description file, which is an INI file. The format of the file is described in the following section.

The command ScriptedEditorScreenshot.Capture will open a file dialog to select the description file.

The path to the file is relative to the project directory, or an absolute path.

The resulting screenshots are saved to the (Project)/Saved/EditorScreenshots/ directory. A subfolder is created based on the name of the description file.

For automation, you can use the ScriptedEditorScreenshot.CaptureThenQuit command using a command line call like this:

\Path\To\UnrealEditor.exe "Path\To\Project.uproject" -ExecCmds="ScriptedEditorScreenshot.CaptureThenQuit Description.ini"

This will make the screenshots, then exit the editor.

Description file format

The description file is an INI file. Each section describes a single window to capture. The section name is the name of the screenshot (without the file extension).

Each section contains the following keys:

• Tab: Path to a window tab, which follows the hierarchy of tab managers, beginning at the global tab manager.
• Size: The size of the window to capture, in pixels, using the format WxH.
• Warmup: Optional number of frames to wait before capturing the screenshot. This is useful for widgets that take more than one frame for the final presentation.
• Highlight: A path to a child widget to highlight (See next section). This key can appear multiple times.
• Crop: A path to a child widget, which is the area to crop the screenshot to. The screenshot will be cropped to the bounding box of the widget.
• CropMargin: Margin to add to the crop area, in pixels. Can be a uniform value (e. g. 20), or a space separated list of two (20 10) or four (20 10 10 20) values.

Widget highlighting

The path is a list of path elements separated by a dot. Each element is either a widget type name or an index. If no index is specified, the first widget of that type is used.

In deeply nested widgets, the tool does a deep search for a widget when the widget type is specified within angle brackets [].

Example

• Highlight=SVerticalBox.SHorizontalBox.3.SButton.2: Highlight the third button in the fourth horizontal box in the first vertical box.
• Highlight=[SMyWidget].SHorizontalBox.STextBlock: Do a deep search for a widget of type SMyWidget, then find the first text block in the first horizontal box.

Example description file

This example captures two screenshots:

• An overview screenshot of the tab MyEditorWindow in 1920x1080.
• A detail screenshot of the DetailsTab, which is registered as a tab in the MyEditorWindow tab manager. This screenshot will be cropped out of a window with the resolution 500x800 and have a button and a text block highlighted. The crop area will be around a highlighted button with a margin of 80 pixels.

When the file is named MyEditorWindow.ini, the resulting screenshots will be saved to:

• (Project)/Saved/EditorScreenshots/MyEditorWindow/MyEditorWindowScreenshot.png
• (Project)/Saved/EditorScreenshots/MyEditorWindow/DetailsTab_Cropped.png

[MyEditorWindowScreenshot]
Tab=MyEditorWindow
Size=1920x1080

[DetailsTab_Cropped]
Tab=MyEditorWindow/DetailsTab
Size=500x800
Highlight=SVerticalBox.SHorizontalBox.SButton.2
Highlight=[SCustomStructVisualizer].SVerticalBox.STextBlock
Crop=SVerticalBox.SHorizontalBox.SButton.2
CropMargin=80

See also TestDescription.ini.

Trivia

This plugin has absolutely no UI.