William Faucher introduces EasyToolbag, an essential quality-of-life utility for Unreal Engine 5 available on the Fab marketplace. This Blueprint-driven tool streamlines repetitive tasks, accelerates scene creation, and offers customizable viewport controls, dramatically boosting UE5 workflow efficiency.
Veteran Unreal Engine artist and educator William Faucher has become synonymous with high-fidelity visualization and optimized workflows. Recognizing the common pain points that slow down scene creation in UE5, Faucher developed EasyToolbag—a brilliant quality-of-life utility designed to package repetitive setup tasks into a simple, accessible menu.
EasyToolbag integrates directly into the UE5 editor as a custom toolbar menu, allowing users to save significant time otherwise spent manually dragging assets, configuring default parameters, or hunting for specific settings. The best part? Because EasyToolbag is entirely Blueprint-driven, it avoids the complexities and migration issues often associated with C++ plugins, ensuring greater stability across future engine versions.
Accessing and Installing EasyToolbag
EasyToolbag is available for purchase on the Fab marketplace (formerly the Unreal Engine Marketplace) and integrates seamlessly into your projects. You can acquire Easy Toolbag here: Get Easy Toolbag on FAB.
For users running Unreal Engine 5.6 and newer, the tool button typically appears automatically due to new engine features. However, users running versions 5.1 through 5.5 must perform a small, one-time configuration step to ensure the launcher button appears correctly when the project loads. This involves creating a `DefaultEditorPerProjectUserSettings.ini` file in the project’s Config directory and adding the following crucial lines:
“`ini
[/Script/Blutility.EditorUtilitySubsystem]
StartupObjects=”/Game/EasyToolbag/System/BP_EasyToolbagLauncher.BP_EasyToolbagLauncher”
“`
Essential Features: The Three Menus
Faucher divided the utility into three primary menus, each addressing a different aspect of the UE5 workflow.
The Create Menu
This section focuses on accelerating the setup of fundamental scene elements, often with customized starting parameters tailored to professional needs. Key buttons include:
- Post-Process Volume: Spawns a volume with common necessary settings (like global illumination controls) already enabled, saving several clicks.
- Sequence and Camera: A powerful one-click option that simultaneously generates both a Level Sequence asset and a corresponding Cine Camera Actor, instantly preparing the user for cinematic work.
- Sky System: This revolutionary feature spawns a complete exterior lighting setup—Directional Light, Skylight, Sky Atmosphere, and Volumetric Clouds—in a single action, providing an immediate and balanced starting point for outdoor environments.
- Reference Spheres: A must-have for Photorealism workflows. This spawns a Blueprint containing black, 18% gray, white, and chrome spheres. These objects are essential for accurately setting exposure and confirming material fidelity, offering quick controls for scaling, layout, and roughness adjustments.
Viewport Helpers Menu
The Viewport Helpers menu streamlines performance optimization and visual tweaking directly within the editor interface, bypassing tedious trips to the console command line or deep settings panels.
- Cap FPS: Instantly toggle a frame rate limiter, essential for reducing GPU load, heat, and energy consumption when working on heavy scenes.
- Screen Percentage: Quickly adjust the viewport rendering resolution. Lowering this percentage (e.g., to 75%) can greatly boost FPS, while increasing it (supersampling) can produce a crisper viewport output ideal for high-quality screenshots.
- Exposure Compensation: Provides a fast way to adjust the scene’s brightness offset without needing to manipulate the Post Process Volume settings immediately.
Easy Suite
This category serves as an integration hub for William Faucher’s other popular “Easy Tools” (like Easy Fog, Easy Rain, or Easy Atmos). Clicking a button in this suite automatically spawns the relevant assets into the scene at the correct facing orientation, eliminating the need to manually search the Content Browser. This level of automation is invaluable for fast Level Design iteration and adding atmospheric polish.
Customization and Community Support
One of the greatest benefits of EasyToolbag is its foundation in Blueprint. Users gain access to the underlying widget Blueprint via the Systems folder, allowing for deep customization. Artists can modify the default settings for existing buttons, or even create and integrate entirely new buttons with custom logic to truly tailor the tool to their specific needs.
Faucher also provides dedicated Discord support for community-driven assistance, emphasizing the collaborative nature of developing effective workflow solutions. When purchasing the tool, remember to leave a rating to support the creator and help refine future updates.
If you are serious about optimizing your workflow and spending less time on repetitive setup, EasyToolbag is an undeniable asset. For more deep dives into technical setup and maximizing your scene quality, explore our guides on Unreal Engine Environment & World Building and sophisticated methods for Lighting & Rendering in Unreal Engine.
