Theoretically, you can now play a video on any static mesh actor or a number of surfaces. Typically, though, it is just a plane, which can be dragged from the modes window right into the level. We'll generate a material by dragging the media texture directly on to the actor we want to use (our plane in this case), and then you can see a dead-simple material is added and is set on the surface. So after doing all of that, as seen here, there's one tricky part left: the audio that will fail to play if we don't right-click the +Add Component for our in-scene screen (plane), add a Media Sound component, and hook its media to our player:
Manually hooking up the audio this way is one of the only complaints I have about the process these days, so now that we're pretty close to having everything we need, it's just a matter of triggering the video and checking it out:
Here a simple trigger volume is added in front of our screen, a blueprint-level variable (of Media Player type) is added on the left in the level blueprint, and with the volume selected, right-clicking in the blueprint event area lets you directly drop its on-actor-overlap event in and trigger an Open Source node, which is also set to point to our new asset. So note, this logic will trigger any and all instances of this material, which uses our media player, which can be great, but also may not be exactly what you want. There are a number of solutions there – the most obvious, but not nicest for asset cleanliness, is just to duplicate the player for each individual thing you want to play separately. Anyway, there you have it, we can now walk over to the screen to see and hear the Countess' intro sequence as many times as we like, as we trigger our MP4 video thereof!
One last point: when playing, this video comes across pretty dark in the scene:
To correct that, I just did a very simple multiply on the color output in the material. Once again, there are a number of ways you could approach this; I always start with the simplest and if that does the job, move on! You can check that change out here, modify the constant value in the material, see the effect it has on our output in the game:
Now let's check out a couple more great visual FX that can be made with UE4 as we haven't used their particle system much yet.