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Inkwell puts writing on any static mesh — a scroll, a poster board, a sticky note, a plank, a gravestone. The plugin does not care how the mesh was made; it cares about three things you decide in your DCC:
  1. Which faces are the writing surface, and which material slot they use.
  2. Where those faces sit in UV space — because the page lands on the mesh through its UVs, and nothing else.
  3. The mesh’s real-world size and orientation, so the page’s physical dimensions and the reading pose both make sense.
Get those three right and everything else — paper, ink, face mapping — is a handful of settings on the document and the Ink Page Display component. The four props that ship with the plugin (/Inkwell/DemoProps/Meshes/) were authored exactly this way; open them next to this guide and everything below has a live example.

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The writing surface gets its own faces — and usually its own slot

Model the area the text should occupy as a distinct set of faces. Inkwell drives ink into one material slot on the target mesh (the display component’s Material Slot), so the cleanest setup gives the writing surface a dedicated slot and leaves the rest of the prop — frame, edges, back — on other slots that Inkwell never touches.
Poster board mesh in Blender with the paper face selected

The shipped poster board in Blender: the paper face is its own face set (selected), inset from the ply frame that surrounds it.

Blender material properties showing two slots and the Assign button

Two slots: the frame material and the paper face. In Edit Mode, select the writing faces and Assign them to the paper slot (1 — slot list, 2 — Assign).

1

1 — One slot per surface kind

PosterBoard_Ply is the frame; PosterBoard_Paper is the writing face. The material names in Blender are placeholders — real materials are assigned in Unreal — but the slot count and order survive the FBX round trip, and the paper slot’s index is what you type into the display component’s Material Slot.
2

2 — Assign the writing faces

In Edit Mode, select the writing faces, pick the paper slot, press Assign. Every face in that slot will carry paper and ink; every face outside it is left alone.
A single-slot mesh is fine too — the crumpled page and the scroll each have one material covering the whole prop, and Material Slot stays at 0. Use a dedicated slot when the prop is more than paper (boards, signs, books with covers), or when you want Mesh’s Own Material mode to leave the rest of the prop’s look untouched.

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UVs are the whole contract

Inkwell maps the page onto the mesh through its UVs. The face mapping on the document (Page Face on the display component) can pick a rectangle and turn it in quarter turns, but it cannot fix a bad unwrap — what a mapping can express is exactly what an affine transform can. So the unwrap is where the quality is decided:
  • Axis-aligned, non-overlapping island. Unwrap the writing surface as one rectangular island, page-upright: U runs along the page’s width, V up its height. No other island may overlap it — overlapping faces would repeat the writing.
  • Match the page’s aspect ratio. The island’s proportions should match the document’s page (an A4 document is 21 × 29.7 cm). If the island is squashed relative to the page, the writing is squashed by exactly that much — Inkwell will not re-proportion it.
  • Fill the square, or declare the region. The simplest unwrap spans the full 0–1 square — that is the flat-sheet assumption and the default (Fit: Full UV Range). But an island can sit anywhere, at any size, if the face mapping says where.
Blender UV editor showing the sticky note island occupying a sub-region of UV space

The shipped sticky note's unwrap: the writing face occupies one rectangle of an otherwise empty UV square. The document's face mapping (Fit: Custom Region) names that rectangle, and the ink lands inside it.

The three Fit modes on the face mapping (FInkPageFaceMapping), and when to reach for each: Rotation Quarter Turns (0–3) rescues the unwrap that came out sideways or upside down — quarter turns on purpose, because they can never clip the page’s corners against the region. Ink On Back Face controls whether back-facing geometry that shares the front’s UVs shows the writing mirrored through, the way real paper does; turn it off for bare paper backs.
Curved surfaces need nothing special. The scroll’s decree bends into its rolls because the mesh’s UVs bend — the text follows the surface because the UVs do. Unwrap the curved face as if it were flattened, keep the proportions honest, and the ink will follow every curve. Creases work the same way: the crumpled page is geometry with its folds in the normals, and its UVs were never touched.

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Size, orientation, and pivot

  • Author at real-world size. One Blender meter is 100 Unreal units. The shipped props are literal: the crumpled page is 0.21 × 0.297 m (A4), the sticky note 0.076 m square. The document’s Page Width Cm describes the page; the mesh should agree with it, or the reader will hold up a page whose physical size and printed size disagree.
  • Lie flat, face up. Author the sheet lying in the XY plane facing +Z, width along +X, top along +Y — that is how a page is authored for Inkwell, and it is what makes the reader’s pickup, the flip animation, and wall mounting all orient correctly.
  • Apply your transforms. Rotation and scale belong baked into the mesh data, not left on the object. An unapplied transform exports as a surprise.

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Materials: what Blender decides, and what Unreal decides

In Blender you decide the slots. In Unreal you decide what fills them, and there are two ways a custom mesh takes its ink — both covered in depth on the paper page:
  • Custom material — the document’s Paper Material replaces the writing slot. Your material graph carries the MF_InkwellPageInk material function wherever the ink should multiply in.
  • Mesh’s own material — Inkwell replaces nothing: it makes a dynamic instance of the material the slot already wears (per mesh instance, so instance overrides survive) and drives only the ink parameters. The one contract: that material must contain MF_InkwellPageInk, or the paper renders and the ink silently doesn’t — check the Output Log for the LogInkwell warning if a page comes up blank.
Nothing about the textures or shading you preview in Blender ships — export the mesh without materials or textures and author the real ones in Unreal.

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Exporting FBX

The settings that matter, as used to export every shipped prop: On the Unreal side, import with Import Materials and Import Textures off (slots arrive as empty names for you to fill), and skip Nanite for props this light.

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Check it in five minutes

1

Import and slot check

Import the FBX, open the static mesh, and confirm the slot order — note which index the writing surface took.
2

Point a display component at it

Add an Ink Page Display to an actor with your mesh, set Document, Target Mesh, and Material Slot. With Preview In Editor on, the page appears immediately.
3

Fix placement with the face mapping, not the mesh

Writing sideways? Rotation Quarter Turns. Writing covering the whole prop when it should sit in one panel? Fit: Auto Fit or Custom Region. Writing stretched? That one is the mesh — the island’s aspect doesn’t match the page’s, and the honest fix is in the DCC.

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Next

Paper and the material contract

The four paper modes, and where MF_InkwellPageInk goes in your material.

Ink Page Display

Material Slot, Page Face, and every other knob the mesh plugs into.

The shipped examples

The scroll, poster, sticky note, and crumpled page, placed and readable.