Using Unreal 4 as a renderer?
polycounter lvl 3
Hey guys, I was wondering if it would be viable to use Unreal 4 as a renderer? I've got Substance Designer and Painter and those are super cool, but I've got no way to set up a scene and render it using pbr shaders. As far as I know you can't plug in metalness and roughness maps in Maya. I considered Marmoset Toolbag 2 to do it, but it's $100 more than Unreal 4.
From what I've read you can download Unreal 4 and all the cool stuff, and then cancel your subscription and still use that version of Unreal 4. Now that version 4.3 is out and the substance plugin works, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to do this?
Thanks in advance.
From what I've read you can download Unreal 4 and all the cool stuff, and then cancel your subscription and still use that version of Unreal 4. Now that version 4.3 is out and the substance plugin works, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to do this?
Thanks in advance.
Replies
Substance Designer now has the Yebris rendering engine as well. That might serve your needs if you're just needing it for single assets and are really wanting to stay tight with money. It sounds like you want to do scenes though?
I've watched some tutorial vids for both UE4 and TB2 and yeah, I've got to agree that TB2 is more user-friendly, but UE4 doesn't seem too much more complicated. Updates for UE4 are $20, but the latest update seems pretty stable and good enough to render scenes with. Even if I did update everytime, that's 5 updates, and maybe this is just wishful thinking, but by then I'm hoping Unity 5 will be out.
Not too sure what's considered a large scene. What I want to render right now is like, taverns and apartment rooms and stuff of that size. I'm totally just using the renderer in SD right now for single assets, cause I don't got anything else, but I really want to make a scene.
I would just go on and pick up UE4 then.
Alright, guess I'll pick up UE4 then, why do you recommend I pick up TB2 later though?
Thanks to everyone for the replies
Couple of reasons... mostly subjective.
Its just an amazing piece of software for quickly pumping out show pieces.
It updates automatically, so you could make changes to textures and see it reflected in the TB viewport.
Also has input for substances if you use substance designer (also recommended).
Finally, its supporting the polycounters behind its creation.
Probably there is a way to tune shadows through some ini files. But I know nothing about it.
On the contrary Unity 4 has very nice clean shadows and great global illumination baking system.
I hope Epic will do something to improve shadows.
Have you tried increasing the dynamic shadow resolution at all? In the upper right, type r.Shadow.MaxResolution and then whatever resolution you want to set it to. There are a lot of commands in there that aren't exposed to the normal engine settings menu.
But I must point out that I'm by no means an UE expert and there probably is a way to get good quality.
I use substance designer (which is awesome) but I thought that substance is only supported in Unity Pro? At least I haven't been able to get it to wor on the free version of Unity. Substance support is definitely something I want to be able to take advantage of, but there's no way I'm going to pay $1500 or $75 a month for it. Unless for some reason you can use substances on the free version of Unity with TB2, which would be cool.
Edit: And by no way I'm going to, I mean there's no way I can afford to.
Edit Again: Wow do I feel stupid. So I've been dragging the SBSAR file onto the objects in Unity, not the material, and that's why I couldn't get it to work, I thought that it only worked in the pro version because every video I've ever seen substances being used was using the pro version of Unity. This changes things quite a bit.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/substance-ue4
The plugin for the UE4 just came out, if that helps at all. I haven't gotten to trying it yet, but at least you don't need to recompile the engine now to be able to use it.
If you ever get around to doing that, be sure to let us know. It would be very interesting to see what you come up with.
Might be worth having a look through this thread. Seems like he's only released a handful of his UE4 matcaps so far but I think he's planning on releasing the lot in the future:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?13501-Matcaps-for-UE4&highlight=matcap
You'll notice in the preview notes for 4.5 there is Artist Template. This is something that I hope will give artists a head start in creating a high quality scene for showing their assets in. The map uses a blueprint that ties together most lighting options like HDRI background, directional light, fog, skylight etc... It also comes with a high quality HDRI captured from Epic's courtyard.
Awesome work dude