Why use Unreal Unity or Stingray. They all have specific advantages or wokflows they are better at - that's like saying why use modo, blender, maya or max when I have c4d.?
Beside LiveLink it is not better than any of already existing engines (maybe I missed something but there was no unbelivable magic in any of those promotion movies), so it makes sense to question its purpose. And on top of it I will have to subscribe it.
So I have to pay and I will not get the main feature? Well, that makes perfect sense.
There are send to Unreal/Unity in Maya and Max already?
Well, I didn't heard about any plans to make LiveLink for Houdini/Modo/Blender/Cinema4d. And based on how Autodesk implemented Creation Graph in 3dsmax I would prefer to stay away from any Autodesk DCC app till they learn how to write them.
Side Effects made API that allows to easily integrate Houdini Engine in any application. A It's free to access and anyone can implement it in even Notepad++, if that's his wish. Will Autodesk create such API for Stingray that will allow easily implement LiveLink in any other Non-Autodesk application?
I'm not in the least bit interested in trying it out with a subscription fee that high. Not when i can use Unreal for free (the royalty fee doesn't bother me).
The fact that MayaLT is tied into the subscription is actually a big turn-off for me too. I don't use Maya and likely never will, so that's a huge loss in value as far as i'm concerned.
I can *maybe* see why a studio or large team might want to use Stingray, but only from the financial standpoint that $30 * devs * 12 = not much per year and there's no loss of revenue due to royalties. BUT, the largest actual market for game engines now is indie teams, and the majority of those need free packages now, and don't mind paying royalties later because paying royalties means their game is actually selling and they're making money.
At which point they'll likely not switch to a different engine for their followup game because they already have an established workflow.
I can *maybe* see why a studio or large team might want to use Stingray, but only from the financial standpoint that $30 * devs * 12 = not much per year and there's no loss of revenue due to royalties. BUT, the largest actual market for game engines now is indie teams, and the majority of those need free packages now, and don't mind paying royalties later because paying royalties means their game is actually selling and they're making money.
12 devs for two years is a total of $8640... that's dirt cheap. You're already paying royalties to steam, skipping engine royalties could really pay off.
12 devs for two years is a total of $8640... that's dirt cheap. You're already paying royalties to steam, skipping engine royalties could really pay off.
$8640 being cheap is entirely relative.
Are you asking each dev in your 12 man indie team to pay for the license themselves (not unreasonable, but again that comes down to individual budgets, what if one of them can't pay for a month?).
I would argue here that the only teams who would see this expense as being "cheap" are already well established, have set budgets, have already had a successful release, and as i mentioned above, have no reason to switch because their workflow is already in-place and proven.
The lack of royalties is really the ONLY appealing thing here.
Just having a bit of fun with you. Marmoset is awesome.
The other engines are definitely not free.
Maybe free under limited conditions.
There is nothing stopping Autodesk from doing something similar in the future. Who knows. Not my call.
Either way, the reality is that software development companies need to make money to pay their engineers some way or another. So somebody is paying. Whether it is subscription, royalties, ads, flat fee.
I guarantee the average team (indie or AAA) spends half that monthly subscription fee daily on their lunch.
30 bucks ain't breaking the bank.
Very accurate, imo.
People scream loudly about $30 month, but in reality it is not breaking the bank if you get Maya LT and Stingray for this.
It might not fit everybody, but if you make even a tiny bit of money, you can directly subtract your subscription fees from taxes (just about everywhere).
$30 that's a shame for the indie scene, maybe they could do free for everyone until VAT registered...
Not sure the VAT thing (UK anyway) really makes a difference, as you're often better off only getting VAT registered if you're going to break the turnover threshold. Essentially being VAT registered means you essentially become a tax collector.
One the pricing though, yes its monthly, whereas others are free, but from what I can see there isn't anything about royalties. So that's interesting to look at maybe, when looking long term maybe?
Mmmh i see no Lifelink. Only a faster export/import way.
Lifelink for me is more like:
"select a Mesh in Gameeditor mode"
"push the Magic Button"
"The scene change to Modelling Mode and the current game environment is rendered maybe as reflection actor in a sphere in realtime.
Then don't install it?
Plenty of software I own comes with things I don't use.
I don't install it or not use the parts I don't want.
So you just use Stingray.
If that is too much for $30 a month, then don't get it at all?
Not sure I see the problem.
There may be other options for Stingray in the future.
Unreal/Unity/etc change their pricing and schemes from time to time too.
This is one option Autodesk offers for Stingray.
Get Maya LT and Stingray for $30/month.
For students it's free.
Maybe there will be another option in the future, I have no idea.
I agree it would be nice to have some kind of free version for people to experiment with and afaik there is interest internally to do it, but if/when it appears I can't say.
Then don't install it?
Plenty of software I own comes with things I don't use.
I don't install it or not use the parts I don't want.
So you just use Stingray.
That it often true but in this case it feels like Maya LT makes up a significant part of the cost, as that is £25.00 per month on its own. I would be interested to know the extent of the C++ access, if it is limited by not including core engine/tool code for example.
The engine looks nice and the visual scripting looks a little smoother to use than blueprints in UE4 but I haven't seen any killer projects that really make me interested in using the engine. I understand that can be out of Autodesk's control but it would be nice to see a really beautiful scene made using the engine.
I've been a huge fan of Bitsquid's data-oriented architecture, though I've always felt that C++ or C# should have been the scripting language of choice.
Is it still possible to swap out the rendering pipelines via configuration files, and does it still have collaborative editing?
I'm also curious whether it still supports the modular toolchain, where you can hook your own tools up to it.
Regardless, it's great to see a stronger base toolkit attached to the engine.
I would be interested to know the extent of the C++ access, if it is limited by not including core engine/tool code for example.
but I haven't seen any killer projects that really make me interested in using the engine.
For c++ you get access to our source on GIT of the engine and editor.
I believe only the libraries of some things are no there as source code (like say beast source code or 3rd party libs we can't distribute).
For awesome scenes, yea, we definitely need more of those. We have some game companies using the engine already so hopefully that will come.
That said, Unreal4 has an amazing render engine and still has a few things we don't have yet. But we will work on bridging that gap as much as we can. :thumbup:
I've been a huge fan of Bitsquid's data-oriented architecture, though I've always felt that C++ or C# should have been the scripting language of choice.
Is it still possible to swap out the rendering pipelines via configuration files, and does it still have collaborative editing?
I'm also curious whether it still supports the modular toolchain, where you can hook your own tools up to it.
Yes it still is entirely data-oriented and it is what made me really love the engine. Iteration time with the engine is super fast. Most things are entirely controlled via JSON text files (levels, unit, all shader nodes etc etc).
So you can change just about anything in those text files and then press F5 and everything refreshes and you continue. Super nice if you are a bit more technical.
The entire render pipeline is also configured through json files as you mentioned. So all the post-effects etc. You can change their code or add new ones on-the-fly, press F5 and continue. You almost never have to close the editor or re-compile.
(also, compile time for the entire engine, from scratch is 5 mins on my modest laptop!!)
"collaborative editing" is not being pushed just yet in the new editor, but it is still there in the original editor. I'm sure it is something we will push in the future. Its really cool.
What I would do is what Epic did when they rolled out UE4, $30 download and then you don't have to pay until you want monthly updates. Although I would make the first month free so people can download it and try it out.
Yes it still is entirely data-oriented and it is what made me really love the engine. Iteration time with the engine is super fast. Most things are entirely controlled via JSON text files (levels, unit, all shader nodes etc etc).
So you can change just about anything in those text files and then press F5 and everything refreshes and you continue. Super nice if you are a bit more technical.
The entire render pipeline is also configured through json files as you mentioned. So all the post-effects etc. You can change their code or add new ones on-the-fly, press F5 and continue. You almost never have to close the editor or re-compile.
(also, compile time for the entire engine, from scratch is 5 mins on my modest laptop!!)
"collaborative editing" is not being pushed just yet in the new editor, but it is still there in the original editor. I'm sure it is something we will push in the future. Its really cool.
So even in the non-C++ version of the engine it's possible to add in new render targets and configure what they do, or render some things in a forward pass and others in a deferred pass?
So even in the non-C++ version of the engine it's possible to add in new render targets and configure what they do, or render some things in a forward pass and others in a deferred pass?
Yes!
Our entire render pipeline is defined like that.
You can make an entirely new render pipeline without touching any c++ code.
For example, not too long ago I made some changes to our render pipe where I wanted to do two passes for transparent objects (front culling followed back by culling) to improve double sided transparent objects.
I touched only 5 or 6 lines in the sjson config file for the renderer and didn't touch any c++ code.
All our post effects etc are implemented in the same way.
You can change/add/remove them freely without rebooting the tools.
@shaderfx can you please check post #51, I am a new user and I had to wait for message to be approved by a moderator, and I think you missed that post. Thanks!
Question, will there be sample content and guides along with release? Like a 3rd person starter code or something?
Also I was wondering if the same shaders you use in maya lt automatically carry over to the engine? Is the PBR shader in stingray the same as the one used now? Or will you be updating it?
- Is Stingray able to do anything similar with CE3 graphic?
- Will there be a price package for hobbyists?
Indie/hobbyists all use Unity/UE4+Blender because of cost = zero. How Stingray will target those?
Thanks!
I am a developer on Stingray, but I can't speak about future plans or pricing beyond what is announced.
- No real-time GI. We have real-time SSAO and Beast for baking bounced light etc.
- Not sure what CE3 is, but if it is the video I saw on youtube, then for the most part I don't see anything in there we can't do. Not sure if the video has SSR on the transparent surfaces. We currently do SSR, but not on the transparent surfaces yet. Also not sure what was baked and what was real-time in that video. The bounced lighting, if it was baked, you can definitely do with Beast
- Not sure what Autodesk plans to do. No idea if there will be a free-version. I definitely hope so. For students it will be free.
Also I was wondering if the same shaders you use in maya lt automatically carry over to the engine?
Yes. We call them templates.
There will be simple templates for a bunch of different types of games.
There will also be online help (which we will refine continuously so you don't have to wait months for a new release)
Maya and 3dsMax 2016 contain a material/shader called "Stingray PBS". You can exchange those materials / shader graphs directly with the stingray engine.
So you do not have to redo your materials.
They are automatically transported from Maya/Max to stingray via FBX (and live-link).
I do believe you might need EXT1 of 2016, just so you have all the bug fixes we have done.
One other question, i imagine you know a lot about shader coding and my ultimate goal is to make some cellshaded or ramp shaders for my handpainted characters and possible personal game projects.
Whats a good place to learn shader programming for stingray? Even if there's nodes there's still a lot to learn, and a lot i don't know how to do yet.
EDIT: Also would custom shaders be compatible with live link?
EDIT2: Oh another major concern for me is alpha sorting, i'm big on doing really long i guess anime style hairstyles but I constantly run into the issue of alpha sorting. The maya viewport though supports something called depth peeling which gives the best results even if it does seem like there's a performance hit. Does sting ray support this? Or what are the way stingray handles alpha sorting?
Oh Cryengine. Yea I know it. I am not used to calling it CE3.
We don't have an exact match for all rendering features yet no, but we do have a bunch of them and more coming.
I guarantee the average team (indie or AAA) spends half that monthly subscription fee daily on their lunch.
30 bucks ain't breaking the bank.
Wow, I am sorry but I think we have different views on what indie "team" means.
For some one in Europe who get less that 1000 euro at the end of the month (and believe me EU is in financial trouble), 30 euro is something. Sure is not the end of the world, but is another 30 euro.
I just have a few more questions about rendering tech that are a little more production-oriented and then I will stop bothering you for a bit, Mr. Shaderfx.
- Are there built-in shaders for materials necessary for character art, like hair, skin, teeth, and eyes?
There is a high level layer with support for object replication and RPC calls. That is a built on a transport and session layer with support for Steam, PSN and Xbox Live
So today is the day right?
Excited for this
Don't have much more interesting to say, just looking forward to giving it a spin and see how it is to work with.
Replies
Beside LiveLink it is not better than any of already existing engines (maybe I missed something but there was no unbelivable magic in any of those promotion movies), so it makes sense to question its purpose. And on top of it I will have to subscribe it.
So I have to pay and I will not get the main feature? Well, that makes perfect sense.
Well, I didn't heard about any plans to make LiveLink for Houdini/Modo/Blender/Cinema4d. And based on how Autodesk implemented Creation Graph in 3dsmax I would prefer to stay away from any Autodesk DCC app till they learn how to write them.
Side Effects made API that allows to easily integrate Houdini Engine in any application. A It's free to access and anyone can implement it in even Notepad++, if that's his wish. Will Autodesk create such API for Stingray that will allow easily implement LiveLink in any other Non-Autodesk application?
I'm not in the least bit interested in trying it out with a subscription fee that high. Not when i can use Unreal for free (the royalty fee doesn't bother me).
The fact that MayaLT is tied into the subscription is actually a big turn-off for me too. I don't use Maya and likely never will, so that's a huge loss in value as far as i'm concerned.
I can *maybe* see why a studio or large team might want to use Stingray, but only from the financial standpoint that $30 * devs * 12 = not much per year and there's no loss of revenue due to royalties. BUT, the largest actual market for game engines now is indie teams, and the majority of those need free packages now, and don't mind paying royalties later because paying royalties means their game is actually selling and they're making money.
At which point they'll likely not switch to a different engine for their followup game because they already have an established workflow.
12 devs for two years is a total of $8640... that's dirt cheap. You're already paying royalties to steam, skipping engine royalties could really pay off.
$8640 being cheap is entirely relative.
Are you asking each dev in your 12 man indie team to pay for the license themselves (not unreasonable, but again that comes down to individual budgets, what if one of them can't pay for a month?).
I would argue here that the only teams who would see this expense as being "cheap" are already well established, have set budgets, have already had a successful release, and as i mentioned above, have no reason to switch because their workflow is already in-place and proven.
The lack of royalties is really the ONLY appealing thing here.
30 bucks ain't breaking the bank.
Is Marmoset free yet? :poly124:
Just having a bit of fun with you. Marmoset is awesome.
The other engines are definitely not free.
Maybe free under limited conditions.
There is nothing stopping Autodesk from doing something similar in the future. Who knows. Not my call.
Either way, the reality is that software development companies need to make money to pay their engineers some way or another. So somebody is paying. Whether it is subscription, royalties, ads, flat fee.
Very accurate, imo.
People scream loudly about $30 month, but in reality it is not breaking the bank if you get Maya LT and Stingray for this.
It might not fit everybody, but if you make even a tiny bit of money, you can directly subtract your subscription fees from taxes (just about everywhere).
Not sure the VAT thing (UK anyway) really makes a difference, as you're often better off only getting VAT registered if you're going to break the turnover threshold. Essentially being VAT registered means you essentially become a tax collector.
One the pricing though, yes its monthly, whereas others are free, but from what I can see there isn't anything about royalties. So that's interesting to look at maybe, when looking long term maybe?
but what if i don't want maya LT?
Lifelink for me is more like:
"select a Mesh in Gameeditor mode"
"push the Magic Button"
"The scene change to Modelling Mode and the current game environment is rendered maybe as reflection actor in a sphere in realtime.
I actually am a Maya user and I agree with you so hard right now.
Edit: I think it's a real shame there isn't a free version for personal work / R&D.
Then don't install it?
Plenty of software I own comes with things I don't use.
I don't install it or not use the parts I don't want.
So you just use Stingray.
If that is too much for $30 a month, then don't get it at all?
Not sure I see the problem.
There may be other options for Stingray in the future.
Unreal/Unity/etc change their pricing and schemes from time to time too.
This is one option Autodesk offers for Stingray.
Get Maya LT and Stingray for $30/month.
For students it's free.
Maybe there will be another option in the future, I have no idea.
I agree it would be nice to have some kind of free version for people to experiment with and afaik there is interest internally to do it, but if/when it appears I can't say.
That is for you to decide.
If the "free" options do exactly what you want then I see no reason why you would.
That it often true but in this case it feels like Maya LT makes up a significant part of the cost, as that is £25.00 per month on its own. I would be interested to know the extent of the C++ access, if it is limited by not including core engine/tool code for example.
The engine looks nice and the visual scripting looks a little smoother to use than blueprints in UE4 but I haven't seen any killer projects that really make me interested in using the engine. I understand that can be out of Autodesk's control but it would be nice to see a really beautiful scene made using the engine.
Is it still possible to swap out the rendering pipelines via configuration files, and does it still have collaborative editing?
I'm also curious whether it still supports the modular toolchain, where you can hook your own tools up to it.
Regardless, it's great to see a stronger base toolkit attached to the engine.
For c++ you get access to our source on GIT of the engine and editor.
I believe only the libraries of some things are no there as source code (like say beast source code or 3rd party libs we can't distribute).
For awesome scenes, yea, we definitely need more of those. We have some game companies using the engine already so hopefully that will come.
That said, Unreal4 has an amazing render engine and still has a few things we don't have yet. But we will work on bridging that gap as much as we can. :thumbup:
Yes it still is entirely data-oriented and it is what made me really love the engine. Iteration time with the engine is super fast. Most things are entirely controlled via JSON text files (levels, unit, all shader nodes etc etc).
So you can change just about anything in those text files and then press F5 and everything refreshes and you continue. Super nice if you are a bit more technical.
The entire render pipeline is also configured through json files as you mentioned. So all the post-effects etc. You can change their code or add new ones on-the-fly, press F5 and continue. You almost never have to close the editor or re-compile.
(also, compile time for the entire engine, from scratch is 5 mins on my modest laptop!!)
"collaborative editing" is not being pushed just yet in the new editor, but it is still there in the original editor. I'm sure it is something we will push in the future. Its really cool.
In the end, they both do the same thing. Is just a question of time before it goes free.
So even in the non-C++ version of the engine it's possible to add in new render targets and configure what they do, or render some things in a forward pass and others in a deferred pass?
Yes!
Our entire render pipeline is defined like that.
You can make an entirely new render pipeline without touching any c++ code.
For example, not too long ago I made some changes to our render pipe where I wanted to do two passes for transparent objects (front culling followed back by culling) to improve double sided transparent objects.
I touched only 5 or 6 lines in the sjson config file for the renderer and didn't touch any c++ code.
All our post effects etc are implemented in the same way.
You can change/add/remove them freely without rebooting the tools.
Also I was wondering if the same shaders you use in maya lt automatically carry over to the engine? Is the PBR shader in stingray the same as the one used now? Or will you be updating it?
I am a developer on Stingray, but I can't speak about future plans or pricing beyond what is announced.
- No real-time GI. We have real-time SSAO and Beast for baking bounced light etc.
- Not sure what CE3 is, but if it is the video I saw on youtube, then for the most part I don't see anything in there we can't do. Not sure if the video has SSR on the transparent surfaces. We currently do SSR, but not on the transparent surfaces yet. Also not sure what was baked and what was real-time in that video. The bounced lighting, if it was baked, you can definitely do with Beast
- Not sure what Autodesk plans to do. No idea if there will be a free-version. I definitely hope so. For students it will be free.
Yes. We call them templates.
There will be simple templates for a bunch of different types of games.
There will also be online help (which we will refine continuously so you don't have to wait months for a new release)
Maya and 3dsMax 2016 contain a material/shader called "Stingray PBS". You can exchange those materials / shader graphs directly with the stingray engine.
So you do not have to redo your materials.
They are automatically transported from Maya/Max to stingray via FBX (and live-link).
I do believe you might need EXT1 of 2016, just so you have all the bug fixes we have done.
CE3 is CryEngine 3, is impossible for you to don't know anything about it.
However, I am interested if Stingray is able to produce anything close to this level:
[ame="
And thanks for all answers!:)
Whats a good place to learn shader programming for stingray? Even if there's nodes there's still a lot to learn, and a lot i don't know how to do yet.
EDIT: Also would custom shaders be compatible with live link?
EDIT2: Oh another major concern for me is alpha sorting, i'm big on doing really long i guess anime style hairstyles but I constantly run into the issue of alpha sorting. The maya viewport though supports something called depth peeling which gives the best results even if it does seem like there's a performance hit. Does sting ray support this? Or what are the way stingray handles alpha sorting?
We don't have an exact match for all rendering features yet no, but we do have a bunch of them and more coming.
Wow, I am sorry but I think we have different views on what indie "team" means.
For some one in Europe who get less that 1000 euro at the end of the month (and believe me EU is in financial trouble), 30 euro is something. Sure is not the end of the world, but is another 30 euro.
- Are there built-in shaders for materials necessary for character art, like hair, skin, teeth, and eyes?
- Does this iteration of Beast implement lightmap seam fixup with a linear solver as outlined in this paper: http://miciwan.com/SIGGRAPH2013/Lighting%20Technology%20of%20The%20Last%20Of%20Us.pdf ?
- Is there any support for level streaming/asynchronous loading?
We have directional lightmaps like the Last of Us, but not sure about the seam fix. Dont think it is there, but i will ask.
Skin shader is on its way. should be done very soon.
That said our render pipeline is completely open without needing to change c++. So adding custom shaders is something people can do themselves too.
There is a high level layer with support for object replication and RPC calls. That is a built on a transport and session layer with support for Steam, PSN and Xbox Live
What kind of materials would you be looking for? Like materials with provided texture sets or like master shaders with parameters?
In no particular order
- Paralax (all types possible)
- subsurface
- skin shaders
- water (all possible types)
- glass
- hair
EDIT: also lots of post effects!
Excited for this
Don't have much more interesting to say, just looking forward to giving it a spin and see how it is to work with.
http://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview
We also have the first bug patch (v 1.0.1) coming very soon