Unreal Engine 3 - MASTER THREAD
polycounter lvl 17
So. I tried looking around for an UE3 thread and didn´t find one (With the search button broken and all it makes it kinda hard to search too).
Anyway. I´ve recently begun my journey into Ue3. A couple of years later than most but hey. Watcha gonna do eh?, Anyway, I´ve mostly been using an inhouse engine the last 1.5 years and it´s time to learn.
I didn´t get the collectors edition so i missed out on all the goodies it had. *whine*
So yeah. I was thinking this could be a Q&A / Tutorial thread perhaps. If there´s one like it already just lock this up and destroy all proof of it´s existance.
First matter of business. How do you guys normally show off your models? Do you make a level and place out the mesh or do you just use the mesh viewer?
I´m still trying to find something that works for me and with being new to the program and all i have no clue about the potential.
Anyway. I´ve recently begun my journey into Ue3. A couple of years later than most but hey. Watcha gonna do eh?, Anyway, I´ve mostly been using an inhouse engine the last 1.5 years and it´s time to learn.
I didn´t get the collectors edition so i missed out on all the goodies it had. *whine*
So yeah. I was thinking this could be a Q&A / Tutorial thread perhaps. If there´s one like it already just lock this up and destroy all proof of it´s existance.
First matter of business. How do you guys normally show off your models? Do you make a level and place out the mesh or do you just use the mesh viewer?
I´m still trying to find something that works for me and with being new to the program and all i have no clue about the potential.
Replies
Oh and before you print screen hit "G" on the keyboard for "game mode"...it hides the lights, post-processing volume if you made one, etc...
Is there a way to change the background color though? Black is not the best as we know. Sorry for the nooby-level on my questions. I swear! I´m better on other things
in any case, this is a good idea if there is no post like this. the one about xnormal works pretty well and it is also a good way to keep all the information together and avoid lots of different threads about UE3.
nice one then :P
If I know what angle I want and will be doing lots of tweaking, I'll set up a camera and matinee sequence so that whenever I run the level it puts me in that view. I even had a file with 3 switches that would switch cameras once - but that's really something I decide on a case by case basis if I save or lose more time by doing so.
Also set the LOD bias of all textures on the asset to -1 or whatever to make sure the model uses your highest LOD level.
Either disable the hud with Kismet or enter showhud 0 in the console.
Take the screenshot larger than what you want with "tiledshot x" (screenshot resolution = your current game resolution * x) then shrink it to whatever size you want in Photoshop (looks sharper).
Yeah you don't get much control over the mesh viewer in the generic browser...although I like orbiting control there better.
Drop in a height fog or some sort of fog plane actor if you want to quickly change background color.
EDIT: Oh anyone know a quick and easy way or tutorial to do an animated texture/effects? For example pulsating glows and what not?
Hourences site helps a lot with such effects:
http://book.hourences.com/tutorialsue3matexpressions.htm
So if the numerical value is less than zero, is that the maximum resolution?
Is the LOD bias found in the properties of each asset (dumb question I know, had to ask it though)
E.g: -1 equals full resolution (Close LOD/Max resolution), 0 (medium LOD), and +1 (far LOD) ?
flkk: where do you type in "tiledshot x"? A screencap from you with a red circle drawn in the area would even help, thanks! Much appreciated.
Only with certain groups would -1 be enough to max res. In other cases you might need -2
It feels like the editor is growing on me. There are some things i´m not happy with but that´s just because I haven´t found out how to do it yet. For example the sine-thing and get that pulsating effect (Something about invalid float samples or not being able to read it). Will study hourances page a bit.
To see what you are doing, check the boxes to the left of the words Sine & Time and then tick both of those little joystick looking buttons at the top of the whole window...they are to the left of the eyeball. I don't remember which is which but this is how you can see animation in your expression nodes.
What you will see is the Sine value now being taken from 1.0 down to -1.0.
Now a value of Zero is also black so that is why it looks like black is more predominately flashing than white at the moment. Make it .5 and it will be smooth...if you wish. Can play with it...
Now drop in a "Multiply" node to the left of Sine and plug it into "B". Above Sine drop in a Constant3Vector and plug it into "A". Change the Constant3Vector RGB values so you get red. Now take the output of Multiply & plug that into Emissive.
There. You just made a stop light. ;-)
In the console. Try pressing Tab, ~ or F10 while ingame and look for a textarea to appear.
You can change the keys its bound with these settings:
[Engine.Console]
ConsoleKey=F10
TypeKey=Tab
in this file: My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config\UTInput.ini
Try that
Next up im gonna try and see if can do something with masks and combine it with the glow to only get specific parts to be affected by the sine.
On another note. I assume it´s only possible to have one "modifier" or whatever we call it go into one of the material slots (Diffuse, Normal, etc). Or do i have to do some fancy hack or change?
Other than that. Tremendous help fellas. I´m really starting to feel it all pop into place! Guess i should post a gif of the finished result soon.
maybe "force Dynamic light" would work?(not sure though)
What you are doing is baking a static light map when you click build all. There are a variety of things you can tweak. On the individual static mesh hit F4 to go to the properties, open the static mesh actor rollout (exact name is not coming to me at the moment). Go to the very bottom, open the rollout again, and you need to find something that says "override light map properties" or something...uncheck it. Now the light map resolution will be whatever you specify in the mesh viewer in the generic browser.
It's difficult to explain without pictures...maybe I'll do that later.
In general though, your real-time lights need to be a bit brighter for it to come thru after you build the lighting. That part is not very WYSIWYG to me. Just have to work with it.
thats the longest wtf i've ever seen. . .
thanks for the lighting info, i've having bitch of a time getting good shadows across static messes, hopefully this will help me figure some things out.
P.I.G. good tread idea!
I've been thinking about getting Gears of War for PC... anybody have an opinion on the overall advantage or disadvantage of making a map for GOW instead of UT3?
Thanks.
It also depends on if you were going to make a single player map or a multilayer map. Gears of War plays alot different than UT3... i would say that it would be easier to make a map for UT3 because of it's style... it's mostly run and gun, no need to worry about cover as much.
Gears of War is all about cover, you have to integrate props that act as cover nodes, and then you have to place your cover spots all over the map... so it's a bit more time consuming, but it will make you use your brain a bunch more.
Some advice for people who are making maps for UT3 or GOW and are thinking about posting it on the epic forum. Make sure that you understand the community that goes to that forum. They are very different from the people here. People there are looking for gameplay when it comes down to it. Yes a different environment from the shipped levels is appealing to them... but they won't like the map unless it is fun.
So here is a basic timeline of the posts you have on the epic forum when you are sharing a map. This may seem stupid to some people... like "do you really need to follow this?". My response is that it isn't necessary... but it something to think about. Devoted Testers are hard to come by and if you overload them with releases... they won't bother downloading them and putting time into playing it, getting an opinion, and posting their thoughts.
First post: Post your Alpha release. This should be not much more than a BSP. No static meshes are necessary here. Test it with bots and make sure there are no clitches and that someone else will have fun playing it. With that said, if you have a friend that is willing to play it for a little while... send it to them. That can be really helpful so that you know that you aren't the only person who enjoys the map before sharing it with the internet.
Second post(s): Listen to what people give you for gameplay feedback. Make sure you don't post another version of your map within a week after your first release. Chances are that you aren't going to get too many devoted testers who are going to want to test every little change. Posting a new version everytime you change something like elevator speeds will make them not want to download the new version. Then when you release the final... nobody will see it.
Third Post: Post a Beta. Your beta should take a sometime to nail that core gameplay. You should have listened to everything people said about your map and really act on what they said. If someone sees that you didn't address what they said needed work... well... you probably just lost a tester. Make sure that your beta really nailed that key gameplay element that makes your map special. Your Beta should also have some life. Even though you want to wait a little bit before posting your beta... I personally think that your beta shouldn't include all of your custom assets... this would take longer than you want and people will forget about the map. The gameplay should be considered done. Now I'm not saying that your Beta should be the default checkered material. Take sometime looking through the assets that come with the game to give it some spice. After your beta... the only thing left to do are the custom assets and ART... yes ART. If you are a polycounter, chances are art is very important to you. Make sure that after you post your beta you start working on your assets. It's going to take a long time to create all new assets and you should get started as soon as you feel comforatable with the layout. I would suggest starting with assets that are going to be in a section of the map that is unlikely to need tweaking. This way you don't waste your time making assets that don't end up getting used.
Fourth Post(s): Same as the Second Post(s), just listen to what people have to say. If you don't get any gameplay critiques then just keep working on the assets. But if you do get a lot of critiques that aren't necessarily "minor problems", consider releasing a second beta (BETA2/B2) that address's those problems.
Fifth Post: Post your final release. Like I said above, this might not be your 5th post... but it is the fifth step in my mind. There is going to be a pretty big gap between the Beta and the final due to all the custom assets you have to make. In that time you should start a thread here and to get art critiques if you haven't already made a thread. There really isn't much to say about your final release... except that it shouldn't be rushed... especially considering you will be doing, what I hope, is your true passion... art.
So that's all I have to say. I know this might not be a perfect workflow but I think it will help get the most out of the people there. Oh and please don't think that I'm classifying them negatively... I'm just saying that the people here (on polycount) are focused on art while the people on the epic forums are less focused on art and more focused on gameplay.
There are a lot of people on this forum that have more experience than me so maybe some people could add to what I wrote.
I also don't know if this is the best place to post this but it seemed like a good idea while writing it. :P
Hope this is helpful to some people.
I found a tutorial for this, thanks. It's helped increase my lightmap resolution, but yah the lighting, guess I have to crank up the brightness on those.
Okay another lighting question: Is there a way for me to have different light setups in the editor (not the build). Like say, I have 2 lights, one is blue, one is red. But I want to be able to just flip them both to full white, and then back to the blue and red. I want this because I want white lights when I work on my textures, but be able to flip to the colors to see how my texture is like with colored light, and then flip back to white so I can continue working.
I'm about to start Using Ued 3 myself.
Not sure if they have already been posted but a few tutorials can be found here...
http://architectonic.planetunreal.gamespy.com/first_level.html
http://waylon-art.com/LearningUnreal/
http://www.artbyjessemoody.com/ue3_tut1.html
WYSIWYG = "What You See Is What You Get". Pronounced "Wizzywig" for fun.
It's a term for things that happen like they are supposed to. In this case building lighting in UE3 is not very WYSIWYG because the end result tends to be too dim. What you see is NOT what you always get.
Dreamweaver is also not very WYSIWYG. I blame the devil for all of these types of software problems that plague mankind.
Anywho, another thing to do is surround your scene with a post-processing volume and play with the properties. Not so much for the bloom, DOF or motion blur control (while still very cool)...but being able to adjust the saturation, highlights, and mid tone levels comes in very handy.
I seem to get a different experience every time I go into the editor.
Depending if I reinstall windows and do not upgrade to the patches or if I use gears instead of UT3 or if I may be choosing a different light actor thay may or may not support dynamic lights.. and then sometimes I get nicer soft self shadowing and then sometimes ( roboblitz? ) the dynamic shadows only seem to be hard.
Doesn't seem to be any documents out there covering self shadowing soft shadow tips in unreal..
doesn't help that some shadowing documentation at UDN are red linked.
Wish it was as easy as Gamebryo :-(
( set up desired resolution in maya and export beautiful soft dynamic shadows )
Somewhere in the collector's edition video tutorials they explain dynamic lighting/shadows. Maybe take a look at those.
nice to know it's covered
No problem. I have only gone through the last set of tutorials on how they make a map... I know it is included in that. I'm guessing it is introduced sometime before that.
Those are pretty good. The only thing I don't like about them is that it is played in fast forward with him commenting on it. I prefer it when they are talking about it while the are making it... live. But I understand that the length of the videos would end up pretty long then.
in 3DS MAX
in UT3
my material setup
I've also tried using the opacity slot instead of the opacity mask. And setting my diffuse to emissive and what not. But that of course doesn't light it like I want and it actually made the whole thing partially translucent. It did give me the hair detail that I wanted though.
Surely there's a way to make it look more like my max render right?
It's a reach but who knows...
I did however take that alpha and save it out as a separate grayscale map and used that in the opacity slot instead of the diffuse's alpha. For reasons beyond me, the end result was better looking. Still not my ideal perfect look, but for now it's good enough for me.
my latest version in the editor
still lookin for tips and tricks on how to do hair though....
that might be because your diffuse, by that time, had been compressed maybe?
Your original process was fine, just make sure your diffuse has been exported with each channel (open in photoshop to check is what I do) and make sure you didnt check the NoAlpha settings when importing (forgotten the specific names off the top of my head, but its obvious.)
You'll always get rough/nonfeathered edges using opacity mask iirc, you can try brute forcing the feathered effect by placing loads of alpha cards (theres something on the UDN about this) as long as they're small I dont think it hurts scene shader complexity too much.
After that, you could do what jesse suggested and fake the lighting/try to match similar lighting.
oh and another issue I've been having is whenever i close and reopen unreal ed, all my textures in my package appear to be downsampled. they display at the correct size and the info text confirms that. but they're blurry. they look like a texture of half the size that's been blown up. Iv'e been having to reimport my textures everytime I mess with it. it drives me up the wall.
In Max the full range of the alpha channel opacity is used giving you a nice blend and feathering effect to the hair. This is clipped inside UE3 so that any pixel in the opacity channel is either black or white (on or off) and so looses the gradiated opacity.
The collectors ed vids led nowhere.
It's as if everthing out there is written for/by level editors who only lightmap static meshes.
UE3 is a turd wrapped in fancy candy foil.
however if u still think it tastes like chocolate:
UE3 / PhysX Training Series begins January 21st. Sign up now!
Anyone know how to fix this?
also something i made:
how to import modeling ingame:
http://vimeo.com/2875902
Try this and this
Not very informative though...
best I can achieve is physically accurate shadows with loads of shadow acne
( looks like what epic's weapons are shadowed with: acne guns )
shadow filter quality: high / projection technique: BPCF
map resolution: 2048 min & max
Can't seem to get my BSP geometry to recieve shadows ( disapears with light builds )
It seems that the shadow lod problem ( shadows disapearing at distances ) is
solved with my hi map resolutions! thats nice, at least my shadow acne won't pop off.
I guess I could just make all my walls and floors a skeletal mesh and call it a day. ( give up on UE3 )
I think that has to do with the saved file location. Maybe try that solution that you found for that problem we both got in mid December. I know that fixed it for me.