Yay, my first shader attempt from random concept to completion. Nevermind the thread in the taskbar, I was just curious about other methods. Even if a fresnel-based outline is useless to me, shaders are fun, so I am considering this a baby success.
Now to attempt masking the effect with sketchy texture maps... why haven't I messed with this before? It's fun.
It always suprised me how people could say UE3 games look good when most of them have no radiosity, Gears/UT would have benefited greatly from radiosity since the lighting was all baked anyway..
It seems they are not baking the shadows from the sun? Only the indirect light, and then using dynamic shadow mapping for the suns shadows. I guess this is more cohesive as outdoor dynamic and static objects have the same shadows, and of course dynamic objects self shadow.. Gears and ut3 didnt even have self-shadowing except in cutscenes
I think if developers adopt this lighting approach and stop lathering on the UE3 bloom and DOF they can shake the infamous UE3 fingerprint that has become so recognisable.
It always suprised me how people could say UE3 games look good when most of them have no radiosity, Gears/UT would have benefited greatly from radiosity since the lighting was all baked anyway..
It's not the lack of radiosity, it's the lack of contrast and actual shadows. The textures are all extremely noisy to the point where it's difficult to get any sort of depth perception because of how overwhelmingly complex the patterns are. That, combined with the fact that most of the lighting just looks like ambient with a few spots and omnis means that the environments have almost zero contrast and any important objects just fade into the background noise unless they have some stupid team-colored glow around them.
Now that there's actually decent lighting, it's a lot easier to gather important information about the environment at a glance.
I blurred the first image in that comparison set to give an idea of what I'm talking about:
The top image conveys very little information. You can see that there are some structures in the middle, but the background is a mess. The bottom conveys significantly more information. You can tell that there are two buildings in the middle, that there's a large expanse of open ground and a wall farther back.
Just adding more contrast and direction to the lighting instantly made the entire level more readable.
My friends call it the "brown filter." That's the word they use to summarize their disappointment in UT3: "brown." The game was cool, but did lack the colour and personality of previous UT games. I admire the engine and artwork, but it doesn't do much for the gameplay in the end. That said, new sandstorm is gorgeous.
Great lighting + crappy enviro > Crappy lighting + Great enviro
Obviously within reason but yeah, this isn't 1999. Lighting has become probably the most important part of enviro work, done badly even the best artists enviro work looks like shit.
Awesome to see this is free to use now. Shit, 2 years ago I was on a hunt for a good free engine and all I found were projects based on q2 source and a few other half developed open source engines that for the most part, either looked like total crap or were not complete enough to use. Now there is Unity and this and both have everything an indy dev could want. I like the direction the industry is taking, looks like we will be seeing a lot more indy games hitting the scene soon. Most of them will probably be crap but some of them will undoubtedly be a success and might bring some new concepts and ideas to AAA titles. All the cautious formula following studios can finaly see how new ideas are recieved without worrying about making a loss or spending all that time and money on a new idea that may not take off.
The ramifications of this could be huge and so far as I can see, all beneficial to the industry.
It seems they are not baking the shadows from the sun? Only the indirect light, and then using dynamic shadow mapping for the suns shadows. I guess this is more cohesive as outdoor dynamic and static objects have the same shadows, and of course dynamic objects self shadow.. Gears and ut3 didnt even have self-shadowing except in cutscenes
From what I understand of Lightmass, all shadows are baked. However the "dynamic" appearance of the world shadows on the dynamic objects is achieved by projecting the static lightmaps of direct lights into the dynamic light environment of those objects. So while it's not a true dynamic shadow in the traditional sense, the light environment of dynamic objects is doing a lookup into the static textures so that it looks dynamic.
So a dynamic lookup of a static texture, if that makes sense. I think I have that right, haha.
And since Epic integrated Valve's distance field approach for rendering the lightmap textures, you can assign a relatively small lightmap texture size (around 64x64 or so) to an object and still get a nice crisp shadow on it when lighting renders.
You can check out Valve's paper on that technology here:
From what I understand of Lightmass, all shadows are baked. However the "dynamic" appearance of the world shadows on the dynamic objects is achieved by projecting the static lightmaps of direct lights into the dynamic light environment of those objects. So while it's not a true dynamic shadow in the traditional sense, the light environment of dynamic objects is doing a lookup into the static textures so that it looks dynamic.
This is very interesting, so that would mean that only the dynamic objects would have shadow mapping?
If so, thats pretty cool.
Do you know if the alpha testing of the shadows means that they can't have soft shadows? All of the shadows from the sun look pretty sharp.
Yes what the comparision showed me is that on one of them theres sharp direct sun lighting and on the other there's just a very soft/ambient one.
How much does that have to do with engine version though?
Maybe the quality of lightmaps but i dont really think the general lighting has anything to do with the new engine build.
This is very interesting, so that would mean that only the dynamic objects would have shadow mapping?
If so, thats pretty cool.
Do you know if the alpha testing of the shadows means that they can't have soft shadows? All of the shadows from the sun look pretty sharp.
You can change the "spread"(don't remeber the word used in ued) angle on the directional light to control how sharp or smooth the shadows should be.
Damn I didn't know it was that advanced, we're learning shaderFX atm and well, it's basically the same :O
About the lighting, lighting is everything! As I said on our school forums, it looks better because they did another lighting take on it, this time there are visible shadows, it has colour! Instead of the gray stuff we've seen from UT3 and gears in the past. Glad they've done it different this time, much more interesting, and beautifull.
Damn I didn't know it was that advanced, we're learning shaderFX atm and well, it's basically the same :O
Hah, I could've told you that months ago already, I thought you knew since you "work with unreal" and all
And Yes I agree on the lighting being a different approach, but a far superior one. I would probably play more UT3 if all the maps were done like this....
Noticed there was some discussion on lightmass earlier in the thread and questions on how the lightmaps are stored. We do indirect lighting calculations for all lights unless they are dynamic. You'll notice there's a new light type called Dominant (direct,spot etc) and you can only have one of those touching a surface at a time BUT you get really accurate shadows. The dominant lights use distance fields to store their shadow maps which means you can adjust the sharpness of the shadow after the fact. It's not an accurate area light affect (sharp close up blurry far away) but it works well enough. Character/dynamic shadows are no longer modulated (you wont get double shadows on the ground) they now blend correctly into the environment shadows from dominant lights.
I saw a question of how lightmass handles nighttime, it does just fine. I chose to go with daytime in Deck because it showed off our GI much better because we only hand 4 maps to show new lighting so I might as well light it in a way that best shows bounced lighting.
Thanks for the positive comments on the relighting of the UT maps, I lit DM-Deck and VCTF-Sandstorm and oversaw/final tweaked the other two. In addition to relighting the maps we also did a huge pass on lightening/adjusting contrast on the textures. There's a tool in the texture properties window to do this now, it keeps the source art the same but the compressed image has your adjustments.
The UDK maps took about 5 minutes each to build lighting but that's with a Swarm properly set up. It's hard to give estimates on how long a level will take to build especially with swarm because it depends on what computers are in the swarm, how many cores they have etc....
Jordan, this is enlightening to have your comments on the UDK. I've admired that portfolio page of yours forever, but never knew you worked at Epic. One of those "aha" moments where I finally can tie together an old portfolio to an actual person. Slight bemusement on my end. Good job!
It's worth pointing out that Jordan is one of the most talented and technically savvy artists we have here, anything he says about the UDK stuff can be taken as near to gospel as you'll get.
Kevin or Jordan, care to give us some insight on why Epic decided to take that specific lighting approach on UT3 back in 2007? Especially with the stark contrast between the old and new maps in UDK, I have trouble understanding why this design choice was taken for UT3...
i just need to jump in here an point out how fantastic and unique place polycount is, to have ppl that have lived and mastered these engines in here telling secrets to help us out.. pretty nice.. like to see a "game art" school compete with that
I'll second that. PC has a lot of highly skilled industry vets in the membership, and I've learned a ton just reading through the old threads of guys like you, Kevin and Jordan. It's awesome that you stay active with the PC community like this, so thank you for sharing your insights.
Xoliul: Time passed and we got better, its often that simple in game development. UT had less resources than Gears which was developed in parellel so more features were added in support of Gears that didn't help with UT.
For instance, much of the detail level of Gears is made possible by the streaming tech, but the same device doesn't aid the significantly larger levels and vehicles / character count that UT supports so it was necessary to strip more 'stuff' out to make it run. Streaming doesn't help with UT as everything is loaded and occupied by players all the time.
We are always aware of the areas we can improve, just as we are of the deadlines we have to meet. After Gears2 shipped the majority of the coding team were all thrown enmasse at rewriting the lighting engine to create our own GI solution. We're pretty happy with how its turned out, but its always the case ( if we are doing our jobs right) that our older titles don't hold up as well as our latest ones.
guess epic tried to save some texture memory .. sharp and contrasty light needs highres lightmaps, diffuse light can look alright with a lower lightmap.
my cintiq is making the camera spin in UDK, when i test the level,
and i'm having to unplug it to test.
can you alter the settings so that it goes into "mouse mode" in UDK?
The other thing with UT3 vs the UDK lighting, is mainly what Kev said; we didn't have this tech then At the time, this lighting is what we all thought looked great, and looks "dated" now that we have new stuff (as im sure every artist has had this experience when looking at their own art). It isn't that UT was "poorly directed," its just that we did not have the super sick tech with lightmass, and lightmaps that we do now. Jordan's relights just blow the old stuff away, seeing the side by side shots made me think the same thing hehe.
I have yet to install this, does anyone know if this comes with the cover system from Gears? I would imagine it doesn't, but, man it would be cool if it did.
I have yet to install this, does anyone know if this comes with the cover system from Gears? I would imagine it doesn't, but, man it would be cool if it did.
You can code that in unrealscript.
I remember someone modded in a gears like cover system for UT3.
Some stuff I'm wondering about the Unrealscript coding, since i'm not really familiar with it:
Can you go really far and code new car physics? Or does that require C++ ? I remember the programmers at work told me you need to use C++ to add new controllers for the animtree, but maybe you could reuse the wheel controller that's in there?
Hmmmm...the new update to UDK gives users the ability to bind UnrealScripts to Windows DLLs. This effectively extends the engine, and makes it possible for users to code their own C++, compile it into a DLL, and then use it with the engine. That will definitely make those unsatisfied with UnrealScript coding happy.
The Foliage deformation animation feature is also nice. And the slew of new video tutorials is certainly a welcome addition. Pretty good update, all told.
Hmmmm...the new update to UDK gives users the ability to bind UnrealScripts to Windows DLLs. This effectively extends the engine, and makes it possible for users to code their own C++, compile it into a DLL, and then use it with the engine. That will definitely make those unsatisfied with UnrealScript coding happy.
The Foliage deformation animation feature is also nice. And the slew of new video tutorials is certainly a welcome addition. Pretty good update, all told.
Totally. The reasons not to use it are becoming thin. The percentage cut and inability to use different platforms are the only ones left I can think of.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, A4 (sequel to A3), Alliance of Valiant Arms, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Alpha Protocol, America's Army 3.0, American McGee's Grimm, APB, Army of Two, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Black College Football: BCFX: The Xperience, Black Powder Red Earth, Blade & Soul, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, BioShock, BioShock 2, BlackSite: Area 51, Blitz, Borderlands, Crimecraft, Damnation, DC Universe Online, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon[24], Earth No More, Ender's Game: Battle Room, Elveon, End, Fairytale Fights, Fatal Inertia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Fury, Gears of War, Gears of War 2, Global Agenda, Hail to the Chimp, Highlander: The Game, Hei$t, Hessian Boots[30], Hour of Victory, Huxley, I Am Alive[32], Legendary, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Magna Carta 2, Medal of Honor-Airborne, Mirror's Edge, Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Mortal Online, MU 2, Parabellum, Rise of the Argonauts, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, RoboBlitz, Saw: The Video game, Section 8, Sephiroth 2, Shadow Complex[38], Singularity, Sin City, Stargate Worlds, Star Trek DAC, Sky Gods, Soul Scream[40], Stranglehold, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, The Agency, The Last Remnant, The Punisher: No Mercy, The Scourge Project, TNA iMPACT!, To End All Wars, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Turok, Undertow, Unreal Tournament 3, The Wheelman, Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction, X-Men Origins, and Wolverine.....need I say more
I have put it in our Games Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, here is our showreel, www.uhanimation.co.uk
I can not wait to see what the students come up with. I'll be back
Replies
awesome xoliul!
The difference is amazing, UDK is much more dynamic, the previous UED looks very flat in comparison. Thanks for sharing.
How well does Lightmass handle nighttime scenes? The third image looks like it started off as a nighttime scene but became daytime with Lightmass.
Yay, my first shader attempt from random concept to completion. Nevermind the thread in the taskbar, I was just curious about other methods. Even if a fresnel-based outline is useless to me, shaders are fun, so I am considering this a baby success.
Now to attempt masking the effect with sketchy texture maps... why haven't I messed with this before? It's fun.
It always suprised me how people could say UE3 games look good when most of them have no radiosity, Gears/UT would have benefited greatly from radiosity since the lighting was all baked anyway..
It seems they are not baking the shadows from the sun? Only the indirect light, and then using dynamic shadow mapping for the suns shadows. I guess this is more cohesive as outdoor dynamic and static objects have the same shadows, and of course dynamic objects self shadow.. Gears and ut3 didnt even have self-shadowing except in cutscenes
I think if developers adopt this lighting approach and stop lathering on the UE3 bloom and DOF they can shake the infamous UE3 fingerprint that has become so recognisable.
I can't wait to get me fingas on this!
It's not the lack of radiosity, it's the lack of contrast and actual shadows. The textures are all extremely noisy to the point where it's difficult to get any sort of depth perception because of how overwhelmingly complex the patterns are. That, combined with the fact that most of the lighting just looks like ambient with a few spots and omnis means that the environments have almost zero contrast and any important objects just fade into the background noise unless they have some stupid team-colored glow around them.
Now that there's actually decent lighting, it's a lot easier to gather important information about the environment at a glance.
I blurred the first image in that comparison set to give an idea of what I'm talking about:
The top image conveys very little information. You can see that there are some structures in the middle, but the background is a mess. The bottom conveys significantly more information. You can tell that there are two buildings in the middle, that there's a large expanse of open ground and a wall farther back.
Just adding more contrast and direction to the lighting instantly made the entire level more readable.
Obviously within reason but yeah, this isn't 1999. Lighting has become probably the most important part of enviro work, done badly even the best artists enviro work looks like shit.
Awesome to see this is free to use now. Shit, 2 years ago I was on a hunt for a good free engine and all I found were projects based on q2 source and a few other half developed open source engines that for the most part, either looked like total crap or were not complete enough to use. Now there is Unity and this and both have everything an indy dev could want. I like the direction the industry is taking, looks like we will be seeing a lot more indy games hitting the scene soon. Most of them will probably be crap but some of them will undoubtedly be a success and might bring some new concepts and ideas to AAA titles. All the cautious formula following studios can finaly see how new ideas are recieved without worrying about making a loss or spending all that time and money on a new idea that may not take off.
The ramifications of this could be huge and so far as I can see, all beneficial to the industry.
From what I understand of Lightmass, all shadows are baked. However the "dynamic" appearance of the world shadows on the dynamic objects is achieved by projecting the static lightmaps of direct lights into the dynamic light environment of those objects. So while it's not a true dynamic shadow in the traditional sense, the light environment of dynamic objects is doing a lookup into the static textures so that it looks dynamic.
So a dynamic lookup of a static texture, if that makes sense. I think I have that right, haha.
And since Epic integrated Valve's distance field approach for rendering the lightmap textures, you can assign a relatively small lightmap texture size (around 64x64 or so) to an object and still get a nice crisp shadow on it when lighting renders.
You can check out Valve's paper on that technology here:
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf
This is very interesting, so that would mean that only the dynamic objects would have shadow mapping?
If so, thats pretty cool.
Do you know if the alpha testing of the shadows means that they can't have soft shadows? All of the shadows from the sun look pretty sharp.
-Awesome work Vrav
That be a 'OneMinus'. Inverts the input.
its literally one minus the input so I don't think its precisely an inversion.
Hold 'O' whilst left clicking to add it.
How much does that have to do with engine version though?
Maybe the quality of lightmaps but i dont really think the general lighting has anything to do with the new engine build.
You can change the "spread"(don't remeber the word used in ued) angle on the directional light to control how sharp or smooth the shadows should be.
About the lighting, lighting is everything! As I said on our school forums, it looks better because they did another lighting take on it, this time there are visible shadows, it has colour! Instead of the gray stuff we've seen from UT3 and gears in the past. Glad they've done it different this time, much more interesting, and beautifull.
Hah, I could've told you that months ago already, I thought you knew since you "work with unreal" and all
And Yes I agree on the lighting being a different approach, but a far superior one. I would probably play more UT3 if all the maps were done like this....
I saw a question of how lightmass handles nighttime, it does just fine. I chose to go with daytime in Deck because it showed off our GI much better because we only hand 4 maps to show new lighting so I might as well light it in a way that best shows bounced lighting.
Thanks for the positive comments on the relighting of the UT maps, I lit DM-Deck and VCTF-Sandstorm and oversaw/final tweaked the other two. In addition to relighting the maps we also did a huge pass on lightening/adjusting contrast on the textures. There's a tool in the texture properties window to do this now, it keeps the source art the same but the compressed image has your adjustments.
Those levels look great!
i browse around the example files,
and soo beatiful
but im so clueless
i shall knell and beg to u masters and elders to teach me ,
im so curious with this tool
and i'm having to unplug it to test.
For instance, much of the detail level of Gears is made possible by the streaming tech, but the same device doesn't aid the significantly larger levels and vehicles / character count that UT supports so it was necessary to strip more 'stuff' out to make it run. Streaming doesn't help with UT as everything is loaded and occupied by players all the time.
We are always aware of the areas we can improve, just as we are of the deadlines we have to meet. After Gears2 shipped the majority of the coding team were all thrown enmasse at rewriting the lighting engine to create our own GI solution. We're pretty happy with how its turned out, but its always the case ( if we are doing our jobs right) that our older titles don't hold up as well as our latest ones.
can you alter the settings so that it goes into "mouse mode" in UDK?
The other thing with UT3 vs the UDK lighting, is mainly what Kev said; we didn't have this tech then
can't find mouse mode swap in my cintiq settings tab. it'd prolly work for my old intuos though.
You can code that in unrealscript.
I remember someone modded in a gears like cover system for UT3.
Can you go really far and code new car physics? Or does that require C++ ? I remember the programmers at work told me you need to use C++ to add new controllers for the animtree, but maybe you could reuse the wheel controller that's in there?
http://udk.com/news-beta-dec.html
The Foliage deformation animation feature is also nice. And the slew of new video tutorials is certainly a welcome addition. Pretty good update, all told.
Totally. The reasons not to use it are becoming thin. The percentage cut and inability to use different platforms are the only ones left I can think of.
I just thought I would add a list of tutorials I found, copyed curtsey of our University forum www.3dhit.co.uk
Videos Tutorials
Raven67854: UDK Video Tutorials(Youtube): http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=707437
IWillShutUDown: http://www.youtube.com/user/IWillShutUDown
Gizmosan: UDK Video Tutorials -
Effects: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=708297
JeanMeletou: Tutorial Video Workflow for Speedtree in UDK: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=706669
Documentation
UDK documentation at the Unreal Developer Network (UDN):
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html
UDK build notes:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Devel...radeNotes.html
UDK readme:
http://udk.com/readme.html
"Whizzle" technical documentation:
http://udk.com/elements/downloads/Wh...cument_1_2.pdf
"Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume I: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3"
http://www.informit.com/store/produc...sbn=0672329913
"Mastering Unreal Technology, Volume II: Advanced Level Design Concepts with Unreal Engine 3"
http://www.informit.com/store/produc...=9780672329920
Wikis
wikis:
BeyondUnreal UDK wiki:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com
/Unreal_Development_Kit
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/External_UDK_tutorials
Tutorials
Hourences: Tutorial: An entire (very basic) UDK game: http://tutorial.toltecstudios.com/
wildicv: UnrealScript Tutorial Series: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=708162
wildicv: Master Guide: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=707020
gosmo: Loading SpeedTrees on your map. Without a crash!: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=707937
badkangaroo: A Supereasy Unrealscript tutorial, and some learning : http://okita.com/alex/?p=444
Information
http://hourences.com/book/tutorialsindex.htm
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
MOD watch
$1 MILLION, UNREAL MOD CONTEST
http://www.makesomethingunreal.com/pressrelease.aspx
I love this one
http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/
List of Games that use the Unreal 3 Engine.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, A4 (sequel to A3), Alliance of Valiant Arms, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Alpha Protocol, America's Army 3.0, American McGee's Grimm, APB, Army of Two, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Black College Football: BCFX: The Xperience, Black Powder Red Earth, Blade & Soul, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, BioShock, BioShock 2, BlackSite: Area 51, Blitz, Borderlands, Crimecraft, Damnation, DC Universe Online, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon[24], Earth No More, Ender's Game: Battle Room, Elveon, End, Fairytale Fights, Fatal Inertia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Fury, Gears of War, Gears of War 2, Global Agenda, Hail to the Chimp, Highlander: The Game, Hei$t, Hessian Boots[30], Hour of Victory, Huxley, I Am Alive[32], Legendary, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Magna Carta 2, Medal of Honor-Airborne, Mirror's Edge, Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Mortal Online, MU 2, Parabellum, Rise of the Argonauts, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, RoboBlitz, Saw: The Video game, Section 8, Sephiroth 2, Shadow Complex[38], Singularity, Sin City, Stargate Worlds, Star Trek DAC, Sky Gods, Soul Scream[40], Stranglehold, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, The Agency, The Last Remnant, The Punisher: No Mercy, The Scourge Project, TNA iMPACT!, To End All Wars, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, Turok, Undertow, Unreal Tournament 3, The Wheelman, Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction, X-Men Origins, and Wolverine.....need I say more
I have put it in our Games Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, here is our showreel,
www.uhanimation.co.uk
I can not wait to see what the students come up with. I'll be back