So they're using Box Project Cube Mapping techniques in zones and interpolating between them?
Interesting indeed, just curious as to how they divided up the areas and what artist tools they used to control the distance bias of the cubemap, since you have to be very accurate and specific or else it will look very wrong as opposed to a traditional reflection which shoots to infinity and better suited for a more generic approach outdoors.
Like an idea it sounds ok, anything is better than static cubemaps only, but I really dislike how those looks in motion (blending cubemap part that is).
As for the UE4 demo, well just have to wait several more days for GDC EU where they will show same thing just this time open to public so no need to buy that presentaiton.
Looks like Epic's still got a chance for maintiaining mindshare.
I hope they release the presentation soon, I really want to see more info about SVOs and VCT.
Like an idea it sounds ok, anything is better than static cubemaps only, but I really dislike how those looks in motion (blending cubemap part that is).
Maybe, but based upon this guys work, I don't see why it needs to look bad, unless I'm not understanding what Epic is doing.
Maybe, but based upon this guys work, I don't see why it needs to look bad, unless I'm not understanding what Epic is doing
I think you've mistaken them for Epics tech, Computron posted a slide on Cryteks tech updates for Crysis 3.
Anyway regarding those, this is what I meant, you can see it from 12:50 to 13:10. You can see that cubemap part "dragging" one the screen as the camera moves. In this trailer they had control of the camera so it's less that noticeable, but expect to see it much more once you have control, especially with vertical camera movement because essentially you'll constantly see that cubemap as some texture slapped on your screen.
Well that remains to be seen, their light propagation volumes in Crysis 2 didn't seem that awesome, the change in volume subdivision in the distance was really apparent in tight areas like sewers.
Pfft. It doesn't have this, and I really couldn't care less what it has until they can come up with something to compete with it.
In CE3, if you want to make an indoor environment darker than the outside, you have to place a volume to define the darker areas.
I hope I can get to see the 'tools' in action, that would really be interesting to see how they will create these tools in an friendly way in a game engine to minimize the amount of 'errors' an artist can generate (Cubemap area of influence not withstanding).
I would love to have something like this in the next cryengine since they allready do cubemap environment probes, and as I understand it they even blend the areas between probes better.
I would be curious to see this method on some less rectangular scenes.
Seriously, this entire 'pay to see stuff' method, especially for mass content that has random segments in it, coupled with 'extra' content that I don't need, or the fact that most of the time they will be talking about 'abstract' methods of doing stuff that isn't cross compatible with other engines just is just ticking me off.
At least let me pay a base small fee, or to get stuff separately, I don't want to be a groupie of your site.
After that, they show off the new interface, it looks heavily inspired by Unity to me. Everything's drag-able and dock-able. They have an outliner and a details panel (inspector) just like Unity, as well as a play/pause button for testing in-editor.
Then they talk a little about Kismet. Apparently now you can do kismet scripts for specific objects, as well as play the game and watch the game run through your kismet scripts side by side (with indicators as to where it is at any time), and pause mid-script for debugging purposes.
Next thing they showed was the ability to sort of publish parameters of an object/script/something to the details panel, so a programmer could build a tool or script, and the artist/designer/whoever could access whatever they needed to directly in the details panel without having to run something externally. It looked a lot to me like what Unity does already with it's scripts. Didn't really understand what they were talking about, but definitely looked useful.
They also showed that you can open a piece of code (was C++ in the example) from within the editor (opening visual studio), while the game was running in the editor, make a change, and then recompile while the game is still running and see the change without pause or restart of the game view.
To sum up, they've expanded Kismet, they've re-done the interface, no more Unrealscript, and they've tried to make the editor playback completely seamless with any sort of change to the game/code. Makes me wish kinda I could switch over from UDK to UE4 now.
Though I cant help but be disappointed that every time I see a reply to this topic. I keep hoping I see the words "Unreal Engine 4 released to the public" like with UDK. I have a feeling though that may not happen for quite some time.
Ofcourse it not going to happen for a while, U3 came out in 2007, it took about 2-3 years for UDK to happen, UE4 isn't even in the 'open' as far Development is concerned.
If they do, I'm pretty sure they will get another headache a la Silicon Knights, and that's something they most likely will want to avoid, especially with the input in a new engine.
After reading the slide, a few things stood out for me:
-SSS has shadowed and unshaded mode? Does this mean what I think it means (EI: That you cannot have a real-time interpolation of shadows from shadow to non state?), because if so, I'm really confused as to why such a thing might be hard to implement, granted if I did read everything else right.
-Is the Cone tracing Dynamic, or can it be user clamped and exposed to user (EI: Option menu and gamer can change as they see fit).
-What does Translucency receiving Shadow mean? I thought you could already do that in the current UDK?
-Is the Tonemapper being applied at the end or the middle of the Histogram read out?
-So now there is real-time emissivity, without the needs for Lights?
-When talking about Gaussian Specular, is it referring to Isotropic a la Torrance or just common Blinn?
-I'm confuzzled as to how you can read the 'Roughness' state on page 28, I can understand how to visually imagine the other states, but is roughness the Oren Nayar roughness, or something different?
Well, if anyone who has read the slides mind telling me if I misunderstood something under those points, it would be most welcome
But I thought they only use it for authoring? It still ends up being down sampled to 8 bit by the RC upon export with Crytiff, right?
I mean, the presentation even shows their Normal map compression side by side with the ground truth 16bit normals:
From what I read, 3dc will compress the texture's better if you give a 16bit source and some time for it to figure out the best compression settings, but it's still an 8-bit format in the end, no?
My point was, UE4's GBuffer is lower than 16 bits in depth according to the slides (10 bits to be precise as you can see in the table I posted from the slides), and IDK off the top of my head what bit depth Cry3's normals GBuffer is, I think it differs from game to game. Nexuiz on XBLA has weird stepping in their gradients.
EDIT: Cry3's is 8 bits per channel according to the presentaition you linked:
Does this matter as much if the GBuffer store it in world space? I don't think it changes the precision.
But I thought they only use it for authoring? It still ends up being down sampled to 8 bit by the RC upon export with Crytiff, right?
UE4's GBuffer is lower than 16 bits in depth according to the slides (10 bits to be precise as you can see in the table I posted from the slides), and IDK off the top of my head what bit depth Cry3's normals GBuffer is, I think it differs from game to game. Nexuiz on XBLA has weird stepping in their gradients.
Yea, they author and and export at 16bit with a highly optimised 3Dc/BC5 encoder, which is much cleaner than DXT1/5 or the BC5/3Dc encoder that is currently available in UDK. I'm just hoping for the ability to import 16bit maps and use a similar or identical compression inside UE seeing as we don't have a tool like CryTiff for Unreal.
The maps may end up as 8bit, but the compression is much better than what we have currently in UE3 and looks closer to 16bit than it does 8bit.
Yea, they author and and export at 16bit with a highly optimised 3Dc/BC5 encoder, which is much cleaner than DXT1/5 or the BC5/3Dc encoder that is currently available in UDK. I'm just hoping for the ability to import 16bit maps and use a similar or identical compression inside UE seeing as we don't have a tool like CryTiff for Unreal.
The maps may end up as 8bit, but the compression is much better than what we have currently in UE3 and looks closer to 16bit than it does 8bit.
Ah, ok. That would be nice, since it doesn't really add any overhead and most pipelines would be prefectly compatible,I hope they add that.
I was just hoping for something much better in quality when you said 16bit. I guess super precise normals maps are still a ways off.
Ofcourse it not going to happen for a while, U3 came out in 2007, it took about 2-3 years for UDK to happen, UE4 isn't even in the 'open' as far Development is concerned.
I was under the impression that this version will go straight to UDK. Meaning there won't even be a "regular" unreal editor this time around, just UDK.
The only reason I thought that is because in all the videos where the guy demonstrates U4, the title of the editor he's working with says "Unreal Editor - UDK". So it's just speculation on my part, but I think it makes sense.
It's possible it'll be a closed release of udk until they get some games out, a year after the first udk 4 release wouldn't be too long of a wait to get your hands on the engine.
At GDC Europe's presentation two weeks ago they didn't want to set a date for a UDK4 release, however there will eventually be one. Also, UDK3 will be supported for a long time, apparently.
New Unreal Engine 4 Game Announced from the Dev of Blacklight Retribution: http://youtu.be/vNNsXjSwxBc
Lots of marketing gibberish but interesting to know. I hope we UDK users will also get the chance to get our hands on the engine.
Interesting stuff. Cool to see a dev step forward and take the risk with a developing engine, although it's not such a scary prospect with Epic's experience. I'm very interested to see what features they get into whatever title the put out, and how far removed it looks from current gen specs.
New Unreal Engine 4 Game Announced from the Dev of Blacklight Retribution: http://youtu.be/vNNsXjSwxBc
Lots of marketing gibberish but interesting to know. I hope we UDK users will also get the chance to get our hands on the engine.
So by this time next year we'll be playing UE4 games. That`s interesting even though Fortnite was already announced for *somewhere* in 2013.
I'm sure Epic and Nvidia have a close relationship, Nvidia wants to say they power the best looking games, Epic wants the best hardware to develop their new engine on. I'm excited to see real-time renders that are good enough to to compete with offline renders for product visualization. More opportunities for video tech to be used in other parts of the CG industry, and more opportunities for game artists to branch out into different jobs.
Replies
Interesting indeed, just curious as to how they divided up the areas and what artist tools they used to control the distance bias of the cubemap, since you have to be very accurate and specific or else it will look very wrong as opposed to a traditional reflection which shoots to infinity and better suited for a more generic approach outdoors.
As for the UE4 demo, well just have to wait several more days for GDC EU where they will show same thing just this time open to public so no need to buy that presentaiton.
But wait, WHAT'S THAT?
THE UE4 PRESENTATION ISN'T PUBLIC YET?
Rats. Crytek plan foiled by Siggraph. :poly124:
Looks like Epic's still got a chance for maintiaining mindshare.
I hope they release the presentation soon, I really want to see more info about SVOs and VCT.
Im kidding btw.
Maybe, but based upon this guys work, I don't see why it needs to look bad, unless I'm not understanding what Epic is doing.
[ame="
I think you've mistaken them for Epics tech, Computron posted a slide on Cryteks tech updates for Crysis 3.
Anyway regarding those, this is what I meant, you can see it from 12:50 to 13:10. You can see that cubemap part "dragging" one the screen as the camera moves. In this trailer they had control of the camera so it's less that noticeable, but expect to see it much more once you have control, especially with vertical camera movement because essentially you'll constantly see that cubemap as some texture slapped on your screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52c0PepJHh4&hd=1#t=770s
In CE3, if you want to make an indoor environment darker than the outside, you have to place a volume to define the darker areas.
You might be interested in this newly published siggraph 2012 stuff:
Siggraph 2012 talk : Local Image-based Lighting With Parallax-corrected Cubemap
[ame="
I hope I can get to see the 'tools' in action, that would really be interesting to see how they will create these tools in an friendly way in a game engine to minimize the amount of 'errors' an artist can generate (Cubemap area of influence not withstanding).
I would be curious to see this method on some less rectangular scenes.
http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-europe-12
At least let me pay a base small fee, or to get stuff separately, I don't want to be a groupie of your site.
Well, the first half is pretty much exactly this:
[ame="
After that, they show off the new interface, it looks heavily inspired by Unity to me. Everything's drag-able and dock-able. They have an outliner and a details panel (inspector) just like Unity, as well as a play/pause button for testing in-editor.
Then they talk a little about Kismet. Apparently now you can do kismet scripts for specific objects, as well as play the game and watch the game run through your kismet scripts side by side (with indicators as to where it is at any time), and pause mid-script for debugging purposes.
Next thing they showed was the ability to sort of publish parameters of an object/script/something to the details panel, so a programmer could build a tool or script, and the artist/designer/whoever could access whatever they needed to directly in the details panel without having to run something externally. It looked a lot to me like what Unity does already with it's scripts. Didn't really understand what they were talking about, but definitely looked useful.
They also showed that you can open a piece of code (was C++ in the example) from within the editor (opening visual studio), while the game was running in the editor, make a change, and then recompile while the game is still running and see the change without pause or restart of the game view.
To sum up, they've expanded Kismet, they've re-done the interface, no more Unrealscript, and they've tried to make the editor playback completely seamless with any sort of change to the game/code. Makes me wish kinda I could switch over from UDK to UE4 now.
After reading your description, how could you not feel that way!
SIGGRAPH 2012: The Technology Behind the "Unreal Engine 4 Elemental Demo", Martin Mittring
Though I cant help but be disappointed that every time I see a reply to this topic. I keep hoping I see the words "Unreal Engine 4 released to the public" like with UDK. I have a feeling though that may not happen for quite some time.
After reading the slide, a few things stood out for me:
-SSS has shadowed and unshaded mode? Does this mean what I think it means (EI: That you cannot have a real-time interpolation of shadows from shadow to non state?), because if so, I'm really confused as to why such a thing might be hard to implement, granted if I did read everything else right.
-Is the Cone tracing Dynamic, or can it be user clamped and exposed to user (EI: Option menu and gamer can change as they see fit).
-What does Translucency receiving Shadow mean? I thought you could already do that in the current UDK?
-Is the Tonemapper being applied at the end or the middle of the Histogram read out?
-So now there is real-time emissivity, without the needs for Lights?
-When talking about Gaussian Specular, is it referring to Isotropic a la Torrance or just common Blinn?
-I'm confuzzled as to how you can read the 'Roughness' state on page 28, I can understand how to visually imagine the other states, but is roughness the Oren Nayar roughness, or something different?
Well, if anyone who has read the slides mind telling me if I misunderstood something under those points, it would be most welcome
Wouldn't this limit the usefulness of that, at least in deferred rendering?
Or does it not matter as much since the gbuffer stores it in WS?
http://www.crytek.com/download/AdvRTRend_crytek.ppt
But I thought they only use it for authoring? It still ends up being down sampled to 8 bit by the RC upon export with Crytiff, right?
I mean, the presentation even shows their Normal map compression side by side with the ground truth 16bit normals:
From what I read, 3dc will compress the texture's better if you give a 16bit source and some time for it to figure out the best compression settings, but it's still an 8-bit format in the end, no?
My point was, UE4's GBuffer is lower than 16 bits in depth according to the slides (10 bits to be precise as you can see in the table I posted from the slides), and IDK off the top of my head what bit depth Cry3's normals GBuffer is, I think it differs from game to game. Nexuiz on XBLA has weird stepping in their gradients.
EDIT: Cry3's is 8 bits per channel according to the presentaition you linked:
Does this matter as much if the GBuffer store it in world space? I don't think it changes the precision.
The maps may end up as 8bit, but the compression is much better than what we have currently in UE3 and looks closer to 16bit than it does 8bit.
Ah, ok. That would be nice, since it doesn't really add any overhead and most pipelines would be prefectly compatible,I hope they add that.
I was just hoping for something much better in quality when you said 16bit. I guess super precise normals maps are still a ways off.
I was under the impression that this version will go straight to UDK. Meaning there won't even be a "regular" unreal editor this time around, just UDK.
The only reason I thought that is because in all the videos where the guy demonstrates U4, the title of the editor he's working with says "Unreal Editor - UDK". So it's just speculation on my part, but I think it makes sense.
I have never really needed UDK for it's licensing, so that would do just fine for the time.
I would think so, as far a I can remember every version of Unreal Tournament has shipped with one. Unreal and Unreal 2 might have as well.
http://youtu.be/vNNsXjSwxBc
Lots of marketing gibberish but interesting to know. I hope we UDK users will also get the chance to get our hands on the engine.
[ame="
Source: http://www.twitch.tv/nvidia/c/1820857 at 1:13:30
I don't get why though.
It's Nvidia, they are a realtime hardware company, so why use pre-rendered stuff made by CPU's?
So people can drool at those sexay real-time glossy reflections. :poly124:
I'm sure Epic and Nvidia have a close relationship, Nvidia wants to say they power the best looking games, Epic wants the best hardware to develop their new engine on. I'm excited to see real-time renders that are good enough to to compete with offline renders for product visualization. More opportunities for video tech to be used in other parts of the CG industry, and more opportunities for game artists to branch out into different jobs.
All of my money. All of it.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/08/zombie-studios-unveils-unreal-engine-4-game-daylight