UDK vs CryEngine (latest versions)
polycounter lvl 10
I am a total noob when it comes to real time engines and after asking around here about making animations with realtime shaders.I was advised using a game engine would make life easier.
I am into short animation films so I am more interested in the cinematic capability of both of them.So pls,feel free to share your experiences on which has the better engine for creating very realistic looking scenery and in realtime.
You can also check out this thread for more info on what I am going for:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96066
Thanks
I am into short animation films so I am more interested in the cinematic capability of both of them.So pls,feel free to share your experiences on which has the better engine for creating very realistic looking scenery and in realtime.
You can also check out this thread for more info on what I am going for:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96066
Thanks
Replies
Both of them do the same thing, but for the sake of simplicity and lack of headaches in learning shaders at this stage, I would advice CE.
but in udk if you dont want to fiddle with shaders you could easily just make 1 master shader and instance it around with different maps.
still would need to make it but it would be a one time thing, than you can later get more CE like controls for your shaders.
UDK could be something they try later on in their spare-spare-spare time.
Plus, CE is just made for shadows, especially if you sport a DX11 card, while UDK still has issues with any type of harsh angles casting gradient shadows if they're not standard Lambert, which can be troublesome in many cases.
Just found some comparisions between CE and UDK,Its obvious CE3 has the upperhand when it comes to graphics.It has real time dynamic lighting while UDK is baked.
Just found these from NEOGaf:
Unreal Engine 3
CryEngine 3
From the GDC 2012 trailers from UDK and CE.CE looks better.It renders more like VRay.I won't lie that I am hating the plastic look the Unreal engine seems to be having with their models.Why is that?I am suspecting their shaders are not as good?
Also CE3 seems to be designed for more serious gaming companies.From the screenshots,CE looks sick and seems like studios might be switching to CE soon and everything including lighting and shadows are realtime especially with sandbox.Does anyone know where I can find beginner tutorials for CE?
Saw this video:Ship interior made with CE:
[ame="
BTw,system requirements for CE aren't so demanding like UDK for developer use
System Requirements [Developer]
System Requirements [End User]
- End Users who only use the game launcher without Sandbox have lower system requirements.
- Operating System: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2GHz or better (a multi-core processor is strongly recommended)
- Memory: 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
- Video Card: nVidia 8800GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512MB RAM or better (SM 3.0 minimum)
Presently,I have a CPU with 4GB RAM,Windows Vista,Nividia 9500GT of 1GB ram,105GB RAM of free space.My graphics card uses Direct 10x and it is compartible with CE3 so I think I am gonna try it.Can anyone explain the licensing to me?If u want to sell a game u have to buy a license?How much is the license?
You can do the same for UDK, but you must know your shaders pretty well to create said shader from scratch.
Looks aside, CE isn't exactly 'lighter', it runs slower then UDK in my case, but that's because my graphics cards blows chunks when it comes to managing shadows at run time, but as I said, they look better.
For the license cost, it should be all written on their site. I think for UDK, you need to make 50-60K in sales before you need to start paying 25% royalties. While CE3...they still haven't finalized the public license terms last I checked.
I am pretty sure the price /license will be revealed once CryEngine becomes popular.
Ace-angel,what graphics card do u use?
Btw,have u any info about frostbite2 game engine?
As for the price, I don't have any idea, I just read stuff here and there on their forums, nothing solid, you can however send them an email if you're interested and you should get a reply back.
Frostbite 2 won't be available for a LOOONG time since DICE is under EA (just like Crytek) and releasing too many engines to the public for free wouldn't be such a good idea (one of the reason's they didn't release the Godfather engine after much speak of it becoming public).
The best you can hope for are Mod Tools at this point, and afterwards, maybe a couple of years, we will eventually get a public SDK of FB2.
As a beginer one should try to learn as many differnet toolsets as possible, and learning UDK and CE3 is not that much - they have many simmilarities that will translate once you learned one of the packages
I think there is something that is going to discourage me from using Cryengine.It seems you have to create an account and use that account to run the engine.Does that mean I have to be online everytime I want to use CE?Thats not cool..what of if I am away from home,or in a settlement where there is no internet connection?
EDIT:I am gonna say crytex is really off course making internet compulsory.They can have their game engine for all I care.Going to start learning UDK,if there are obstacles,I will cross that bridge when I get there.
Check this comparison out:landscape/foilage/architecture
Unreal Development KIT:
[ame="
[ame="
Cry Engine:
[ame="
They both look realistic.I like the UDK one better and the fact that I do not need to login to the internet to acess the engine or save my work is a huge plus with UDK and I can share my stuff with others and they are upfront with their license rules.
I am almost rounding up retopology of one of my girls in ZBrush,I learnt while reading on the forums...something about some engines will not accept a model if its not all quads or triangles.What are UDK's requirements?
UDK does not require you to use quads. It comes in as triangles even if it's quads in your application.
Can somebody pls tell me where I can download the offline documentation for UDK?
I am not aware of any offline documentation. As far as I know all the publically availiable info is at udn.epicgames.com
So,these are the problems I have encountered so far.I really love the navigation with the WASD, Q and E AND Z and C for navigation using the keyboard.Is there a key to orbit or rotate the camera because whenever I right- click my wacom pen and move to the left or right,or try to move forward or backward with the wacom,my camera moves too fast.I even selected the lowest camera speed fom the icon or should I reinstall the wacom driver?I took the senstivity to firm in Wacom settings,still camera moves too fast.
Second problem was I tried to open the Night and day scene map in UDK and a tab comes up,saying Run out of video memory.I use a Nividia Geoforce 9500GT of 1gb ram and I have a quadcore processor with 4gb ram.Do I need to increase the specs?
Thirdly,I noticed UDK startup icon displays Unreal Development kit(32-bit,DX9).
My windows vista uses Dx10 so why is it displaying Dx9?
Except for these,UDK is working well and I will really like to do more with it.
Thanks
Wacom pens don't work with UDK. I sometimes use a wacom mouse with UDK. But mostly I just use a regular mouse.
You should just ignore that night-day map since it's just meant for feature presentation and even on latest high end GPUs you won't have high framerate. As for the vid card, 9500 is an older model that was also mid range when it came out, but you can still use it unless you intend to do more demanding scenes.
As for the rendered you can work in either DX9 or DX11. There's a line in engine.ini for DX10 but afaik that never did anything.
So yeah, DX9 or DX11 is your choice both in UDK and CE3.
I did a custom setting for UDK in Wacom tab changing the mapping from pen to mouse.Moves so much better now.Thank you.I will definitely be getting an original mouse though it would be nice if the UDK devs consider incoporating Wacom use.
@Money
Yeah,heard Dx10 was completely useless compared to 9 and 11,don't know how that came about.Thanks for the info,I also found this for Maya Users,holding the U button:
[ame="
I guess I will manage the 9500GT for now until things get heated up project wise.If I want to use DX11,I will have to get Windows 7 and a DX11 graphics card.Direct 11 can't be installed in Vista,I think.
@Ace-angel
I thought CE hasn't upgraded to DX11 yet?
Btw,can complex houses/buildings,human characters be modeled in UDK,are there bones for rigging and can I animate a character in UDK?or I need to do them in Maya before importing into UDK.
Also, you're right, CE3 is not DX11, I heard last update should have been such, but I guess I was wrong, on the other hand, the Mod Tools for Crysis itself are DX11...strange.
I was really hoping a skyline maya integration would have been announced at GDC.
Where iterating HIK considerations could have happened in the earlies stages of character development. Where even the earliest skinning decisions could benifit from in engine feedback. Where blind data stratagies could be coded with considerations of the earliest environment creation as it related to HIK coded strategies in engine as it related to those first skinning baby steps in such a way where iteration at the earliest stages was more than lip service but realized nirvahna.
I have been involved with proprietary modeling tools pipeline that iterate rigging and skinning at the very first stages of modeling in this way. The guys making these tools sold me on Maya's early art for engine that should have matured all at once game development a long time ago. Where in the end UDK should have simply been a Maya plug-in a long time ago. Or at least by now. Seeing some of their early proof of concepts realized in the skyline demoes really gives me hope that the most creative minds have ultimate control of game design some day.
I map my normal alt mapped mouse button to U in my mouse control panel for Unreal. Awesome when programs support a Maya alt navigation strategy! Which is just about every application nowadys.
In the newest GDC video on the Area they expose HIK usage in Unreal, looks pretty neat. Sort of hard to wrap my head around the disconnect between rigging in Maya without the immediate feedback of HIK effected by terrain in UDK. Once again, there should be no disconnect in a skyline friendly future with no more floaty foot terain.
You can register the new 2013 release of HIK for UDK if you register as a developer at Autodesk's gameware website.
But I noticed the BSP brushes with different shapes like cube,staircases,cone,e.t.c and the use of csc to add,interact or subtract.Isn't that modeling?Although I don't think a human 3d model can be made in UDK.I think the BSP brushes work for building structures?No need to UV map,just assign textures.Still trying to get the hang of it.How about animating in UDK?Can one import a fully rigged 2d textured model for animation.I do remember someone saying something about motionbuilder having realtime capabilities like UDK and CE.Motionbuilder was used for movies like James Cameron's Avatar to acess how the motion capture actors conveyed emotion and action to the 3d characters.I read that somewhere.I m still trying to recover from how breathtking UDK looks especially in realtime,the lighting is superb.
@zakhar2
Thanks for pointing that out.But with Windows 8 coming out soon,we may be looking at DX12.I have to join the moving train.Wonder if XP is still used.
@dr jekyll
I think I am gonna remap my mouse settings for UDK as well.I think Maya is okay for rigging characters.It is just like MotionBuilder though it has a HIK.I don't plan on having a developer status with UDK anytime soon,probably when i get better at it.
Guys,I was going through the previous thread link in my first post about Maya realtime shaders where using RT shaders in Maya for a full environment is not the right approach.In my research on UDK,it seems most games or realtime scene uses a limited number of shaders in order to get the best or faster interactivity.
Like ACE angel pointed out that most games use a Phong specular shader for the whole scene,everything hence the plastic look.So I am thinking if I use say one shader for the two girls and their weapons with multi tile uvs (2048 x2048 res)and one shader for the whole environment and terrain a good no of uv tiles for different parts.Performance/interactivity of viewport will be faster than if I used different shaders for hair,weapons,clothes,body,walls,roofs,floor,pillars,props for a scene(this has been how I create my materials/shaders in Maya-very wrong)?
Anyone here tried Motionbuilder?
Naturally, again, it's all comes to you, if you're making clunking buildings which aren't interactive and don't break dynamically, then yes, a BSP will save you precious time in all cases and are normal in real production.
As for animation, here is how you export (it's Max related, but essentially, you need to install the exporter which comes with UDK and export it as a PSK file IIRC): [ame="
Motionbuilder, I loved that software, until I came across an erotic game that had better animations tools then a 4K software, so take it for what you will from a modeler like me. Motionbuilder is still bad-ass mind you, just I guess you need to know it well to cope with it.
Naturally, the big benefit of Motionbuilder is NO LAG during animation. I'm not kidding about this point, I haven't seen a single software be able to cope with animations without lagging the viewport to hell and back, especially Max.
As for the shaders in UDK, if you want, I can setup a basic multi-layered material with the basic bells and whistles to get you started. It wouldn't be too hard, and should get rid of the plastic look.
Also, when I mean multi-layered, I mean that these shaders have a double layer to everything, like two Speculars and extra settings like Diffuse Roughness, etc...
EXTRA: Windows XP is still used, no question about that, but with stuff like RT SSS and Tesselation requiring DX11, I think it's a case of what you want your hardware to give you back.
Thanks for posting the vid.From watching the vids,its clear direct animation isn't possible in UDK,one has to create the rig and animation in another app like 3dmax or Maya and them import into UDK and use kismet to set it up.Since I am into UDK for cinematic purposes rather than making a game,it does defeat the purpose as I wanted to be able to animate my characters and see how I animate them interacting in real time with lighting,foilage moving around,buildings getting destroyed,water effects as I animate.UDK is for previewing/creating a game with top notch graphics while in realtime.So if I am not satisfied with the animation I would have to redo it again in Maya.Okay,I could just do all the animation sequence of the girls fight and import into UDK,if it isn't right,redo it.UDK is great for realtime stuff though.
You used motionbuilder.Cool,what erotic game software hadth better tools than motionbuilder?I did try out motionbuilder early last year but I stopped using it due to lack of tutorials,damn that app is technical.
[ame="
This video was what spiked my interest in MB.Dynamic hair joints and u get to do everything in realtime..the viewport in this video seems to be draging though.It was even used for Spielberg's Tintin movie.I don't know..since I am more of an animator,does UDK really fit what I am going for,though I could see myself importing animation from Motionbuilder into UDK to render it out in realtime(wonder if the graphics of Motionbuilder is as good as UDK in realtime,I myself never experienced any lag in the viewport when I used MB.I think I need to think this through carefully.
Thank you,Ace but don't worry,I already have a tutorial I am following that focuses on how to create shaders in UDK.It will be good practice for me.So lag in the viewport in Maya or UDK /rendering time isn't caused by the no of shaders or the amount of textures in a scene?
Maybe I should give Motionbuilder a shot or stick to good old Maya?
During one of the skyline autodesk demos, Ikinema was being used instead of HIK in Skyline. Powering Maya animation solving in a Sony engine for the demo was a cool demonstration by ikinema.
What was really surprising was Autodesk's own introduction to Ikinema where they propose:
that MotionBuilder's HIK tech is a very nice start but for that next level in rigging and IK solved animation, ikinema really takes things to the next level!
I suppose the point of the ringing endorsement and subsequent demo was to prove how extensible skyline will be in intergrating third party middleware solutions?
However, I have yet to ever been to an Autodesk seminar where HIK wasn't represented as the next best thing to sex and immortality. With such an endorsement I wonder exactly how much savings you get from the coupon made available till the end of march on Ikinema's website? Otherwise the Maya plug-in is a hefty $875. From what I seen in the Skyline demo. The skyline intergration magic had nothing to do with the Maya plug-in. Not directly at least. But was powered from the Ikinema runtime engine. ( Maya's new nodal system would be the frontend to build logic in the Ikinema runtime if Skyline was ever realized. ) Which is not priced without a sales contact! I assume it is priced for deeper pockets.
pretty cool stuff nonetheless:
[ame="
the second presentation
Also at the end of the demo they at least sort of hint that they have begun implementing all this new tech with a few developers.
Okay,thought through this carefully.Maybe what I should be doing is what I can do with an app rather than which app can help me achieve this easier.But easier means faster and less stressful.
I would say I blame Autodesk for all these crap.They are fond of creating apps with a good feature in one and putting another cool feature in another when both apps are meant for the same thing.
For example,Maya dynamic bones can be achieved by converting a spline ik connecting the bones to Maya hair.Then its influenced by physics,but disadvantage of this method is u have to use collision spheres which are basically not good.This method sucks while ncloth has a second layer built over the collision mesh to keep the cloth from sinking in which is cool but tweaking the parameters and using cache or baking to timeslider slows down ur workflow or better yet burn your cpu when trying to run simulations.
Motionbuilder has dynamic bones which are easier to set up and better collision layer over character mesh to prevent the hair geo from enteing the mesh and all in realtime.(Heavenly sword main characters hair and clothes simulation was done in motionbuilder).It probably doesn't look as good as UDK graphics wise but animation can be exported to udk for realtime rendering so:
Maya:modeling/uvmapping/rigging
ZBrush:modeling,detailing,texturing.
Motionbuilder:realtime simulation and animating
UDK:Rendering and environment compositing.
[ame="
and seeing the apps used in the credits.Its quite clear that I have no need for game engines.I need to face the obstacles that come up when making 3d graphically stunning short films.(will try viewport 2.0 for real time stuff)
So I will work on each camera shot after exporting my animation from Maya in layers so I can do my compositing in AE.Did some research on powerful plug ins for AE and I noticed there are 2 main excellent plug-in makers for fire,smoke,water,light effects:
-Red Giant software and Video Copilot.
I have no intentions of getting them anytime soon,maybe after I finish animation in Maya.So I am thinking Video copilot makes better plug ins?