UDK Questions..
polycounter lvl 10
Doing further research on UDK and in reading the comments on this video:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEdnKJfbPNI"]Real-Time Neuschwanstein Environment Castle UDK - YouTube[/ame]
The 3d artist who made the environment said this:
"I have an Nvdia GTX280, a good graphics card not a very high end one. And the scene runs between 40 and 120 fps. One of the "secrets to run massive secenes is to reduce the ammount of shaders. Each visible shader (or material) will create a draw call and use memory. You can have a scene with a million triangles and just one shader, maybe you could even render 2 million or more.
The massive terrain with mountains (25k triangles) only uses one shader that blends four textures with vertex colors. The terrain near the castle uses 4 shaders, It worth the cost because is closer and allows me to show more detail and variety. All the castle's white stone is just one shader, the roof... just one shader and so on.
There is no more than 40 shaders in the whole scene.Some UDK maps have more than a hundred materials and use Lods, occlussion and other tricks to reduce the cost in some other way.
But as you say, this scene would'nt run in a shitty machine. You would need a good one but not an exeptional one."
So does that mean the lesser no of shaders u have for ur scene/maps in UDK,the faster the render time or interactivity.I wonder if this apply to other 3d apps like 3dmax/Maya in terms of rendering time.
Then I also saw this video:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxFD4ynacD0"]Fighter_UDK - YouTube[/ame]
I am thinking the artist used cloth simulations in UDK for the hair and cloth blowing in the wind.If this is possible in udk,why is it that most animators bake the simulation for cloth and hair in Maya or 3dmax before importing into game engine?I also noticed the hair passing through the body,seems UDK doesn't have perfect collision solvers?
Another thing that has been bothering me about using UDK is this whole talk of prefab/original art.Say if I was to use the speed tree tools in UDK to make my own trees,just like the paint effects in Maya,or the water shader in udk,does that mean I am using prefab for my work and it lacks originality.I mean,these things are in place to help one work faster,right?I don't know,maybe I shouldn't be bothering myself with this prefab/original thing.Does it really matter?What matters is if one finishes the project on time.
I wonder if gamestudios like Bioware that use udk make use of some of its prefab tools,effects e.t.c.I would say its just like using the presets in After effects.
Also,UDK license of 25% of whatever one makes above 50,000 dollars seems a little cause for consideration as I was researching Unity 3d the other day.It has a free version that can be used freely and no percentage paid for using the free version.I intend using UDK for a feature film cause of its realtime capabilities.I am guessing UDK has more tools and raw power than the Unity3d free version?
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEdnKJfbPNI"]Real-Time Neuschwanstein Environment Castle UDK - YouTube[/ame]The 3d artist who made the environment said this:
"I have an Nvdia GTX280, a good graphics card not a very high end one. And the scene runs between 40 and 120 fps. One of the "secrets to run massive secenes is to reduce the ammount of shaders. Each visible shader (or material) will create a draw call and use memory. You can have a scene with a million triangles and just one shader, maybe you could even render 2 million or more.
The massive terrain with mountains (25k triangles) only uses one shader that blends four textures with vertex colors. The terrain near the castle uses 4 shaders, It worth the cost because is closer and allows me to show more detail and variety. All the castle's white stone is just one shader, the roof... just one shader and so on.
There is no more than 40 shaders in the whole scene.Some UDK maps have more than a hundred materials and use Lods, occlussion and other tricks to reduce the cost in some other way.
But as you say, this scene would'nt run in a shitty machine. You would need a good one but not an exeptional one."
So does that mean the lesser no of shaders u have for ur scene/maps in UDK,the faster the render time or interactivity.I wonder if this apply to other 3d apps like 3dmax/Maya in terms of rendering time.
Then I also saw this video:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxFD4ynacD0"]Fighter_UDK - YouTube[/ame]I am thinking the artist used cloth simulations in UDK for the hair and cloth blowing in the wind.If this is possible in udk,why is it that most animators bake the simulation for cloth and hair in Maya or 3dmax before importing into game engine?I also noticed the hair passing through the body,seems UDK doesn't have perfect collision solvers?
Another thing that has been bothering me about using UDK is this whole talk of prefab/original art.Say if I was to use the speed tree tools in UDK to make my own trees,just like the paint effects in Maya,or the water shader in udk,does that mean I am using prefab for my work and it lacks originality.I mean,these things are in place to help one work faster,right?I don't know,maybe I shouldn't be bothering myself with this prefab/original thing.Does it really matter?What matters is if one finishes the project on time.
I wonder if gamestudios like Bioware that use udk make use of some of its prefab tools,effects e.t.c.I would say its just like using the presets in After effects.
Also,UDK license of 25% of whatever one makes above 50,000 dollars seems a little cause for consideration as I was researching Unity 3d the other day.It has a free version that can be used freely and no percentage paid for using the free version.I intend using UDK for a feature film cause of its realtime capabilities.I am guessing UDK has more tools and raw power than the Unity3d free version?
Replies
Doing a google search like here will give you all the answers: http://content.gpwiki.org/index.php/D3DBook:%28Lighting%29_Summary
2- Because current technology doesn't have the time process every single frame being rendered with hundreds of polygons hitting one another. So baking them is much more easier bother for control from the artist/animator and speed.
We do have the ability to get somewhat RT dynamics, and APEX has been promising, but even so, its really comes down to speed.
Same issues with solvers, you could do with approximated vertices, but that's about it, it's all about speed and lets face it, players aren't exactly going to care about a girls a hair in the game if they're too busy cover shooting.
So maybe once we have Quad-Cores as a standard, and Octa-Cores as 'average' users demographic will collisions between mesh's be feasible in truly large scene's. As of now, at most maybe the main character will have the privilege of boobies-physics.
3- Not really, since you first need to make the tree's, even in Speed-Tree, but custom made tree's are better since you can textures them as you want, can apply special effects, and do whatever you want with the UV's and such. Prefabs tend to be very 'rigid', they don't have alot of flexibility, and most of them follow 'boring' looks of position branch A and B at 4 intervals, etc...
Don't forget also that they look ugly, I'm not kidding, all of them are 'tiled' in a certain way, and lacking the more finesse of the an artists hands, they can look pretty static and dull.
As for Studio's, well lets just CoD used in many of their scenes unaltered texture's from online libraries, directly, so take it for what you will.
4- Last I checked, Unity 3D was gimped in the free-version, and I don't think (at least, right off the bat) has the prowess for 'OMFGBBQ' looking shaders and filters, but prototyping games is easier. Opposite can be said of UDK.
As for which one is better for movies, it really depends on which one YOU will fine easier to work with in terms of exportation, animation, setup targets, etc...since both more or less have the same flexibility.
Also, if you have question in the royalties department, just ask the peeps over at their respective forums. Some guy wanted to sell shaders in UDK not too long ago, and I think he was give the green-light, and didn't owe royalties.
Can you expand on this? Youve brought this up in several threads and i havent been able to find more info on it.
Cutting corner, crunch time, call it whatever you need to do, but at the end of the day, a product that isn't the main theme and only a passing stone, building, electronic box, pavement, door, etc will be much better of being given the 'quick and dirty' treatment instead of say the main character and the palace corridors treatment.
NVIDIA GDC 2012: Tech Demo Walkthrough (Cam) - YouTube
I think apex clothing is available in Maya.Will research more on this.Great vid.Probably simulation will work better and in realtime with UDK.Not sure a Geoforce 9500gt will do the trick.I have a dx9,probably these features are dx11.
and a lot of those features shown are dx11 only but you can still make some pretty impressive stuff with just a dx9 pipeline too.
[ame="
Their Apex page, you have links to the tutorials for Maya and Max (also see video called "Clothing Demo CCP" in the bottom, I'm guessing that is what you want to do):
http://developer.nvidia.com/apex-clothing
and UDN page
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/APEXClothing.html
But again I don't think clothing itself is that demanding, what really kills performance in those games with Physx for were particles.
I noticed udk autosaves files so I disabled it.There were some other previous maps I was checking out and udk autosaved them.Does anyone know where udk saved the autofiles to so I can delete them?I have no need for those files and they will probably clutter my hard drive.
I also wanted to ask if its common practice to use blendshapes for facial animation in udk or bones is the preferred one.I am thinking of using blendshapes for facial expressions and lip snching for my cinemtics in udk.Is that okay or it will result in problems or huge file sizes?
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DirectoryLayout.html#Autosaves
Don't know about morphs, they could be slower in real-time if you're blending a lot of shapes at once, but you can get exactly the shapes you want. Bones require a lot of setup time to get the proper positions and weights, but are a lot more flexible in the end.