Thread has been a good read so far. I'm also in the process of working on a UDK project, and this topic is one of huge interest to me. Hope to see the discussion develop even further. Btw, Borderlands does use normal maps. And while they don't have spec or gloss maps, They do use a channel from other textures (the diffuse…
I thought Mirror's edge didn't use out-of-the-box beast either--wasn't there was a GDC talk somewhere or something where they went into all the adjustments they made to the technology? Like...the resulting lightmaps had to be hand adjusted to push bounce, color bleed, etc. and they had to go super simple on the diffuse or…
Write a raytracer in UScript, or write your own renderer over DLLBind. Nah just kidding. Art direction matters hugely. It'd be cool if there were tools so art directors could modulate the spec/diffuse/emissive channelsof individual actors with a colour in the level editor. (like object-specific post processing) As it…
Maybe the first ME, but I cannot understand how Unreal 3 'stigma' was apparent in ME2 or ME3, when alot of the stuff was written from scratch. Borderlands too? I really doubt that, since they used nothing other then diffuse sets for their models, which ANY OTHER engine could do the same with, and anything shiny was mostly…