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Black Desert Online Character Creation in UE4

Development Discussion Content Creation
#1

So, as I’m sure you’re all aware, and if your not, you had better been living under a rock, a new mmo called Black Desert Online is gearing to come out soon-ish (within a year, maybe two?). One of the goodies that they have recently decided to show the community is their amazing new character creation system, which is SO amazing that I wouldn’t mind paying for it all on its own. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TP4L1vHfpk The posing ability just takes the cake, imo.

My question is: is UE4 capable of creating something comparable to this? No, I’m not attempting to do this myself, I am not a programmer and only barely understand blueprints, but I am very curious as to what the capabilities of UE4 really are if you are willing to push alot of effort into any one aspect of it. Would love an official response from the Epic team, but anyone with input is welcome. (Also, feel free to gush about Black Desert Online’s character creator. I had to take a long cold shower immediately when I first saw this!).

#2

Yes, of course you could do something like that. But it would definitely take some coding. Since UE4 is open source, if someone wants to spend the time then it’s open for them to do whatever they want.
That would be a lot of work though, getting all of those variables, and then you’d have to make some system to collapse things into a standard asset, like convert the custom textures to a new texture map and things like that. Otherwise each character would take too much memory to run, and they’d take a long time to load.

#3

Yes, I think you should be able to do something like this - with enough effort and time though :wink:

Lets brake this down into different parts:

  • You need to be able to change parts of your character, e.g. the hair, with different skeletal meshes. UE4 can do this, no problem.
  • Same goes for different textures, no problem.
  • To be able to deform the character shape you can use Morph Targets included in the fbx pipeline
  • For posing you have to use some kind of FK/IK system

So in conclusion I say you can achieve something like that with UE4 :wink:

#4

the thing you have to remember is how much of that will you see in game, i expect that would only be seen at the highest level of LOD if at all

#5

I like living under my rock :P, and last i check the unreal engine can create unreal thing, lol i don’t think they isn’t a game system or function in any other game unreal engine 4 cannot replicate, but as on person mention it will take a lot of time and effort.

I only say this because you have you power of c++ and instead of limiting you to the software epic provide they made it so you could add to the engine via plugins, so its not a case where if the engine only make blue birds you have to stick to blue birds, dig into the codes build your own element and you can change the blue birds to red or what every color.

But this is my opinion and i may be dead wrong to believe they is nothing that cannot be done in ue 4, But from what I’ve seen this engine done in ue 3, and it pass version., i doubt epic will try to walk backwards as the power pushed out in ue 3 on some game was amazing.

#6

Well character editing is a unique feature to add to a game but I don’t see such a feature additaion being unique in design taking into consideration the easy of which technoligy convergence can take part of this and part of that and be combined to make a much more useful products .

If you take a cellphone and add a camera you have a product thats more useful than they would be on thier own and games have in the past included level editors in thier game years ago so the next logical step would be to included a feature that allows for character customization.

Would it be diffcult to do?

Well there is nothing about design at all thats easy so adding a feature like this would be just as hard as anything else as to design.

But

The trick here is not about code but about intergration in a manner thats transperent to the end user that fools them into thinking that they are still inside the game when in fact they are using two different applicaions that could just as easlly stand on their own.

Then again.

As an opinion, as I can’t see into the future, the direction of games developmet is becomming more about how quickly a game can scale beyound the ideals of the fixed design that through intergration or convergance the client will at least be able to see the game the way they want that goes far beyound the imagination of the design intent.

#7

Just wow… wow… what you said make perfect sense, i never looked at it like that.

#8

Lol yeah 3d graphics is magic full of illusions and miss direction.

As a game application I don’t see that as being a problem as you can make anything client side look any way you want.

The problem comes in when you need to transfer the edits and changes to other clients on the server so they can see the changes and what I see with out additional information that’s a LOT of data.

I would be interested in hearing how one can pull off the updates with out more or less spamming the servers.

#9

well as interesting as they character system is i think that it operate offline or a small instance or something like that as you only can create your character once so its more of a one time run on server than a constant running thing. so you start up your game then bam instances start you optimize then save then bam it gone forever lol or if they do what i think most MMO game does is you can pay to re-customize your character.

#10

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but I am curious: How did they realize the body and face deformations? Have they added helper bones or morph targets? I want to create a similiar character editor for learning purposes.

#11

hahahahahhahahh