Hair and Fur is an obvious add on that I am sure epic is working on, just putting it out there that it would be great to have something crossplatform to work with realtime hair and fur animations.
Advanced Water System:
Until now water is based on materials, then adding physics boxes etc… it’s hard work and can take a very long time to get a good look. Dynamic water is even harder (splashes, hitting rock faces, having different degrees of “harshness”, different types of water etc)
So I was thinking, what if there was a system. A water system, where you would add water, specify the location using the a brush such as the Box. Then there would be a full blueprint with all the water nodes that you would have control over, would include things like:
Underwater and overwater distortion
Different levels of waves etc
Interactions with the player and environment in terms of foam etc
Underwater bubble options from players or other
Underwater currents and speeds (to slow down, speed up player and what not)
Underwater cloth simulation and hair simulations (gravity blablabla)
Underwater shading obviously and the overall look
could have different types of water that would be very similar. Like an Ocean could have all the above, a lake would remove some of the foam, make it a little darker. You could then make all kinds of lakes, change colours easily etc.
Basically a blueprint that you can edit easily to get the style you need. Some options to edit could be:
Harshness (could be varied)
Underwater and overwater colour, transparency, reflectiveness etc
I was trying to find water tutorials and the only way seems adding a plane with water material and then assigning physics to blocks where you want them to be active.
Doable! Buuuut rendering hair material itself involves transparency work/material storage/etc. Right now UE4 is “just deferred” with limitations on materials and transparencies. How Epic will go about extending is a big question, because it is by no means a “one solution fits all” problem, and thus at the moment is a big area of research for many.
Whatever their solution is, it will have to consider code readability and complexity, AKA how much of a pain it is to write, understand, and modify. As well as platform cross compatibility (what shader functions does it need? How much bandwidth or whatever does it take up?) and a lot of other things. Getting it “right” for UE4 will be difficult, so I wouldn’t expect it, and thus a fur/hair solution that looks good, to be out for a while, at least from Epic themselves.
Thing is, I trust that Epic is working on a hair solution, but for water I am not too sure. I was wondering if I am better off trying to pay someone to do it or waiting half a year, since I do have a while until I will need it.
+1 here. is why forward rendering is essential for better skin and hair, artists will be able to create some stellar content for UE4.
Here are some hair examples rendered with Unity, if we could get hybrid forward rendering in UE4 the hair would no doubt look MUCH better in UE4. Combined with TressFX the tool set would be very powerful
