Integrating UDK 4 with broadcast design

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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I work over in Durham, NC at Sports Media Technology, specifically N + 1 design studio which is the child company http://nplus1design.com/. The NFL is one of our very close clients, along with NBC, NASCAR, UFC, Yahoo - you name it, we’ve probably done it.

I’m sitting there in Cinema 4d rendering out a simple wooden board animation, 50 frames long, with bump, spec, reflections and a normal map - and it’s taking half hour. I laughed, because I knew UDK 4 could get it done in real-time, AND it would probably look better with the right textures. Which made me start to think… “Wait… why not try it?”

I’m unsure of the licensing when it comes to this sort of thing, as I don’t believe Epic Games is expecting UDK 4 to be used for broadcast sports events. But I’d be very interested in trying it out and possibly even working on a project that was rendered straight out of UDK 4, instead of Cinema 4d. So if anyone has information in regards to that, I’d love to know.

We also do augmented reality (basically replacing a green screen with a digital 3D set with real-time camera tracking). However, the software we use could really benefit with a better rendering engine. I wish we could use UDK 4 for that.

Really the point of this thread was to see if this idea has been floated around before. I’m interested in doing some tests. If it ends up looking great, I will definitely post images and video of what I came up with.

I also live right across the street in those apartments, nice GoW statue guys!

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First up it’s UE4 not UDK 4.

Be kind of like calling your grandmother your wife. :wink:

As for your idea sure it’s been done before as to using a “game” engine as a real time rending environment but it’s all about how things are set up. Setting things up would be more or less the same as in Cinema 4d but with different requirements so a company would have to determine the cost in time and money as to running the two in tandem along the same asset pipelines.

From a task orientated approach since the Unreal Engine 4 code is available it’s probably just a matter of time before someone figures out how to make it a replacement as to current rending options in a transparent manner via the FBX pipeline.

What it comes down to is if the math and the money that needs to be spent is just for convenience then that’s a tough sell.

On the other hand if a couple of kids can make a full length feature film out of their garage that gives Pixar a run for their money ……