On this week’s Unreal Engine livestream broadcast, Unreal Engine General Manager, Ray Davis, and Sr. Environment Artist Ryan Brucks give a preview of 4.3, Tech Writer Lauren Ridge gives us a documentation update, we’ll have a rendering update and more!
WHAT
Twitch stream: Unreal Engine 4.3 Preview and Rendering Update and more!
WHEN
2pm EDT
WHERE
WHO
Ray Davis, GM
Ryan Brucks, Sr. Environment Artist
Lauren Ridge, Technical Writer
Guest appearances TBD
Tell us what you want to know about 4.3, documentation, the rendering update and anything else in this thread!
are the Community Spotlight content pieces for this week!:
GREAT content from Petit Con, which was a game jam held in Japan last week – are a couple of examples: Matetester Frozen Cell 3D vs. Dot Tappy Chicken “2”
I’m curious about the rendering update. Is it the distance field AO and skylight GI or something we dont know about yet? Always a reason to get excited about the stream.
After the 4.3 update could the team gather and share some info on upcoming features for the 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 time frame? Just as a state of progress on the major upcoming features. Just a thought.
[QUOTE=mikezteh69;92527]
After the 4.3 update could the team gather and share some info on upcoming features for the 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 time frame? Just as a state of progress on the major upcoming features. Just a thought.
I think this would be a great idea. It’s hard for me to comment on what should be done with the engine when I don’t even know what the team is working on. Now if you have to keep something a secret then do so. Just give us a general idea of where you are headed
With these new API as iOS Metal and Android Expansion Pack is capable of restrictions on Materials, Textures, Content andPerfomance disappear or diminish?
There are plans to update the UDK Remote? Any chance of a version for Android?
Is there any remote possibility in the future for games for Mac are exported from Windows and vice versa?
Any chance of being displayed some small preview of the Sequencer or Cascade 2.0?
Any chance of having something like the “Time of Day” natively?
Thank you, and congratulations to the entire team from the Unreal Engine, for bringing us this wonderful tool.
[QUOTE]
After the 4.3 update could the team gather and share some info on upcoming features for the 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 time frame? Just as a state of progress on the major upcoming features. Just a thought.
Well, those features haven’t been created yet =)
The engine roadmap is and you can vote on things you want. Items being on the roadmap is not a guarantee for the feature, it just means that we want to investigate it in the next few months.
Any chance of getting my Free Blueprints book and upcoming GameDev book (Covering making games from start to finish with Unreal Engine 4) a shout-out on the Stream? I want to help as many people as possible find the resources so they can enjoy them!
**The “So You Want To Make Video-Games?” Campaign **[Free Book for Children, Adults and Elders! My Mission to get the book in front of everybody via Libraries, the Internet and more!] (Thanks again Mark Rein for the generous contribution!): So You Want to Make Video-Games? | Indiegogo
[QUOTE=DavidJHarmon;92536]
if we keep going like this we will have unreal engine 5 out soon lol
so are we going to see true mmorpg coming out every soon with no headaches?
Well, that’s not how software versioning works, the “.” is not a decimal, it’s a separator. After 4.9 we’ll most likely see 4.10 and so on.
The first number is the major version, then updates (4.3 for example) and last hotfixes (4.2.1 for example).
The level browser update looks great. My question is regarding procedural use of this browser. I would like to be spawn a map into a streaming level, have it save that information, and then load and unload that streaming level as normal as if I had manually placed it there, which I spent a week or two attempting without any success.
Will this update, or future updates allow for procedural spawning of objects and terrains into these levels during runtime?
A few questions from me, I’ll be tuning in at work tonight
How much more expensive is the Lit Translucency now than it was previously?
Does this mean that Translucent surfaces now support Lightmaps? What about 2-Sided Lightmaps for things like planes of glass lit from both sides etc.
Does the Lit Translucency Support Realtime Reflections? For Example, can I now have an accurate realtime reflection on water surfaces?
Is epic planning on releasing any of it’s other Tech Demos in future releases, mainly Infiltrator. There are some unique material functions that I’d like to see. (PM’d Ryan and E-Mailed Francois about them already)
Shameless Plug: Do you wanna feature either one of these for lolz/kudos in the community spotlight ;):YouTube
1: For the new DFAO you guys mentioned it only works for static mesh. Out of curiousity, is the way you guys handle BSP and StaticMesh a lot different in terms of rendering? I use it mainly for blocking out my levels but I leave some and there and I’d like to know what to keep an eye out ( Maybe they will not bounce right or capture reflections in the same way…etc )
2: Is it possible to see your setup for Fortnight since it is a very dynamic game. What kind of a lighting setup do you have for interior and exterior. Or is this all secrety stuff ^^
3: Will we be getting better acces to GameMode in blueprint. It’d be nice to setup minimum player count before the game starts, if its round-based, round time etc. I can do most of these myself in blueprint but it seems like the functionality is already in GameMode.h but not exposed.
QUESTIONS FOR STREAM} PLEASE MAKE SURE THE ABOVE GUYS GET SHOWN THIS BEFORE THE STREAM TO PREPARE SOME ANSWERS
Bruneton & Neyret’s EG’12 scalable, high-quality tree imposter method for forest rendering.
**This Method is very close to the Blueprint render to texture system Ryan has been working on, The PDF has some nice details on algorithms and implmentation, We really need this done. Foliage is one of the last things that UE4 is pretty bad at right now, add this method to the brilliant PBR system of UE4 and were onto a winner.
Also a quick question about the terrain tools as they are in UE4 editor, at this time we can select an area of our terrain generated by our imported height map to copy to another location on our same terrain, Please can this be updated to also take into consideration the base map data from the textures imported for material base. E.g if i copy a selection of the map (height) can the tool be updated to also copy the Colour map base texture data, Normal map, etc etc with that height data that your transferring to another area of the terrain. Having ONLY the height information copied from one spot to another without the other maps just ruins the base textures created. If you get that working the terrain tool becomes a whole lot more usable.**
Right click the image and select open in new tab for full res
For Example This is one of the test Environment’s ive been building. Has height map,Normal,Grass/Rock Mask/Sand Mask/Roughness Map (basicly all the PBR maps you need. Within the terrain tool i may want to copy one area of the map i like to another area i don’t like that much, But as is the tool would only copy the height info and break all the other imported PBR maps ive created. But if it copied all the relevant map data from each texture terrain editing from imported maps becomes superb. Please Please Please make this happen.
Another request for terrain & Foliage tool, Im building my environments in high end 3d app (Blender in this case). What id really like is to be able to use Blenders Particle system to distribute tree models, rocks etc onto my terrain directly in the high end tool, but then once ive got what i like to be able to turn each of those hair particles into a dummy which holds the object type, position, rotation, scale (say i have 100,000 pine trees instanced) then to be able to export that set of dummy’s with FBX into UE4 terrain foliage tool and the foliage tool to recognise the name prefix (for example pine) that you have imported as mesh into UE4 and then scatter instances of the object across the map in the positions matched by the imported dummy’s (which would mean no having to go round painting in foliage by hand, Also being able to mask map areas with a black and white map would also be helpful (so if you are hand painting foliage in it will only add objects for example where black is in the mask map
For More Terrain Work ive been doing goto this thread on the forums:
Object-order Ray Tracing for Dynamic Scenes
Quick Breakdown:
Ray tracing is a robust and flexible approach to image synthesis that elegantly solves many problems that are hard to solve using rasterization. Recent advances in the performance and flexibility of graphics processing hardware have made ray tracing a viable option even for real-time rendering applications. Yet, integrating ray tracing into existing rasterization-based real-time rendering solutions poses significant challenges. Modern rasterization-based rendering engines typically use the capabilities of modern GPUs to generate, transform and amplify geometry on-the-fly. In contrast, efficient ray tracing techniques typically depend upon pre-built spatial acceleration data structures that allow for fast random access to the scene geometry.
Our article presents a method for tracing incoherent secondary rays that integrates well with existing rasterization-based real-time rendering engines. In particular, it requires only linear scene access and supports fully dynamic scene geometry comprised only of triangle soups. All parts of the method that work with scene geometry are implemented in the standard graphics pipeline. Thus, the ability to generate, transform and animate geometry via shaders is fully retained. Moreover, shading can share the same material system that is used in a deferred shading rasterizer.
Consequently, our method allows for a unified rendering architecture that supports both rasterization and ray tracing. The more expensive ray tracing can easily be restricted to complex phenomena that require it, such as reflections and refractions on arbitrarily shaped scene geometry. Other rendering steps can be dealt with using rasterization as usual.
While our method of ray tracing works object-order, we still manage to limit the number of intersection tests that have to be performed: Using a coarse conservative voxel approximation of the scene, we first estimate potential hit points for each ray and subsequently only test triangles with rays that have potential hits nearby. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-pass intersection testing scheme that allows for early termination of rays on first hit (analogous to Z-culling optimizations), which is a recurring problem in methods that deviate from standard (depth-first) traversal of spatial data structures.
Our GPU Pro 5 article provides a detailed description of our ray tracing method as well as a sample implementation that demonstrates the tracing of incoherent secondary rays with reflection rays. Ray tracing is implemented in the context of a traditional rasterization-based deferred shading engine, everything besides reflection rays is rasterized as usual.
**The above Object order raytracing is very interesting and works well with deferred rendering (even can use the original engines material system (PBR in UE4’s case) this would be superb. I also had the idea of mixing the render to texture tools shown in Ryans last stream to simplify the raytrace system even further, By mixing this with the render to texture approach of 3d geometry imposters for objects not near to camera view the engine only would need to trace rays against a single quad, getting rid of one of the slowest parts of trying to get realtime raytracing working, Intersection testing against tris. By mixing the approach of the above tree imposter method (that should also be converted into other world geometry imposters as well like rocks and other static geometry in any scene) realtime raytracing just becomes a matter of for a large chunk of the scene intersection testing to a single quad per object (as each object should have colour,normal in the baked imposter maps) data BVH building (or what ever method you choose for a hierarchy) would be much faster and well within the realms of achieving good frame rate’s.
**
You guys need to look hard at these suggestions.
