Dear community members,
a question like mine sounds maybe like a “noobish-” or a “fanboy-” question but it is by far very serious!
After watching tons of youtube-material I am not sure if an engine-change will be “easy” for me because I have special requirements. I have chosen to ask this clear question to people who work with the UE. Ergo: You.
At first a small background and why I am asking:
I am since 2002 professional 3D-artist and tested my content ever in an game engine for its setup, errors, look, materials or function etc. pp… Since Crysis it was CryEngine, later its FreeSDK, then EaaS and now I tried version 5. In the past I protected myself for a new engine change in reason of the need amount of time for learning its handling (its a “blocker” for my normal work). The CE had for me an advantage because with my slowly raised skill over the years the sandbox was easy to use.
The problem is (I feel it is in an endless loop), whenever I started my testmap and assets again, enginechanges makes already exported assets useless or existing maps was hard to import into a new version of the engine. I cant start everytime new, so I am looking now if an possible change to Unreal is “easy” possible, based on my requirements.
Now my question: I want to create an testisland with palms and all the stuff an volcano-island contains and want to setup sailing vessels, guns and static content. The System needs an good ocean system (underwater-volume like CE too) and cloth for the sails (on dynamic objects (like a vehicle “sailing vessel”)) and a rope system for guns and vessels rigging. Short: A very good physical system for breaking objects and so on too.
My question is now: Is it “easy” possible to create a techmap for assets, like this? I mean: For someone (like me) who can not code shaders. I have seen some great videos about PhysX-Watervolumes or the NVidia WaterWorks, which fits very good to my seafaring theme but I am curious how easy it will be usable for me. I dont have an NVidia-GPU, so the watervolume and breakable stuff must be running on an AMD-card.
I ask for your opinion and possible options for realizing it, because the videos or the “getting started”-documentation doesnt clear this out for me.
My references you find on my HP: www-drakes-legacy.com
Thank you very much!
Salutations Drakes Legacy,
I cannot comment on how easy/hard it would be for you to set up a tech demo map like you suggest, though it sounds like you have some skills so it shouldn’t be too out of reach.
But what I can comment on is that Unreal makes it very easy to upgrade an already existing project to a new version, so you should not have the issue of having to spend much time doing that once you have set up the map the first time.
Thank you very much for your reply! To be honest, I thought a few days about my question and how to ask here because such a question is “hard” and contains a very big potential of possible misunderstandings. But I must chose a way for the future of my testing plattform. I dont ask how hard it is for me in general. I mean: My value is the time to learn a new engine, but much more important: Is it possible without big knowledge of writing shaders to realize my requirements? I can give a few examples:
I try to sort the physical requirements:
WATER
Like I have written, a watervolume is very important to me. This system looks as to be a separate shaderpath in Unreal. Should work but depends to the other need physical systems (the resulting framecount). The Nvidia waveworks or some PhysX-shaders are looking exactly what I am looking for but is it “easy to use” or “easy to learn”? New hardware is an option but I need to start at some point.
The first pic shows a common sailing vessel (wip). It contains many LODs and physical meshes. I have seen, that it is easy to setup in the engine. Now its important to make the interaction in the watervolume right. Such a vessel is “deep” in the water, so 1/3 of the hull is below the waterline. The physical interaction must set to an individual weight setup (like the real weight in the hold of a ship).
SAILS
The vessel have sails. It can be setup as cloth (interactable in realtime (but normally very frame expensive)), cheated cloth or prebaked. This system must work at an dynamic ship.
ROPES
Another requirement is the common rope-system. Example on the pic below, another ship (wip). Not just the guns, a part of the rigging is not static. For the guns I can animate this system but for the common rigging or chains I need a working rope-system. It is not as important as the watervolume and the closthsytem because the standing rigging will just work “on the ship”. Those small things can be faked with vertexcolors or something like this. Much more important is this system for the rudder.
Below another picture. Like mentioned above, the working ropes are important for the rudder or the steering wheel (for example)
Here is a view through the gun deck of this 6th rate vessel (with just one gun). Geometry-Instancing, LOD-using and the whole rope- and cloth-sails-setup must be work in realtime on the watervolume and thats the nut. The polycount is huge but optimal split with submodels. And another important question: Watervolumes should cut out the inner hull, below the waterline. So far I have read, the PhysX should realize this but (like all with PhysX and Unreal) this theme is brand new to me.