If a scene of that scale is planned, I would then use an opaque material at distance (which would require separate tweakings to have the same look, and when near switch back to translucency.
sorry for my lack of faith but I don’t think that would ever work. there’s always going to be some shading/light/shadow inconsistency between opaque and translucent that would cause a seam.
talking from experience here. at work (3d city builder with islands, very extreme camera limits, lots of water close and far) we had to disable the translucency shadow volume entirely. the drawbacks greatly outweighed the benefits.
sure on a first person game the effect wouldn’t be that visible but that seam would probably be a deal breaker on anything that doesn’t have the scale of a small lake
Yup, tried it here… it is a no go. Maybe in 5 years with advancements on hardware and software this can be a thing.
April is almost over… do you have a new ETA on when Ocean and Sky Seasons will hit the UE4 Marketplace? I was going to buy TrueSKY and another water shader, but I think now I would like to be the first to purchase your plug-in, and give you a five star rating!
I am sure you have checked out Assassins’s Creed Odyssey… once again they have pushed the bar higher with some really nice swells, SSS, rock splashes, and waves that start off rolling then break, leaving a great foam trail, and shoreline effect.
I have waited years for great ocean water to hit the Marketplace, looking forward to your release. Wish you great success!
@CrashA51 We will need to wait for UE 4.23 to come near end preview to re-evaluate the necessary changes for our ocean, which was hugely impacted by the recent engine changes at the rendering module. We also wanted to have it properly setup to behave properly under RT Ray Tracing conditions tweaking this in the material and asset. The same engine changes affected Sky Seasons aswel and we have postponed its development to advance the Ocean front which has a lot of people asking. With that said we think one or two months after last UE4.23 preview will be enough to have it released.
Looking forward to it. As mentioned before, I don’t typically buy or like plug-ins because when developers stop supporting them, it creates problems. For example, I think you and your partners get a lot of credit for keeping the community ocean project alive. I understand this kind of high quality ocean and sky need the performance advantages of a plug-in, and I feel you have a passion for this, and will be here for the long term. So I support your efforts 100%, and can’t wait to purchase your offerings on the Marketplace.
Do you have any plans to start a Trello Board, where we can list suggested or recommended features? Discord is great, but Trello is much better for SW dev visibility and communication.
I have setup a Trello, but private only. I think the ocean will be released with lots of features already (as seen on 1st thread page) and probably we will make it public once it is released for further improvements. Since there will be a FREE version released together with the Premium version, there will be no doubt anyone seen the quality of the free one will want the Premium. The free one will have the essentials (buoyancy, underwater effects, shore, foam, wakes, surface disturbance like trails) and the premium will come with the ultimate solutions for the usual troublesome features, meaning the remaining not mentioned when compared with 1st post.
I was discussing with one of my collaborators which has some advanced programming skills too, and we are still giving a shot for a blueprint only solution, it will all depend on the testings he will do when he finishes his concept and implement it for us to evaluate performance.
We are working with these assets not just with a selling purpose, but also because we have a long term game project we want to accomplish and we have the game assets development in parallel with our main activity (VFX for film which is what finance us), so these assets must perform well for us to use in future film projects and game projects when we think we are ready to start. We have tons of other assets in the realm of ideas and each project we do we put something into testing to help us achieve and improve other projects.
Sounds great… looking forward to it, and you can count on me purchasing the full version. Good Things
Sounds impressive, I play with the thought to port my boat sim project from Unity to Unreal. And I think this plugin is a very good starting point.
any more news on this product??
No. We are holding the development until the UE4.23 first preview, so we can evaluate how we will finish its development, for the following reasons:
- rendering module at engine changed too much, basically a lot of rework at our side, if we released it earlier a lot of work would went to trash can.
- ray tracing not yet complete, and we want to release it ready for ray tracing and right now translucency has issues we want to see how they progress.
Once we can start checking how 4.23 is going, we will update the estimation for its completion.
Is ray tracing getting improvements in 4.23?
Ray tracing is still far from being a complete feature, it is not in release state, so the next UE4 releases will receive enhancements and missing features, ie: UE4.23 will introduce landscape and foliage feature changes (those currently are not even supported with ray tracing), but Niagara probably will be worked later on 4.24 or so. Long way ahead!
I see your youtube video of FFT, how are you going to solve the depth problem when enabling transparency volume lighting.
It was something in our list, but since UE4.23 got a huge amount of changes in the rendering module, we are far from finishing investigating these changes, since there are still things to change in the next 2 releases (4.24 and 4.25), and how we will proceed also to make the asset compatible with Realtime Raytracing till there.
We currently stopped investigating UE4.23 previews, it is too buggy for us to proceed… however about the new Rendering module, we collected enough information to determine the state for this project and if it will worth the headache of developing and supporting it. There are some game studios asking for pricing on having this feature available for them as primer with an added amount of money as incentive for us to finish it soon, but while the offer is tempting, it will make this product to be not available for the UE4 Marketplace concurrently, since they want exclusivity for quite an amount of time, so we are not considering this option, unless they agree on a simultaneous release for everyone.
We do need something working for two projects we got, so basically the best scenario will be having an average solution for our needs first, but considering the future planned expansions.
Now on when the asset will be released is the following topic, we could start saying that our goal is to have any new asset working on all APIs and rendering modes, which includes Raytracing, and the current state for Raytracing is sort of “crude” as solution. We are not a big studio, we have very limited human resources, and we have our main income from projects related to FX for film (not yet using a UE4 pipeline, something we are digging into), which we can’t put aside that to pursue one project that keeps being nuked with engine changes that makes it to not work. Right now we are at a limit on time to invest on this project without hurting other major projects we got. While the UE4 engine keeps getting better release by release, it pushes us to have more and more dedicated time on it to adapt to the changes, something we just can’t right now. We will get back to the development in August, but not in an exclusive pace, unless something changes for the better in our plans.
We wrote a documentation for some techniques we developed out of any known algorithms already extensively discussed elsewhere and we are issuing patents, therefore in case once the product is submitted to the UE4 Marketplace, it will go with that document, so we will be able to quickly dismiss any copyright infringement that might occur and also sue anyone which got access to the code without the proper licensing to replicate it at will and reselling it as his own piece of work. This will add some time to the releasing process, but ultimately will benefit us since some portion of the work will be set for FREE or for a very small fee in the basic version.
This procedure was necessary because of recent case on marketplace where assets are being copied, modified and some content added, and the work which otherwise the creator could not find a way to improve or do better, was just put to sell (again, was banned on first attempt one year and half ago) as his own work. This produced prejudice to the original creator (lost in sales).
Simply put: you can paint a “Monalisa” with a better smile, but still the concept of a painting a woman with an intriguing smile will be what is known as plagiarism, which is liable to legal sue and liable to economic compensation. Outside the realm of ideas, concrete work once copyright protected in specific ways, can even forbid specific modifications/derivative work. If one can’t understand this concept, should not submit products to the Marketplace.
Hey Nilson,
Its unfortunate that we are seeing the infringement issues with the assets in the MP, so I understand you guys need to protect yourselves with patents. A lot of us have been waiting for a good ocean asset and Ive been keeping tabs on this thread to see about the progress. Do you have any videos or pics you can share so we can see the progress of the asset? Any ideas on ETA for release accounting for the legal process?
Thanks!
I am redoing a good amount of work with the shaders to adapt to the engine changes and we really want that it could work with realtime raytracing (even if not yet performant with). Also, we are spliting the company, so we will have the film effects company separated (I will still be partner thou) and we will build a new company dedicated on film and games using UE4 only, quite a challenge because we will be only two working now on this and other projects. We hope to grow some in the upcoming months to be able to handle all the planned projects, the film and the game we decided to make.
For the same reasons we had to issue the patents, we can’t share about the ongoing results (which is a bit messy atm).
Gotcha - sounds like you guys have a lot going on :). Good luck and looking forward to the updates!