Plugins, Scripts, Assets to help production? (Maya, UE4, 3DSMax)

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
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Ok so as you guys can tell from my other thread I have close to no experience.

But in order to plan out my journey to building my first level which considers of a cave and then some out-doors a small scuffle and fight with 2 people and then a few assets such as a knife.

I am wondering what plugins, scripts, assets and other softwares will facilitate my tasks now and in the future.

I am talking about:

  • Simple fluid simulations, I will need smoke, preferably reactive to the person as he walks through it
  • Rain and waterfalls and reactive water simulation like puddles and a small lake
  • Realistic foliage that I can edit etc rather than do on my own since they are fairly complex, reactive foliage preferred so that the grass etc will move
  • Terrain Builder plugin for fine tasks such as building this cave which won’t be too huge
  • An easy way to control assets that are in the scene
  • HD Lighting and shading
  • Responsive lighting as I want to have a flash light and maybe some fire affecting the scenery and making it more “redish”
  • Realistic Fire that adheres to the wind velocities in the room etc (I want that flickering effect)
  • Simple way of managing light sources, maybe even moving light sources?
  • Weather control? No idea what I mean by this, some way of the terrain changing weather, like it starts raining, or snowing, or storm etc
  • Reactive environment to lets say footprints etc, this is ofc finetuning, just wondering if there is a simple way of doing this
  • Destructive environment? Not all of it, just lets say a box or something, any good simulation softwares?

Will update, basically anything to help make the scene easier to produce once you have the assets.
Like in a video I saw yesterday, it looks incredibly easy once he’d scripted all the settings to “paint” a surface: v=_i6wjsfaek4
Foliage: ?v=FwqLBkP5TpQ ( Go halfway to see the responsive)

Realistic Waters: ?v=1Ro92_oAyuc

Will add a few more things I could use

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- Simple fluid simulations, I will need smoke, preferably reactive to the person as he walks through it
Nothing like this really exists yet as a plugin, you would have to write it yourself/find someone to do it for you. Very high-level stuff. You could theoretically make a Cascade system that uses a ‘swirling’ vector grid out of Maya and uses it to drive sprites as the player passes through them. This is of course hypothetical, but could work.

- Rain and waterfalls and reactive water simulation like puddles and a small lake
You can fake this using dynamic material instances and particle systems.

- Realistic foliage that I can edit etc rather than do on my own since they are fairly complex, reactive foliage preferred so that the grass etc will move
Look into SpeedTree and search for grass on the forums. There has already been a thread where someone is using a field around the player to generate a vector that changes a grass shader’s world position offset.

- Terrain Builder plugin for fine tasks such as building this cave which won’t be too huge
Caves wouldn’t be supported with the Unreal Terrain system, since they are *concave *structures [no pun intended]. You could write a voxel-based system to build 3D caves, similar to how Cryengine deals with this problem. Alternatively, build them as modular sections in a 3D package.

- An easy way to control assets that are in the scene
Elaborate on what you actually mean here. Too ambiguous a question.

**- HD Lighting and shading **
Again, elaborate.

- Responsive lighting as I want to have a flash light and maybe some fire affecting the scenery and making it more "redish"
Dynamic lights are already supported by UE4 out of the box.

- Realistic Fire that adheres to the wind velocities in the room etc (I want that flickering effect)
Can be faked with a Cascade particle sim. See my answer to your first question regarding fluid simulations.

- Simple way of managing light sources, maybe even moving light sources?
Again, Unreal supports dynamic lighting.

- Weather control? No idea what I mean by this, some way of the terrain changing weather, like it starts raining, or snowing, or storm etc
A blueprint hooking up a number of particle systems, fog volumes and dynamic material instances will handle this.

- Reactive environment to lets say footprints etc, this is ofc finetuning, just wondering if there is a simple way of doing this
Footprints can be generated using decals projected where footfalls occur.

- Destructive environment? Not all of it, just lets say a box or something, any good simulation softwares?
Unreal has features that allow you to created voronoi fractured versions of your static meshes, out of the box.

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Awesome thanks! Also in terms of atmosphere, I feel a lot of game lose quality just because the air is fully transparent. Is there a way to change what it looks like? Have a few particles floating, and make it seem like it’s there, I want the air to have a density, so that players really feel like they are in the game.

like in this video most of it.
Not just fog, (go min5), I like the way it looks dusty the air.

Also thanks for the cascading.

PS:
I didn’t just mean plugins, I meant also good places to get assets/simulations. Since the unity asset store has a lot, can I use those or are they only for unity?

By HD Lighting and shading I mean to get a scene that looks as good as the demos, they seem to have light bouncing off the texture packs, would this be done with normal maps? So that the textures on let’s say a brick wall respond to the lighting a bit? Like the creases are darker etc? Or if you have a rock surface to get that nice light bouncing like you would in a real environment?

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[QUOTE=;102715]

PS:
I didn’t just mean plugins, I meant also good places to get assets/simulations. Since the unity asset store has a lot, can I use those or are they only for unity?

You can use them as long they are in a fbx/png/jpg/tga file type :slight_smile:

Here are some good sites for assets:
://www.blendswap/
:///
://texturelib/#!/category/?path=/Textures/rock/stones

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Thanks! Will check all those out!

It is great to see mods helping us out so much even though I ask completely newbie questions.

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[QUOTE=;102715]
Since the unity asset store has a lot, can I use those or are they only for unity?

Just as a side note, I got a few of the unity .fbx and used them in my UE4 scene. It’s pretty easy.

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You might also want to check out cg textures.

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cg textures? by that do you just mean textures?

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www.cgtextures

Its a site that has a pretty large catalogue of royalty-free textures for use in VFX, games etc. We use it here all the time. You do have to pay for a premium account, but you can get all the images at a respectable resolution for free.

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Oh, forgot to add the link from cgtextures to my list above :stuck_out_tongue: Yeah, I also get my textures from there

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Thanks! Will check it out for sure