I keep seeing images of environmental work done with various renderers and I was wondering if it was possible to use any of them with Unreal Engine. I know it would reqiure coding, but I was just wondering if it was possible. One example would be the Yebis renderer.
Technically you could, but it would require a massive amount of work. The renderer is integrated through pretty much all parts of the engine, so there would be many things to do.
It would be nice to have a plugin or something that we could get to push our projects to the next level
Rendering is all about preparing all the different bits of data to all come together.
Those bits include geometry, textures, shaders, light maps, lighting, evironment maps, global illumination, post-processing, and a bunch of other details.
Trying to replace the renderer of the Unreal Engine would be like trying to replace the seating AND engine of a Tesla, yet leave the chassis intact.
You … could … do it, but why?
You can’t just “plug in” a renderer, but everything from light map baking to geometry preparation to shader editing needs to change. You’d have to replace all the editor bits and the building bits and the runtime bits, too.
If you think you can do better than Unreal, I suggest you clone the source code and change the engine to actually make it better instead!
It would have to be a lot more than a plugin. Like I said, it would not be a small task because of how much the renderer is integrated into the engine.
Yeah it seems like it would be a crazy task to handle. I was just wondering how AAA titles that are made in the Unreal Engine get so much detail in comparison to some of the other projects I see here on the forums. Take Arkham Knight for instance. WOW! It looks amazing and it feels massive. Also Fable Legends. Does using C++ over blueprints result in a huge difference in performance?
Adding features to the existing renderer is very much different to completely replacing the renderer. Thats what other companies tend to do, add in required features, and its exactly what I have done. I have added quite a lot to the renderer for my game, but at no point would I ever even consider trying to replace it.
A lot of it is the quality of the assets that you make. Though for Arkham Knight it’s actually Unreal Engine 3 that has been heavily modified, basically they added many of the features that UE4 has like PBR since they started working on the game long before UE4 was ready. Remember Me was a similar case.
They have many artists, with lots of experience, working many hours. The Unreal Engine can already do massively detailed levels, you just have to work hard at it (like you have to do in any engine!)
This includes casting/baking normal maps for finely deteailed/modeled geometry, building carefully crafted LODs, being aware of the environment, lighting, sight lines, and level setup of all player flows, and a bunch of other hard, planning, work, that goes into the $20M+ budges of AAA games (and as I’m sure you know, the high-end AAA games have 10x that budget!)
Game engines are the canvas, paints and palettes, but the artists are who make the artwork. If you don’t have enough artists, or good enough artists, or enough time to let them work, then your game won’t look great.
This is also one of the main differences between Unity and Unreal – Unity doesn’t scale to that level of art pipeline and collaboration. Unreal, by hook or by crook, does. (It’s not painless, from what I hear, but it’s at least possible!)