Add the ability to smooth vertex colors and landscape painting
Allow vertex painting on different LODs
Add vertex painting features to static mesh viewer with the ability to override all instances
Optimize BlendAngleCorrectedNormals material function - the results are the same as RNM, and RNM uses 2 less instructions
Blueprint node to convert float to string and make percentage/decimal calculations
Allow colors and constants to be linked to a master swatches panel so they can be changed between multiple materials on the fly, without resorting to creating MPCs for the purpose
Isolate mode (for instance, if you only want to see the skybox, but nothing else)
Allow base LODs to be reimported from the static mesh editor
Simplygon is gone? Auto-generate LOD option would be nice, especially one that respects UV seams
To remove the expense of rendering normals on top of and underneath the clear coat, why not allow users to select one or the other, and remove the overhead?
A basic vector field maker would be nice (for those of us who are stuck with Blender)
Relative nodes list when actor references are plugged into variable inputs (For vector: ActorWorldLocation. For boolean, IsInAir? Etc.)
Vertex lighting options (Can seriously help out mobile devs, or just for fun!)
Scene capture actors automatically stop rendering when textures are not called, and do not render more than the necessary texture size (for things like portals)
Automatically transform vector displacement to smooth per-pixel normals, option in editor to toggle on or off
Color ramp shading model. Can be used as debugging tool to separate light from shadow and aid lighting artists.
Deferred iridescence shading model… OK, this doesn’t help anybody, but it would be SO cool!
Some others I thought of:
Simple vector shapes in UMG (rounded corners for custom shapes, shape outlining, transformation and animation, doesn’t need to happen all at once)
Bring back dominant directional light for cheaper translucent lighting models
Option to subdivide models further to generate higher LOD
Basic model and texture painting in-engine. If you need to fix a small mistake, or just test basic colors on a test character, it shouldn’t have to require going back and forth between Photoshop, the modeling program, and a separate painting program in order to do it.
Basic modeling in-engine. Now I know modeling is a whole other beast, but stuff like BSP walls and floors, icospheres, and block meshes with adjustables would be nice. The ability to fill holes or fix UVs (seam placement, unwrap, move islands around, scale it so density is averages), set vertex angles (for foliage meshes), and harden/soften edges would be extremely helpful, and avoid going back to Maya or 3DS Max or Blender just to fix one polygon is a bit inundated. And yes, this happened to me multiple times.
None of these things are really WOW, people will want to buy the engine over, but they will help streamline the development process so much. UE4 is already WAY more user friendly than UDK. Things like this would definitely help save a lot of time. Recently I’ve been having trouble with vertex painting because I didn’t import the models with vertex painting, and I’m constantly reimporting new LODs, which completely screws up the vertex paint. I like painting on my models with the material already there so I can make adjustments according to what looks best. But with LODs, that’s really not possible.
Hi I am a Character Artist and I have been in the industry for five years now (HiRezStudios on Smite the entire time). I saw this post and read it and had to add to the modeling part.
I feel that modeling in engine is the next step and could save me and every artist out there a lot of time. I recently got a HTC Vive because I know that within a few years modeling could be done entirely in vr.
I think that there is a huge market for this and I think that Ue4 could have a modeling plugin that would save days if not weeks off of the modeling process.
I tryed the new Vive environment “set dressing” plugin and wasnt that impressed. The idea is there but the execution is bad.
To add to the post of feature requests I think that there needs to be a maya or max scale of modeling tools within the engine Everything from extrusions, to vertex merging and Uv editing and even normal mapping.
Why do it in other programs? seems silly all this importing and exporting
I currently can do an entire Hipoly in zbrush but I would give that up for VR modeling.
Please Epic if you read this contact me I would love to help build such a set of tools (im not a programmer but I use the tools and know what is needed) and or also help with the current set dressing tool as its super clunky. lasers that never turn off and having a traditional universal tool in VR when your hand does all the rotation needed
Super excited though thanks
Modeling in UE4 is like asking for graphic design features in a video editor. There are so much tools required for modeling it’s very easy to get out of hand if all that stuff was crammed inside UE4, which is already insanely complicated and split up between Materials, Blueprints, a ton of object classes, Matinee, Cascade, AI behavior trees, UMG, and the list goes on and on. If you added fully-featured modeling to all that, Epic would no longer be working on a game engine anymore, but an entire production suite. I only want some basic functions that would save time from having to go into a modeling program for small changes, like filling holes, basic UV functions, more robust vertex painting, stuff like that. That way instead of having to fret about all these things before hand, then import to the engine with poor results, then go back to the modeling program and re-export/re-import to see if it works, anything to tone down that kind of back and forth would be great.
For instance, it would be awesome if I could authorize cloth inside of Unreal again! This feature was a proprietary solution in UDK with CPU skinned clothing, but Apex clothing on the GPU requires either 3DS Max, Maya, or Nvidia’s godawful standalone tool where my character imports at a 90 degree angle with no option to reorient, I can’t move the camera when painting weights, and there are so many options I just get confused what’s important and necessary to get cloth on the character and in the game. If Epic can work with NVIDIA to get an authorizing tool inside of Unreal, then this would be a HUGE improvement to the current system of “you need to pay Autodesk $250 a month for that feature, and by the way we got rid of ours.”
Everyone’s riding the VR train now. Call me conservative, but there are very small improvements that can be made just with what we have and massively improve the user experience, and it should be done before we all get caught up in VR. For instance, using the mouse to move the camera while vertex or landscape painting will also paint colors/weights. Moving the camera should automatically disable painting until the camera is repositioned. I’ve been waiting for that to be fixed for over a year! Some mesh painting in UE4’s static mesh browser would be amazing as well. Vertex painting, or better yet texture painting for masks! Again, these are all things that UE4 can already do, it would just be a lot nicer if it did it in different areas of the engine and with slightly expanded functionality. So, UMG already supports vector squares, but rounded corners and gradients with outline strokes would be awesome! This is something that would be a lot nicer as a vector than a texture.
and having a traditional universal tool in VR when your hand does all the rotation needed