No worries, it hasn’t happened yet, but should be starting up in 15 minutes or so.
The streams are at 14:00 ET, or 19:00 GMT, so you haven’t missed it yet. The full VOD will be uploaded to Epic’s Youtube channel (youtube.com/unrealengine).
I’d like to know if they use Amazon servers for backend and how much latency will influence gameplay.
Also would like to know the average bone count in character skeleton, if custom skels are used for each class or all of them are using the standard mannequin setup.
Amazing detail…
Great job, I’m interesting of concept art blueprints from Paragon level design project and maybe a little info about the design document, any technical screenshots of the entire project would be very epic, thanks.
A huge number of questions from this thread went unanswered. Is there a Brian Karis or Jordan Walker could pop in here and quickly address some of the character shading questions?
It is not a general purpose anisotropic specular model. The hair shading model is very hair specific. It is an approximation to this paper http://www.eugenedeon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/egsrhair.pdf
I wish I would have seen this question during the stream because we could have switched on a skylight so you could see. The indirect solution is a major approximation and is specific to the hair use case. In fact it will not pick up high frequency lighting information well at all but typically you will want that to be in direct lights anyways. For the typical use case of indirect lighting it is totally adequate. The approximation was inspired by Square’s work on Agni’s Philosophy.
Yes, we have added that feature. More info will be coming.
Could we get a snapshot of how your Hair Material nodes are laid out??
Same goes for the eye material, please?
Sweet! Now I can scrub it for all kinds of sweet details! I hope next week discusses the implementation of Abilities, and how those work!
wow, so impressive
will new shading models be in 4.11?
once again SOOOO IMPRESSIVE
How big are the textures for these characters? Are you using 4k textures for everything?
It seems like it’d be hard to get good performance with this many characters using really high res maps and very complex materials.
From my experience trying to get human characters to look good, even 4k maps for the body tend to look blurry.
I was able to watch it live, and it was a terrific stream. Big thanks to Brian and Jordan for going into a lot of detail and specific minutiae of how things are operating in the engine.
Ooh, is this akin to the system they had where the characters were represented as elongated spheres that were used to project indirect shadows directionally away from the ambient light source (as opposed to non-directional SSAO)? I noticed the characters had soft blob shadows under their feet in one of the trailers that didn’t look like standard SSAO shadowing and was curious what was going on there.
In the Q&A at the end, they mention that each character is given four texture sets (each set has its own normal map and a couple ‘mask’ textures used to define separate materials, AO/cavity, weathering, dirt, etc.). The masks are used in conjunction with their layered material system, so in addition to those 4k textures, the various materials are sampling other assorted tiling texture maps that are using 2k textures. Jordan mentions, however, that if a particular texture set isn’t used for something particularly large or important on a given character (like miscellaneous small accessories), they may scale it down. It’s about an hour and a half in on the youtube video.
Thanks!
Sounds like it’d be insanely hard to make it perform decently.
Here we go 
Nice tech. Looking forward to see more streams and why not slideshows. 
I want those characters real bad. But I wanna play that game even bad
This is rad! I just got the master build off GitHub to play with the new shading models for hair, eyes and cloth. Is it possible for you guys to share examples of the material setup? or just screenshots of the nodes? 
I want to see body and hair materials node structure. can you show it?