I made a lof of content for UDK in the last +1.5 year
Today I was importing my content made for UDK units in UE4 to check the scale change in UE4.
I know the unit have changed and they say it’s 1uu=1cm
When I made some things in Maya using the old UDK scale as reference to make it feel right in VR UDK I had do scale things by 2. (I was using the 96 unit thing)
Now in UE4 I believe using x3 looks right.
So From UDK to UE4 I did x1.5 What are your views and experience on the subject ?
Did you also get to the 1.5 ?
Scale is actually more of an issue in VR than regular since the distance between the eyes is true to real world vales.
If you scale the world up bigger without scaling up the eye distance, it will feel off.
The best bet is to use as close to real-world scale as possible to start with, and that will give you a good basis to calibrate your setup and make any adjustments you feel you want for your VR experience.
Let me know if you have any problems getting your scale to feel right!
Im trying to recreate the room as a way to learn ue4 and modelling but i ran into a problem straight away, the scale is off, i measured it in cm and set everything the same in the editor but i can’t even walk through the door as the player is too big?
You’d think with vr on the way they would have made the default scales true to life, making uu cm was a good start but the rest needs to follow, hopefully that will happen soon but in the meantime what can we do to fix it?
@Magneto
Well that’s the thing, how did you define your player size ? The pawn in UE can be at the wrong size.
What helped me put things to scale was not about the room it was about the pawn size. "yes but how to you compare the pawn size if you don’t have a room ?"
Well, make a flat surface and add another pawn of what I call a pawn shell : a static mesh of your pawn. (a statue in a way)
It’s a great way to make sure your eyes are at the same height etc…
Having a door frame or a table is always tricky to estimate. You can’t be wrong when you are nose to nose with yourself
Im new to ue4 so i have no idea how to set the player to the correct scale etc, i’ve only done a bit of mapping and texture work in the past so any help would be appreciated.
Ideally ue4 should have a default vr project set up with the correct scale, walk speed and a basic human avatar so you can see your self, until then i think many will struggle, especially those new to it who may only be interesting in creating their own virtual space for fun.
Your right, but this is too early…
The people that have been using UE4 since beta and are interested in VR probably have things working already, it’s hard to ask for the work of other you know…
I am, like most of the users here new to EU4, I haven’t started importing characters or even look at the new pipeline.
So I can’t help you there (yet).
With UDk it was easier in a sense that there were some full characters from Unreal Tournament within the resources to start tinkering from and use as a reference.
BUT there is a manequin thing that help in the creation of character, it’s a Maya (and maybe 3ds max) plugin.
You should look into it (I didn’t). There are cool official video on it on their YouTube channel
I know it’s a good starting point, no rigging to do, ready to animate etc…
I won’t use it, because all my assets are ready, but you probably should, if you are new to all that.
You know, making characters and animation require a whole different set of skills than making environment and all.
I am a very special case as I can do pretty much everything (not so badly… ^_^)
Teaming up with someone is a great way to improve, as he will know things you don’t and you will know thing he doesn’t, it’s a very powerful learning dynamic !
With VR I think most people want to feel like they have been transported into the world we create. This is why Oculus and Valve OpenVR settings profiles allow the user to specify their real world height and IPD. You might have a user that is 5’4" (1.63m) and another that is 6’4" (1.93m). However, these differences in human heights do not prevent us from building architecture in real life and we should approach VR architecture the same way.
I think the answer is, for VR applications, to not eyeball your scales, or snap them to easy whole numbers (200 unit high walls for example) but to build them as close to real life scales as possible. Treat your dimensions as if your level were architectural blueprints that construction workers will use to build your level in the real world to be used as a movie set or theme park attraction.
This is a matter of opinion but I believe the first VR games should respect the players profile height and IPD. If you override those it should be for a very specific reason (perhaps your narrative calls for you to posses the body of someone else in a “Being John Malkavitch” style. However, I don’t think we should do what is commonly done in videogames which is to make every player a 7"4 master chief.
On a similar note, as the Sony Morpheus guys say “head tracking is law”. You don’t talk about fight club and you don’t clip positional head tracking. With positional tracking players will be able to move their avatar’s heads and torsos and get their “eyes” in locations they normally wouldn’t be able to in a traditional game (inside walls and other meshes). Instead of clipping the camera to a few inches from the wall you’ll have to do something else. (show black nothing, show static, render the world as an x-ray) or you could make the bounding box around the avatar big enough that the player can’t lean far enough to get their head inside a wall.
TL;DR – If you are making a true VR experience you can no longer rely on the bag of tricks built up during the last several years of first person shooters.
On my project though, because I don’t have any real world reference (it a total created world) the only reference I could have was… me ^^
So I created an avatar, my size, and put it in front of my otherself and see if the scale and the feel of it “felt” right.
I actually extended my arm and try to grab my otherself head, and “see” if my real arm distance were right.
Quite a fun experience ^^
The sample content has some example maps with animated characters. You could use that as a starting point for scale. I would not mess with eye separation too much, I’ve seen some really bad Unity demos where the scale of things is way off. I would just use the scaling tool and shrink/enlarge objects as needed.
Then take the rift off your face to see if an object a similar distance looks the same in real life. (like your hand as an example)
I created a demo where you shrink down to the size of a bug. To get this shrinking feeling, I had to change ipd and head model size as the viewer shrinks relative to the world size. I found that these HMD controls were not exposed to the blueprint system so I added them. Here are my edits: https://github.com/uclatommy/UnrealEngine/commit/4c891e5cbf223a2d437922460c395d582d5b37fc
If anyone can suggest a way to do this without modifying the engine code, please let me know. Could I have created a custom class to handle this or is it appropriate to modify the engine to gain this capability?
