In this post I will keep updating a list of what’s being made for next version of UNIBLOCKS (for the next update main focus will be on improving materials and expanding material library for PRO version plus adding new template building or two). Here it is, with most recent stuff on top:
- March 8th: WIP two new simple blueprint - doorframe and windowsill; those will be simple to cut the time for this release, but with time new design features should arrive. Also, added some kind of “stone forest” to the center of that new hovering block/house:
- March 3rd: Spend a whole hour working on Uniblocks today, yay! Things started to settle down and manageable pace allows me to get back to work, now in Serbia oO (previously it was Georgia).
- Feb 26: Few dev news for a week or so - relocating to a different country, a lot of fuss to deal with (register new entrepreneurship, find cheap apartments, working permits, etc…).
- Feb 21: Finished materials & layout of that new “hovering block” building prefab.
- Feb 19: Spend whole day adding new materials to that hovering square/block building from the devzone - looks nice! It was a mistake to release UNIBLOCKS PRO with basic/weak material library… soon to be fixed, at least. Here are some screenshots:
- Feb 17: Found good appliance for five brickwork patterns - in combination with new randomized color bricks they looks fitting, one pattern for each brick color. Also realized that I’m still missing tiles of few types (concrete and ceramic) - working on those, will finish tomorrow I hope. And that will be finally it for materials - in a couple of weeks (early March) update will be ready for release, remaining tasks are to apply those new materials to existing prefab buildings to make them better + add few useful joint types to BuildKit + add cladding for those new joint types to BP_UB_Cladding blueprint + update demo map a bit with new materials and building + update docs map with new materials and their nuances & usage tricks + add mentioned new blocks (and hide 2/3 or joint and rim blocks into variants of basic blocks, with friendly naming pattern, to make BuildKit much more compact to be ready to fit diagonal blocks update (v7?)).
- Feb 15 & 16: Noticed that brickwork materials are heavy (80MB VRAM on average) due to overcomplicated setup for those not that actual materials. Reworked all of them to be bit more crude but 40MB VRAM or less plus each brickwork color (orange/red/white/gray) now has randomized variant with color/brightness variations per brick (much more useful for archviz). Not sure what to do with remaining five brickwork materials that using patterns (white + orange bricks) - looks very … soviet… not sure those are useful for Uniblocks after all, probably to be removed or maybe good idea to modernize those struck me.
- Feb 14: Blueprint “BP_UB_Plinth” now has mods for “U-turn” pieces - now those turns can be rounded and chamfered. And in Build_Kit_v6 there will be two new scalable rim blocks for those new U-turns plinth pieces to match.
- Feb 13: Tried to add shadow casting feature for frosted glass (semi-transparent shadows) - hacky way (by using dithered shadow) somewhat working, but not with triplanar UVs… will left it like that + explain in docs use cases. Also added same dithered semi-transparent shadow hack to default glass shader (M_UB_glass_fast), so it can do that (but with distance dithering noise becomes way too prominent, so use with caution). Theoretically, there is a way to enable ray tracing shadows in project settings + some CVars + some settings in each light to cast volumetric shadows… but all that is outside of asset pack capabilities, it’s a per-project stuff.
Also, tried to get rid of frosted glass issue with objects in front of it being included in frost effect (thanks for the author of this thread), but no luck - solution is working, but produces severe new bug (blurring disappears at the bottom/left/right sides of the screen, something screen-space or depth related)… - Feb 12: Minor improvements in blueprint “BP_UB_Plinth” - fixed wrong bending radius for “Plank” design turns radius 0.5m (it was not matching wall curvature), changed height of this “Plank” design preset (from 5cm to 10cm to make it feel right).
- Feb 11: Added ~10 wooden materials - parquet and plain wood; practically everything www.polyhaven.com patreon subscription can offer about modern looking wooden surfaces.
- Feb 10: Frosted glass shader done - not exactly happy with it (very performance costly, prone to visual artifacts (including objects in front of it into frosted glass effect), not casting opaque shadows from frosted parts) but at least something, maybe it can be polished into something better with time.
Also, in blueprint “BP_UB_Plinth” added option “Vertical flip” - useful when you want to select and mirror all plinth pieces from the floor to the ceiling.
The only remaining materials to make are wooden - parquet and plain wood pattern for decorative beams. - Feb 9: Added four terrazzo concrete materials, also started adding frosted/milk glass shader (ugh, this feature is quite fps hungry).
- Feb 7: Blueprint “BP_UB_Separator” now has two extra options in the “Type” (ex “Thickness”) drop down list: “Seam indeted” and “Seam bulging” - those narrow (5mm wide) lines have tweaked normals to appear indented/bulging so any material on them will have this shading; useful for adding concrete/metal seams, obviously. It also have “Amount X” option to have multiple instances (rarely useful, but sometimes it fits, especially for seams). Blueprint “BP_UB_Window_beam” has adjustable shift distance, when “Shift” checkbox is ON (useful for precise off-grid positioning here and there).
- Feb 6th: Added a few best fitting materials from my “Real Materials” series (and reworked them to use UV cell bombing, where possible).
- Feb 5th: All old materials were reworked - most of them will look better. Next is to add few new materials - pavement & wall tiles, some modern surfaces for the cladding blueprint, gravel, etc. Also, reworked previously removed MI_UBT_concrete_aged_1 & 2 materials (and added two more on top of that), sometimes those are fitting for flowerbeds or for style.
- Feb 4th: Wallpapers rework is done. Simple “pure”, “pastel” and “soft” colorful materials now looks like colorful plaster surfaces.
- Feb 1st: Started reworking wallpapers by simply removing all 30 of them (too simple), instead I will create 5-10 new ones, with more art and style.
- Feb 1st: Reworked carpets - all 30 materials now have cozy appearance thanks to proper normal + AO maps from real carpet (previously there was a simple noise texture).
- Jan 31: Still doing material convertion - seems that quite a bit of improvements and rework is needed for all of 194+ materials plus some new. Heh, this update will be beefy when it’s done.
- Jan 27: Reworked few concrete materials for new cell bombing UVs feature - on average it gives 25% less shader instructions and 25% less VRAM usage due to simpler material setup (mostly just one layer + overlay, using same diffuse texture). For tiles/brickwork/carpets/wallpapers cell bombing UVs didn’t fit, but concrete, metal and plaster materials will benefit from this (need to rework like 40+ materials, a couple of days).
- Jan 25: At first glance it works - triplanar UVs (with dithering for seams) plus cell-bombing UVs (also with dithering over seams) for layers 1-2-3 (can be turned ON/OFF per layer). Main issue was with normals - correcting those after triplanar is tricky, but on top of that there is a need for another correction for cell-bombing random rotation… solution was found, hope it will hold.
- Jan 24: Trying to add new feature to M_UB_Main shader - anti-tiling UVs distortion (“Cell-bombing”) and hide all extra options for each texture map under checkbox, so up to 25% performance boost for material, made from ideally fitting set of texture maps that don’t need any adjustments. Parallax Occlusion Mapping feature removed from this shader (if you need POM its available in previously mentioned M_UB_Main_triplanar_with_POM shader).
- Jan 23: Added new materials MI_UBT_concrete_common 2 & 3
- Jan 22: Reworked materials MI_UBT_concrete_painted_1 & 2, materials "MI_UBT_concrete_aged_1 & 2 were removed (both looks bad), added new materials “MI_UBT_concrete_planks” plus MI_UBT_concrete_smooth 2 & 3 and MI_UBT_concrete_rough 2 and MI_UBT_concrete_painted_3.
- Jan 21: Reworked material MI_UBT_concrete_dark
- Jan 20: Reworked materials MI_UBT_concrete_smooth and MI_UBT_concrete_rough
- Jan 19: Reworked weakest materials in library - MI_UBT_concrete_common and MI_UBT_concrete_bright, now those are looking decent.
- Jan 19: M_UB_Main shader - changed order of “Desaturation” and “Diffuse tweak” parameters so color tweaking can be done after desaturation of native diffuse texture colors, purely for convenience. Plus hue & saturation parameters now hidden under checkboxes to save performance when they’re not used.
- Jan 18: BP_UB_Pillar mesh colliders now have 3x lower polycount.
- Jan 17: BP_UB_Flowerbed blueprint now uses new M_UB_Main_triplanar_with_POM shader with POM for its default ground material (it’s brown ground now instead of grass), so relief of ground level is set to be much more prominent.
- Jan 17: BP_UB_Flowerbed blueprint optimized, now it uses many times less instances inside for large size flowerbeds (same as window beam blueprint - using stretching instead of filling space with 0.5m instances). Also reduced polycount for collider meshes, up to 3 times.
- Jan 16: BP_UB_WIndow_beam blueprint was optimized, previously it instancing 0.5m beam piece to form beam, now it’s about stretching just one middle part of the beam to fit any length, plus start and end beam pieces.
- Jan 14: BP_UB_Pillar blueprint minimal height is 0.5m now to fix disconnection issues between pieces at small thickness. Also fixed pillars Nanite damage/disappearing geometry at distance on small pillars.
- Jan 12: Added shader M_UB_Main_triplanar_with_POM - this is a backport of a new triplanar material nodes from UE 5.7, with triplanar UVs capable to work with Parallax Occlusion Mapping, with fixed typical triplanar mirroring for text on textures, with dithering on triplanar UV seams. Unfortunately, this triplanar node does poor blending on rounded building pieces so I didn’t use it in M_UB_Main shader to replace previous triplanar UV solution, creating this dedicated new shader instead.
- Jan 10: Considered to get rid of “Load asset blocking” node in all blueprints to reduce hitches when loading an UNIBLOCKS house at runtme. But dropped this idea - there will be mother of all hitches anyway because hundreds to thousands of static mesh pieces to load and update Lumen lighting, on top of assembling hundreds of complicated blueprints in Events Graph with Load asset async. Let me know if you have different expertise on this topic.
- Jan 10: Fix for BP_UB_Door_sliding blueprint - opening trigger now even on both sides in mirrored mode.
FREE version will also receive all those small bugfixes and improvements. Few reworked materials will made it there too.