using shading, raytracing, and other engine components

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi all,

I’m a newbie here, so apologies for any obvious questions. I’m an academic working on modeling forest dynamics. I’d love to make use of the shading, raytracing, and other algorithms in my own models. Is that possible, to just use certain UE engine components? Or, is there another way I might go about thinking about this?

Thanks!

2

It depends on what you actually want to do—if you watch the GDC Open World Kite Demo video, they go through how they made it and what they did to make a large map with forests and stuff. That demo will also soon be available when 4.8 is released.

3

thanks for the reply. i did see the video - really amazing stuff, and hence my interest in using it. I’d really like to be able to use, for example, their ray tracing engine to compute shadows for objects, etc. Is there some sort of API I can access? Also looks like source code is available, no? Again, apologies for the basic questions - I haven’t used game engines before, so I don’t know the ins and outs of them yet.

4

Source code is available, the Distance Field Ray Traced Shadows is already a part of the game, the only major thing that’s in that demo is the Distance Field GI which will come with 4.8