What are the "Limits" of UE4?

anonymous_user_b0cf5855 · April 16, 2016, 8:16pm

;513279:

-USB will become obsolete(it already is), FBX has a less chance of that, it’s the main format from Autodesk which is the biggest 3D software company, so it’ll be the standard until something better comes along, it offers the most compatibility for geometry, materials, and animation in one format. It wouldn’t be difficult for a better format to be made, the issue is if the main programs would choose to support that format which is why FBX is probably going to remain for a long time. OBJ is another common format that is still used very often, UE4 supports that as well.

-Yes, it’s much easier to place your meshes in a program like 3ds Max or Maya than it is in UE4, so the deal is that if you were able easily match your object placement as it is in 3ds Max/Maya then it makes the process much easier. But again, that’s just for the meshes and object placement, there’s other things to keep in mind that you can only do in UE4 like configuring LOD’s and doing lighting and materials. With UE4 the viewport is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but you still have to do some extra stuff, the biggest challenge is building lighting, which is where it renders the lighting and saves it to a lightmap texture, it’s a real pain to set up each mesh to work properly with lightmaps and once it’s set up you have to render the lighting which takes hours–for a large map you might have too much stuff to even do that because it has to load everything into memory, which that might require using a dynamic lighting setup instead of lightmaps which won’t look as good. That’s why in the future there will be a dynamic global illumination system that will provide much nicer looking dynamic lighting. UE4 originally had a dynamic GI system called SVOGI but it was removed before release because the performance was not good enough. With something like SVOGI you would get your lighting results instantly.

-Quadro is designed to improve performance in something like the Maya/3ds Max viewport, particularly for scenes that have lots of stuff. However, they aren’t very fast, and it has limited advantage outside of that use. You can get excellent performance with a Geforce card in Maya/3ds Max for a much lower cost, and for things like a video game the gaming cards perform much better than a Quadro. Also, there are GPU renderers like VrayRT, iRay, RedShift, etc. that render much faster with a gaming card than they do with something like a Quadro or a Tesla card. Simply put–Geforce is faster, better priced, and works better in most cases.
As for CPU, I would go for something with a higher clock speed, the issue with Xeons is that they’re built for multi-tasking and reliability, whereas something like the i7 processors are built for speed. The Xeon would be great for rendering or for baking the lightmaps in UE4 but not as good for actually running the game. The cost of Xeons is also not great, you pay much more for the performance than you do with an i7 processor, the deal though is that you could build a faster Xeon system than the fastest i7 system as long as you have enough money. Again, I would wait a bit because new processors and graphics cards are coming very soon.

-Right, in a game engine it’s all optimized to run well in real-time, not for graphical accuracy so there’s many areas that just aren’t as good.

-Rendering in 3ds Max/Maya is easier, since you don’t have to concern yourself with making things interactive or getting workarounds for things like lighting and other effects, but you do have to deal with render settings when you use Mental Ray or Vray or whatever renderer you’re using in 3ds Max/Maya, and of course it renders much slower–I consider it a victory if I can get a frame time to 10-15 minutes but in movies the frame times are much higher, like on the average computer most frame times would take a day or more which is why the visual effects studios have huge render farms.

-Games are still far away from matching what you can do rendering in 3ds Max/Maya. You can certainly get things looking great, and at some point it might even look photorealistic, but it won’t technically be as realistic and accurate though you might not care as long as it looks good to you. There might be a future where rendering in a video game isn’t any different from rendering in a 3D program, but that’s not happening any time soon.

-Right, if you want to use UE4 to just render stuff and don’t care about real-time performance then it becomes much easier, you can render things pretty nicely and there’s quality settings that you can turn up if you don’t care so much about it being real-time. There’s also stuff like Nvidia VXGI which is available for UE4 if you want to try a dynamic global illumination system that you could use and turn up the quality if you don’t are about framerate.

Hey , sorry I did not respond to the discussion sooner; I was away from any type of workstation the previous day.

1a) I see!

Then UE4 will be my destination for this very long project, even if a stronger engine comes along.

Afterall, the FBX has a high chance to remain undisputed and even if it does, I do believe there will be opportunities to convert to a newer format.

Since much of the world uses FBX already (in which developers understand this), developers wouldn’t mindlessly change formats without creating a method to allow conversion between FBX and a newer format(if they ever decide to create and switch over to one).

1b) By USB do you mean flash drives?
Sorry if it is my misunderstanding…I just cant see how the USB port is becoming obsolete?
Every hardware appliance nowadays has USB jacks on one end to allow connection to power, computer, Audio equipment, etc.

-Yes, it’s much easier to place your meshes in a program like 3ds Max or Maya than it is in UE4, so the deal is that if you were able easily match your object placement as it is in 3ds Max/Maya then it makes the process much easier. But again, that’s just for the meshes and object placement, there’s other things to keep in mind that you can only do in UE4 like configuring LOD’s and doing lighting and materials. With UE4 the viewport is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), but you still have to do some extra stuff, the biggest challenge is building lighting, which is where it renders the lighting and saves it to a lightmap texture, it’s a real pain to set up each mesh to work properly with lightmaps and once it’s set up you have to render the lighting which takes hours–for a large map you might have too much stuff to even do that because it has to load everything into memory, which that might require using a dynamic lighting setup instead of lightmaps which won’t look as good. That’s why in the future there will be a dynamic global illumination system that will provide much nicer looking dynamic lighting. UE4 originally had a dynamic GI system called SVOGI but it was removed before release because the performance was not good enough. With something like SVOGI you would get your lighting results instantly.

2a) I see so the main trade off is…

      **UE4**

 **Pros**
 -Real time lighting
 -Can see rendered out models(with life like interactions with wind,etc) 
 as you place assets and world build 

 **Con**
 -Must do all the lighting work before hand to have realtime lighting
 -**If you don’t want to do the work…**
 -Would use dynamic lighting which
 = Doesn’t look as good

In order for dynamic lighting to look better you would use Dynamic GI which
as of right now, doesn’t have a high enough level of performance for use.

VS.

      **3DS/Maya**
 **Pro**
 -Building lighting labor does not need to be done beforehand

 **Con**
 -No real time lighting 
 -No rendered out models(with life like interactions with wind,etc) 
 as you place assets and world build

**2b) ** So essentially, labor has to be done somewhere right?
(Either you…

 -Do the labor beforehand to see what your world looks like real time

Or
-You don’t and you have to press the render button every time you want to see what your world really looks like)

** 2c)** The only change to this process would be in the future if a dynamic GI was released that was able to produce the same quality as building up the light by hand…

Which would allow real time lighting without any of the drawbacks of labor in building the lighting, correct?

-Quadro is designed to improve performance in something like the Maya/3ds Max viewport, particularly for scenes that have lots of stuff. However, they aren’t very fast, and it has limited advantage outside of that use. You can get excellent performance with a Geforce card in Maya/3ds Max for a much lower cost, and for things like a video game the gaming cards perform much better than a Quadro. Also, there are GPU renderers like VrayRT, iRay, RedShift, etc. that render much faster with a gaming card than they do with something like a Quadro or a Tesla card. Simply put–Geforce is faster, better priced, and works better in most cases.
As for CPU, I would go for something with a higher clock speed, the issue with Xeons is that they’re built for multi-tasking and reliability, whereas something like the i7 processors are built for speed. The Xeon would be great for rendering or for baking the lightmaps in UE4 but not as good for actually running the game. The cost of Xeons is also not great, you pay much more for the performance than you do with an i7 processor, the deal though is that you could build a faster Xeon system than the fastest i7 system as long as you have enough money. Again, I would wait a bit because new processors and graphics cards are coming very soon.

3a) Are there any specific information hubs you go to keep up to date the releases and what they are capable of?

3b) Do you think the next new line of CPUs would incorporate the best of both the Xeons and the i7’s?

3c) I’ve read that the Quadros are industry standard more so because they have ECC’s.
Even so…

 **Quadros**
 **Pro**
 -Can improve performance in Maya/3ds Viewport
 -ECC in case of data loss

VS.

 **Con**
 -Ridiculously high price in proportion to the GeForce with similar performance**

**
Thought)** As you see, I just can’t understand how the industry standard (Quadro) is worth?
Is a slight improvement in 3DS/ Maya viewport and ECC really worth that much more money? (Since extra resources spent is multiplied by the amount of computers they have in the studio)

4) When using UE4 for…

**Only Rendering ** Making the level for - cinematic shorts ( w/High level of realism) ]

                                  **VS**

Real-time performance Making the level for
- playability as a game
And/or
-cinematic short( w/lower level realism) ]

Thought) Does one have to still be concerned with the technical problem of “making things interactive or getting workarounds for lighting and other effects?”

5a) Amazing thought though right?
In Unity 3’s latest cinematic “Adam,” apparently all that highly realistic rendering was real time…
If so, its possible something close to what we are imagining might actually be around the doorstep

In case anyone hasn’t seen it, here is the link. https://youtube.com/watch?v=44M7JsKqwow_______________________________________________________________________________

5b) So hypothetically speaking, if game engines become able to render photorealistically, then render farms wouldn’t be necessary anymore right?

 **Because, essentially the thought process is…**

 **A)** We would like Photoreal Cinematic Renders(in which Game Engines are incapable as of yet) 
 = So we **need** to use **3DS Max and Maya**

 **B)** We want faster render times
 =So we purchase and build a **render farm**

Thought) Afterall, hypothetically speaking…

If A) (the need to use 3DS/Maya) was rendered obsolete due to engines like UE4 and Unity3 becoming photoreal in realtime…

Then B) (Render farms) would also become unnecessary correct?

6) Regarding using UE4 to render(at a higher level than its real time counterpart), instead of real time performance…are there any examples of rendering ability of UE4 in which people have used it to create a cinematic of any kind?

Most of the photo real renderings I’ve seen are of a sofa or a single room architect’s preview for their clients.