Unreal Engine 4.13 Preview

[Fredrum]

The forward renderer supports MSAA, but thats only in master and not in 4.13.

Hi sorry what you mean by it's supported in Master? Can I enable it in 4.12? (for desktop-pc)

[John Alcatraz]

Hi sorry what you mean by it's supported in Master? Can I enable it in 4.12? (for desktop-pc)

Master is what will be 4.14. So no, you won't be able to enable it in 4.12, 4.12 does not have the forward shading.

[Fredrum]

Master is what will be 4.14. So no, you won't be able to enable it in 4.12, 4.12 does not have the forward shading.

Ah ok!
What decides a version to be a 'master'? Every other version?
And why does not every version become 'master'?

[Tim Hobson]

Ah ok!
What decides a version to be a 'master'? Every other version?
And why does not every version become 'master'?

Master is the main branch where the next major release is developed. When this is branched off into something like 4.13, this means there is now a 4.13 release branch and the Master branch continues on now as 4.14 to be developed in.

So at one point every major release was master until it just became branched into its own version.

GitHub gives you access to download and compile this "master" branch to test out things or poke around in what will be in the next major release.

[Fredrum]

Master is the main branch where...

I see now. Thanks that makes sense.

Cheers
Fred

[stucki]

i remember something about contact shadows in 4.13 (had seen a video about it...)
will this not be implemented in 4.13 anymore ?
kind regards
stucki

[astonish]

This update added nearly everything we had to roll ourselves for the project we currently building. UV hit traces, easier material on quad to RenderTargets, a bunch of pose stuff... All we need is a full featured VR forward renderer

[Stephen Ellis]

Expanded notes have been added to the first post in this thread. Please be aware this only touches on some of the updates and new features in this 4.13 Preview. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list, but enough to allow you to test out some of the new functionality in order to help find issues. Full release notes will be available with the 4.13 release in a few weeks.

Cheers

[d_brane]

Great release - so many tasty features!

Line trace rendering in VR seems to be broken - it renders only for the right eye (in two different locations). This also seems to affect WidgetInteraction debug info.

Also I noticed line traces seem to lag behind VR motion controllers - probably because of late update, not sure if this is a regression.

Thanks

EDIT: WidgetInteraction works great

[LordAnt11]

How does the media framework function? I create a source, create a media player, texture for the material, in blueprint open the appropriate source for that media player, play it. I get video but no audio from my video file. Do I have to import the audio as a wav or something still? I hear the audio playing within the media player preview, just not in the game.

[DanielW]

Looking forward for Forward Rendering as well... :P

And why no (official) word about the forward shading, even if experimental?

Tested with the particle effects demo. There are some rendering bugs with forward, but it looks roughly same. Forward is 14% faster in this test here. Not much.

Forward rendering in 4.13 is super early, only the first checkin of many really, and not ready for general use. That's why it's not being announced in this release. I expect it will be ready for use in 4.14.

The only things working in 4.13 are the actual forward rendering of multiple lights, with dynamic shadows from stationary lights on opaque. No MSAA (which is the whole point of forward), no significant performance gains, no blended reflection captures, no shadow receiving on translucency or even support for translucency lighting modes.

No new GI? This is not true? http://9gag.com/gag/aBYzgLD/unreal-e...-body-dynamics

I can't read that without logging into facebook on their site which I have no intention of doing. I'm not aware of any realtime GI related changes.

Can we please get detailed information from DanielW on the new drawMaterialtoRenderTarget stuff? he had an awesome tweet showing a 2d puddle wave sim. Are there going to be docs on this?

Full info with screenshots will be in the 4.13 release notes but for now there's this:

"Drawing to render targets from Blueprint. Blueprint functions can be used to draw materials into render targets. This enables a huge variety of game-specific rendering effects to be implemented without having to modify source code.
The new Blueprint function DrawMaterialToRenderTarget draws a quad filling the destination render target with the EmissiveColor input in the material.
For more advanced drawing to a render target, use Begin/EndDrawCanvasToRenderTarget. These allow multiple draws to a subset of the render target efficiently, as well as font drawing methods through the Canvas object."

Hopefully we can get an example in releasable form for 4.13.

How come volumetric light / fog have been ignored / pushed back again? The one ticket with the single most votes in rendering which was scheduled for July.... ._. really sad.

The answer is... forward rendering

At the moment there's no dynamic AO with forward shading I think, at least in 4.13.

Capsule shadows are the only supported dynamic AO method. SSAO could be made to work but it's super low priority due to SSAO generally being terrible in VR (mismatch between eyes causes strain), which is what the forward renderer is targeted at.

i remember something about contact shadows in 4.13 (had seen a video about it...)
will this not be implemented in 4.13 anymore ?

Contact shadows are usable in 4.13 with the light property ContactShadowLength. They need some more usability work though so we are not announcing them as a feature in this release.

[Maximum-Dev]

https://issues.unrealengine.com/issue/UE-14253

https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...ellation-Issue

If it's not solved does that mean there are only minor improvements in 4.13? or the ticket is simply not updated to "Solved" ?

Can you clarify please?

Thanks!

I'm still interested in an answer. [MENTION=404]DanielW[/MENTION] can you please shine some light?

[John Alcatraz]

Forward rendering in 4.13 is super early, only the first checkin of many really, and not ready for general use. That's why it's not being announced in this release. I expect it will be ready for use in 4.14.

The only things working in 4.13 are the actual forward rendering of multiple lights, with dynamic shadows from stationary lights on opaque. No MSAA (which is the whole point of forward), no significant performance gains, no blended reflection captures, no shadow receiving on translucency or even support for translucency lighting modes.

Capsule shadows are the only supported dynamic AO method. SSAO could be made to work but it's super low priority due to SSAO generally being terrible in VR (mismatch between eyes causes strain), which is what the forward renderer is targeted at.

Thanks for the answer!

I absolutely need SSAO in my VR project, and I never noticed any problems with that, I have it set to lowest quality but TAA works really well with blurring it so much that it still looks great. I've never noticed any difference between the two eyes and SSAO. I really want to use the forward renderer since I need as much performance as possible in VR, but I won't be able to use it if it won't support SSAO. I know I'd have to switch to the gaussian blur when using MSAA instead of TAA, but that's not much of a problem I think.

Are you sure there's any noticeable problem in VR with SSAO? I used it for months now and I'm quite sure I would have noticed if it wouldn't look right. I use SSAO mostly to replace dynamic shadows since they are so expensive, and it's great at faking those shadows with the right settings.

[CleanCut]

Also still very disappointed to see the context menu search issue on macOS doesn't appear to be working still. (UE-29885). Unreal Editor went through all of 4.12, including the previews with this issue and looks like still no fix for a major usability problem on macOS.

THIS! A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS!

Everyone go vote for UE-29885 and UE-29024!!!! Mac and Linux lost the ability for the right-click-context menu in blueprints to auto-focus when 4.11 was introduced. And Epic doesn't seem to care. This affects me constantly.

VOTE!!!

[CleanCut]

Actually i would love to know a bit more about Improvements to Instanced Stereo Rendering

In the livestream today they said that setting improves VR rendering performance by up to ~10%