Just wanted to write an awesome title, but I would also like to voice some concerns with the new material editor. Overall it's a huge improvement: I love the linear color space and complete integration of DX 11. Physically based shading will take some getting used to, but it looks awesome. No more hassling with cubemaps: everything just reflects the way it should!
I attempted a cartoon skin shader with subsurface scattering, and I found the single SSS node to be less than useful. It doesn't seem to take values greater than 1. The results are pleasing of course, but more control would be very nice. I'd like to exaggerate the transmission effect of putting a light between your fingers all over the character, and the default SSS settings just seem too soft and subtle to really notice. UE3's transmission didn't work as nicely, but it did have control to exaggerate the effect. I was also hoping I could make an advanced blend between this and a translucent water shader (been trying to do this since a year ago with UE3, actually), but it seems the material can't blend between translucent and subsurface even if it uses material layers.
Another problem I have is how much dang power is necessary to run this engine! The default chair and tables brings my GT 640 down to 20 frames per second. Deleting everything in the level and staring off into space gives me 29 frames per second. This is the only program where looking at the grid actually caused a noticeable framerate drop. I will have to upgrade my GPU to at least a GTX 660 or 750 Ti to run the editor properly. I know it's a much lesser engine, but just for comparison's sake, DX 9 on UE3 runs silky smooth all the time. Even using a global dynamic light function on everything doesn't cause a slowdown this bad!
Can't wait to see where this engine gets going because it's really, really nice.
I attempted a cartoon skin shader with subsurface scattering, and I found the single SSS node to be less than useful. It doesn't seem to take values greater than 1. The results are pleasing of course, but more control would be very nice. I'd like to exaggerate the transmission effect of putting a light between your fingers all over the character, and the default SSS settings just seem too soft and subtle to really notice. UE3's transmission didn't work as nicely, but it did have control to exaggerate the effect. I was also hoping I could make an advanced blend between this and a translucent water shader (been trying to do this since a year ago with UE3, actually), but it seems the material can't blend between translucent and subsurface even if it uses material layers.
Another problem I have is how much dang power is necessary to run this engine! The default chair and tables brings my GT 640 down to 20 frames per second. Deleting everything in the level and staring off into space gives me 29 frames per second. This is the only program where looking at the grid actually caused a noticeable framerate drop. I will have to upgrade my GPU to at least a GTX 660 or 750 Ti to run the editor properly. I know it's a much lesser engine, but just for comparison's sake, DX 9 on UE3 runs silky smooth all the time. Even using a global dynamic light function on everything doesn't cause a slowdown this bad!
Can't wait to see where this engine gets going because it's really, really nice.
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