Monday, August 22, 2016

Pyramid Scene in UE4

Here you can see a video of the Pyramid scene from the previous post:



There are many improvements in this new engine version. Aside the new features like textured voxels and procedural materials, we invested a big deal of time in the quality of the experience. There is still some pop-in, which is coming from a little bug in the meta-material layer. Aside from that the LOD changes are pretty stable and unnoticeable for the most part. The use of UV-mapped voxels also helps minimize the pop-in.

Another old problem area was the replanting of procedural flora (and other objects) every time there was an edit. The new instancing system provides a stable representation that is able to transfer the flora planting into the new geometry. Only edits that really affect the planted instances result in a visual change.

The destruction and building shown here is controlled by blueprints inside UE4. You could easily switch the bombs by a pickax or by rockets.

12 comments:

  1. Do you have any plans to support material blending?

    http://iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm

    For instance, snow makes sense, though sometimes rock doesn't.

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    Replies
    1. It already supports material blending. It is up to the artist to configure so, that may explain some hard boundaries that appear in some places. If you look carefully specially in the natural areas, you will see a lot of blending.

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  2. Can we have a demo :) to play around?

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    Replies
    1. Demos are coming in a few days from now. You can subscribe to the Voxel Farm newsletter at the bottom of voxelfarm.com if you want to get a notification when the demos are out.

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    2. I... was not expecting demos to be getting released anytime soon, this is a pleasant surprise =D.

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  3. Will this scene be included in the Version 3 update that you're soon to release, Miguel?

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    Replies
    1. We'll make the scene available for sure, but still not clear where/when it will appear. For size concerns we only get to package one scene along with the example in the SDK.

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  4. I just tried the turtle demo recently added to site and... "Aside from that the LOD changes are pretty stable and unnoticeable for the most part" > saying this is little bit misleading, because the LOD changes are noticeable a lot. On trees and terrain as well.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for trying it out.

      This turtle demo you ran was built a while ago, before these fixes came in. Check the date of the EXE in your hard drive, it is from May 2016. This predates my post by more than 3 months.

      Like you said, the LOD changes are more noticeable in this build from May, and they can be seen in the video I posted at that time.

      The pyramid demo is not finished, we are still improving the texturing. Once you get a demo with these improvements you will be able to accurately comment on them.

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    2. OK. Sorry then for this comment. I also forgot to say that I'm in common I'm blown away from those demos (also with old LOD). I mean the performance/quality is so great. I don't have high end rig, and despite that, for example, the Alien demo runs perfect.... and its beautiful... After playing around, I can't go back to No Man's sky :D.

      P.S. The asteroid demo has on other hand has bad fps. But I believe the renderer is not optimized.

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    3. One thing that I miss (and I can't explain it it smart words) is the feeling of DEPTH. Even there are objects near and there are objects far away, the end result on screen feels flat. I guess this has to do with lightning / color depth, orsmth. Maybe this is also taken care of in upcoming demo.

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