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Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

arstechnica.com

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Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#81

Post by pavlov »

rsaarelm wrote: post #79

At this point, seeing this kind of extremely high production value animation used to enact this kind of fantasy scene instantly makes me think of hackneyed backstory and plot focus-group optimized to death to appeal to slightly dull 14-year-olds. You don't throw out that sort of development budget to try out something with even a hint of narrative experimentalness, and you can always rely on there being kids with dis…

"This looks very well done, it's probably bad" is a strange heuristic to have.

It's the same for Hollywood movies, isn't it?

When the producers want to focus your attention on how expensive and uniquely complicated a game or movie production was, that's a sign that the actual content was a secondary concern.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#82

Post by robterrell »

laserDinosaur wrote: post #21

The bit where he made a change to the source code, let it recompile on it's own, got a little alert in the editor when it finished and then had the change apply all without restarting the engine...WOW!

Unity does this now. You can recompile a file while your game is playing in the editor, and the running code is replaced. And I almost never use it -- I should figure out why that is.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#83

Post by asianexpress »

teamonkey wrote: post #62
asianexpress wrote: post #42

In a way, this system reminds me of Light Table[1] in its ability to change some code/settings and get instant feedback. It totally changes the way people create content because it becomes so much more accessible and so much faster to see changes -- you can play around with a lot of different approaches more quickly, resulting in more room for experimentation. Pretty amazing stuff! Really curious to see the tools tha…

Being able to compile code and reload it while the engine is running is something that has existed in many engines for several years. What's cool here is that the engine keeps running while editing and compiling, then it auto-reloads and pushes the changes when compiled.

Yeah definitely -- I guess what I meant was that there's now an interface to manipulate code, without having to touch code, and then it automatically goes through the process you mentioned

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#84

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

TrevorJ wrote: post #6

Coming from a film background, it is clear there is a lot of conflation happening in these articles between light that 'behaves' like it would in the real world, and 'good' lighting. That is why you get quotes like in this article 'I light my scene by dropping a sun in'. In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally. Sure, this gives you more realistic…

The quote is about overcoming a technical constraint that forces laborious placing of secondary lights to restore behavior that you get for free in the physical world.

It's not claiming that design or art in lighting is unnecessary. It's freaking obvious that's necessary.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#85

Post by sjm »

psykotic wrote: post #26
malexw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Jason Gregory's "Game Engine Architecture" cover-to-cover and I'd highly recommend it for someone new to the industry who's interested in learning about game development. Gregory is a developer at Naughty Dog (Uncharted series). http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

Indeed. Having been in the game industry for close to a decade now (apropos of this thread, my first job was at Epic Games as an engine programmer working on UE2 and UE3), I can't say I personally learned a lot from Gregory's book (outside of some tidbits on character animation, where the book is especially strong), but I can say that it's the best book on the subject I've read. An older book like Eberly's 3D Game En…

Game Engine Architecture and Real-Time Collision Detection were both prescribed material in my games technology course (done as a double major with CS). Cool to hear that they're recommended by industry folk :) Gregory's book is especially good and taught me a lot. +1!

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#87

Post by zerd »

robterrell wrote: post #82
laserDinosaur wrote: post #21

The bit where he made a change to the source code, let it recompile on it's own, got a little alert in the editor when it finished and then had the change apply all without restarting the engine...WOW!

Unity does this now. You can recompile a file while your game is playing in the editor, and the running code is replaced. And I almost never use it -- I should figure out why that is.

For C++? That's the impressive part.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#88

Post by projectileboy »

rsaarelm wrote: post #79

At this point, seeing this kind of extremely high production value animation used to enact this kind of fantasy scene instantly makes me think of hackneyed backstory and plot focus-group optimized to death to appeal to slightly dull 14-year-olds. You don't throw out that sort of development budget to try out something with even a hint of narrative experimentalness, and you can always rely on there being kids with dis…

I see what you're saying, but the target audience here is the game development community. The animation was clearly designed to show various capabilities: indoor lighting, outdoor lighting, outdoor scenes, interiors with various materials, fluids, etc. etc. As with movies, it's still up to the team to use the tool to create a worthwhile experience.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#89

Post by chipsy »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #84
TrevorJ wrote: post #6

Coming from a film background, it is clear there is a lot of conflation happening in these articles between light that 'behaves' like it would in the real world, and 'good' lighting. That is why you get quotes like in this article 'I light my scene by dropping a sun in'. In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally. Sure, this gives you more realistic…

The quote is about overcoming a technical constraint that forces laborious placing of secondary lights to restore behavior that you get for free in the physical world. It's not claiming that design or art in lighting is unnecessary. It's freaking obvious that's necessary.

To elaborate: Only about a decade ago, 3D game lights were almost uniformly "additive spheres" supplemented with some ambient or directional light. They didn't bounce or diffuse properly. Environments and characters each had separate lighting treatments, making the characters look like "cut outs" in most circumstances. Reflective surfaces were a special case feature, and most details could only be represented with a cleverly painted texture. Everything was faked, and as such, the art of a lot of these games had to hew closely to tech limitations.

Between then and now we've gradually gained enough GPU power to move towards a unified, real-time lighting model with most of the desired real-world properties. Although limits still exist, we can finally start addressing lighting primarily from the designer's perspective.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#90

Post by ISeemToBeAVerb »

daenz wrote: post #52
MartinCron wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a still photographer who sometimes works with multiple off-camera lights (strobist-style) I would love to be able to experiment in software to see a very close approximation of how a setup would look.

I'm not aware of any photographer-centric photorealistic 3d apps, but that sounds like a potential niche business! Might be worth exploring.

I have a plugin for Cinema 4D called "HDRI Studio Kit" that is basically a set of predefined studio lights and lighting setups. Makes it very simple to light objects using traditional photographic methods. You have various tent setups, soft-boxes, umbrella lights, etc...
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