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[Blizzard]

Really no point in another thread. all can be kept in one seeing as they wouldn't get much action.

Not sure why the cryengine sdk hasn't been used much for indy developed games. i have never bothered installing it and the though hasn't even crossed my mind.

Well I'll hush after this, but I think both I and Mik feel the same way and have talked about it in the past -- if people start pasting CryEngine 3 stuff in here, someone can be like wow, look at that castle up there, look what UDK can do, maybe it gets posted in another thread, etc. When in reality of course, it was created by CryEngine 3 and not labeled. It's nice inspiration for fantasy stuff, but I think it just lends itself to confusion.

If there is anyone at all interested in CryEngine 3 work or updates, I feel like that would be enough to keep that thread bumped similar to how (._.) posts updates here.

*end opinion*

 

[desu]

Well if anything, it should clearly be labeled as cry engine stuff.

 

[Fezan]

What do you want to do with it? If you're wanting to learn say, basic 3D modeling, you could teach yourself with Blender or a student version of some professional software. Or if you want to make a simple 3D game, you could start with that. If you want to learn a bit of UnrealScript, you could learn about making custom game/pawn types. If you want to just do level layout for a deathmatch level, there's that too.

I think one key thing is deciding what you want to do, even if that's just learning various things. I wrote down a plan for making a game -- not a good game, but just a very simple game that I could complete in a week or so. I'm still on "budget" as far as I know in terms of total time spent on it, but I haven't gone back to work on it more. After the game jam I hope to revisit it.

well i just want to get all of it done in a month and a half...Have a person to do 3d modeling.having to make a small game as a project...But i have no idea what next step to take...ok imported the model into udk from now what..??

and i would love to read your plan!

 

[[Nintex]]

well i just want to get all of it done in a month and a half...Have a person to do 3d modeling.having to make a small game as a project...But i have no idea what next step to take...ok imported the model into udk from now what..??

and i would love to read your plan!

First put on paper, design and write out what you actually want to make.

After that turn those ideas into some prototypes with generic assets. While doing so and seeing progress create a list of assets you need at a minimum to create/develop the actual game. Just do it one step at a time, you can't start building a game from scratch without a plan. It doesn't need to be 100 pages, but you do need at least 1 page with a description of you want to accomplish and what the most vital gameplay elements are.

 

[(._.)]

dis gonna look good

also I'm gonna start this week working on assets for a space ship game being made in unity with some friends.

 

[(._.)]

Mik u got a WIP for what you're workin on? you allowed to ost it?

this is mostly done. need to add a steam generator to the side of the building.

texture and then moving it into UDK will prob happen after this sunday.

 

[(._.)]

just think I need to add more pipes. I want them to be creeping up the side like ivy growing up a building. Need to add a steam generator also and finish off the sides of this building then this models finished.

hope i didn't bother anybody with all these posts ._.

 

[Thunder Monkey]

Keep em coming man!

You're getting damn good at the portion of 3D modeling I hate with a firey passion. Character modeling? I love something fierce. Environment modeling? No thank you.

 

[Tain]

Does anyone here have a lot of experience with the UnrealScript side of things?

I've been kinda sorta considering seeing how an STG would work out in the engine, and am wondering what the best approach to it would be. Or if it would even be worth it (versus just going from the ground up with basic OpenGL stuff). I'd have to not use any of the engine's existing movement logic, and probably most of the collision logic. Are these easy things to avoid? Where would I start?

 

[Blizzard]

Does anyone here have a lot of experience with the UnrealScript side of things?

I've been kinda sorta considering seeing how an STG would work out in the engine, and am wondering what the best approach to it would be. Or if it would even be worth it (versus just going from the ground up with basic OpenGL stuff). I'd have to not use any of the engine's existing movement logic, and probably most of the collision logic. Are these easy things to avoid? Where would I start?

Pardon my ignorance, but STG = overhead shooter, bullet hell kinda game?

I've messed a fair bit with UnrealScript and if you're comfortable with programming it should not be TOO bad to do your own movement. I think there should be some semi-official examples about writing your own game classes and doing custom movement. If I recall correctly you end up making a choice about whether the main thing you're controlling is a Pawn subclass or a (something else) subclass.

Let me know if you do want to try it, and I might be able to google up the examples.

 

[subversus]

there is a lot of interesting stuff to post in Cryengine thread and I wanted to make one but I'm too busy to maintain it and I'm too busy to actually dabble with CE3 editor which makes the thread useless to me. I might do it one day though. Unfortunately I need better programming skills to get something I want out of CE3.

 

[Tain]

Pardon my ignorance, but STG = overhead shooter, bullet hell kinda game?

I've messed a fair bit with UnrealScript and if you're comfortable with programming it should not be TOO bad to do your own movement. I think there should be some semi-official examples about writing your own game classes and doing custom movement. If I recall correctly you end up making a choice about whether the main thing you're controlling is a Pawn subclass or a (something else) subclass.

Let me know if you do want to try it, and I might be able to google up the examples.

Yeah, likely side-view. I've done a few basic UnrealScript tutorials, but I remember the default actor hierarchy being in kind of a flux on Epic's side at the time I was looking into it. It was pretty early in the UDK timeline. It's probably not the best time for me to start with a project like this, but I'll be back to this thread if I decide to!

 

[desu]

just think I need to add more pipes. I want them to be creeping up the side like ivy growing up a building. Need to add a steam generator also and finish off the sides of this building then this models finished.

hope i didn't bother anybody with all these posts ._.

That looks pretty cool .

 

[(._.)]

thanks ^

this is mostly finished.

need to add streetlamps a sidewalk and a few other things.

 

[The M.O.B]

(._.) How many years you've been modeling?

 

[(._.)]

6 months

 

[The M.O.B]

6 months

...........Wow that is amazing for only 6 months of experience.

How many polys are you up to with the entire building?

 

[(._.)]

thanks

128,146 bit high for something like this. drops to 10k when i get rid of the pipes.

all the tools and techniques I use are pretty basic. buildings usually don't require any special knowledge or anything. you just have to plan well to get nice models.

 

[Ether_Snake]

Great stuff in here, nice house too

One thing that is important to understand is that when looking at a gray model, you will tend to add way too many modeled details. Textures and lighting is what does 75% of the "image quality". In fact it is often better to texture than model details. For example, if you model cracks on the surface of the building, it will look very "edgy", and you would never get the richness you'd get from a texture instead.

You are always better off keeping your triangles to break the straight edges (corners, straight roof, etc.), to have interesting volumes and silhouettes. The details and the richness of everything will come from the textures.

It's not so much that a lot of triangles is costly to render or increases the weight of your mesh in memory, sure that's one part of it, but it also makes it longer to model, and more difficult to modify later on. UV mapping will also take more time when there are too many triangles. A mesh should be as simple as possible, so it can be easily manipulated/mapped/modified.

That's why it's important to learn to texture early on, you'll quickly start to realize how much can be done in textures, and how versatile textures can be.

That and lighting together can really speed things up and allow an artist to work on the essential.

Just some tips

 

[Black_Stride]

Well if anything, it should clearly be labeled as cry engine stuff.

Sorry about that to every member of UDK-GAF...(._.) asked for inspiration and those were the shots i though would inspire him/her/it i didnt mean to cause any confusion.....i would have posted pics from Lord of the rings if they would have inspired him/her/it I just didnt think to label them as made in CE3 cuz they were essentially reference pictures.

Again apologies.

thanks ^
this is mostly finished.
need to add streetlamps a sidewalk and a few other things.

You didnt give me your old max files
P.S What are your render settings and whats your rig?


P.P.S I havent found any Tutorials or guides for importing working vehicles with more than four wheels....any help would be appreciated.

Here is the ugly blockout of the vehicle im trying to import...but the middle set of wheels arent working right.

And in case you are wondering what kind o weird vehicle im modeling this is the inspiration:

The game itself is Mass Effect meets Skies of Arcadia in 1970.
the Truck is gonna be used for what in Mass Effect the Mako did....im really frustrated cuz i know its probably easy to get a 6+ wheeled vehicle in UDK, but im just missing it....its probably not helping me that this is a dual project im doing on both UDK and CE3 so im trying to model/attach/group everything to accommodate both engines.

 

[GrizzNKev]

So I just started working with UDK today for fun, and I think I've got some of the basics down, but all of the more detailed tutorials are based on older versions that are lacking quite a few features and tools.

My goal is to create a decent looking outdoor environment, but I can't find anything of quality for that, let alone one that takes into account the more recent additions to the engine. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

[(._.)]

You didnt give me your old max files
P.S What are your render settings and whats your rig?


P.P.S I havent found any Tutorials or guides for importing working vehicles with more than four wheels....any help would be appreciated.

Here is the ugly blockout of the vehicle im trying to import...but the middle set of wheels arent working right.

And in case you are wondering what kind o weird vehicle im modeling this is the inspiration:

The game itself is Mass Effect meets Skies of Arcadia in 1970.
the Truck is gonna be used for what in Mass Effect the Mako did....im really frustrated cuz i know its probably easy to get a 6+ wheeled vehicle in UDK, but im just missing it....its probably not helping me that this is a dual project im doing on both UDK and CE3 so im trying to model/attach/group everything to accommodate both engines.

sorry about that. I will need to go through my stuff and find/zip them up. do you have a drop box account? I can send it to you through there if you still want them.

I just use the default render settings in 3ds max. I use one basic skylight with shadows on and default to light my models. My rig is more than enough for simple renders in 3ds max. i7 2600k 3.4 ghz, 8gb ram.

Great stuff in here, nice house too

One thing that is important to understand is that when looking at a gray model, you will tend to add way too many modeled details. Textures and lighting is what does 75% of the "image quality". In fact it is often better to texture than model details. For example, if you model cracks on the surface of the building, it will look very "edgy", and you would never get the richness you'd get from a texture instead.

You are always better off keeping your triangles to break the straight edges (corners, straight roof, etc.), to have interesting volumes and silhouettes. The details and the richness of everything will come from the textures.

It's not so much that a lot of triangles is costly to render or increases the weight of your mesh in memory, sure that's one part of it, but it also makes it longer to model, and more difficult to modify later on. UV mapping will also take more time when there are too many triangles. A mesh should be as simple as possible, so it can be easily manipulated/mapped/modified.

That's why it's important to learn to texture early on, you'll quickly start to realize how much can be done in textures, and how versatile textures can be.

That and lighting together can really speed things up and allow an artist to work on the essential.

Just some tips

Thanks. I realized I went a bit overboard with my steampunk house. It is due Sunday and I still need to texture it which will probably take all day :\

I will try to keep these tips in mind for my next project. I have been told this before but I really like adding a ton of detail. I'm also not really experienced when it comes to materials so I don't really take them into consideration.

Working on this Spaceship now. This will be going into Unity. No active thread for that so I'm just gonna post it here. This model took like 30/40 minutes of just messing around. Gonna try and spend a lot of time on the materials for it. Keeping it low poly. up to 178 atm. probably make another 10 of them over the course of the next 2 months.

 

[(._.)]

texture WIP (ugly as fuck)

Unity doesn't have any shadows so it will prob look lighter than this in the engine.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

Don't you have to pay for a license to get shadows? I believe just the free version doesn't use them.

 

[(._.)]

yup. It is like $1000.

I'm using the free version

 

[(._.)]

ok, here is the finished scene. um, may change some stuff before I bring it into UDK. lamp post for one.

 

[B.K.]

That's why it's important to learn to texture early on, you'll quickly start to realize how much can be done in textures, and how versatile textures can be.

I need to learn how to texture. Do you know any good tutorials?

 

[The M.O.B]

EDIT: What Blizzard posted below.

 

[Blizzard]

January 2012 Unreal Development Kit Beta in case anyone missed it.

Thanks! Your link doesn't work though, so here's another one.

http://udk.com/news-beta-jan2012

Some noteworthy things:

Holes can be cut into the landscapes for cavern entrances!

New Simplygon Merge Tool for combining static meshes:

# Grouped static meshes can be combined into a single static mesh
# This can greatly improve rendering performance
# Materials/textures are automatically collapsed and new UVs are generated
# This tool is fully "non-destructive" - you can modify meshes and remerge, and roll back changes if needed

 

[(._.)]

this is going in Unity.

 

[Mik2121]

Uhm, I will add the new UDK info soon.

 

[Mik2121]

Here's something I was testing now:

Basically the footprints are decals and the ground is all painted with vertex painting, so I can paint in snow wherever I want. The shaders aren't too heavy either (the footprints are the heaviest right now because I'm using translucency rather than 2bit transparency. I will change it to that later, but even then the Unreal Engine isn't all that good with transparency

 

[Blizzard]

That's quite neat. I may have linked a video etc. about snow/ice effects which I guess also used (dynamic?) vertex shaders or painting, and it can look really nice.

 

[charsace]

I've never used UDK in my life, but I have a question. UDK has a subsurf modeler built in?

 

[Blizzard]

I've never used UDK in my life, but I have a question. UDK has a subsurf modeler built in?

Not as far as I'm aware, aside from maybe sorta the terrain/landscape tools. You'll want to use Blender, professional software, or something similar if you want to make actual 3D custom meshes.

 

[(._.)]

As far as I know not many video game engines have any kind of tools like that. Not sure why they would need them when you can just make them in max/maya and then import

 

[-SD-]

Is there an equivalent GAF thread for CryENGINE 3?

there may be one for it's SDK like this but it's probably dead so we all post w/e in here.

That does not make sense at all.

 

[(._.)]

That does not make sense at all.

erm?

having multiple threads for different topics that will get maybe 1 post every two months makes more sense than just having one general topic for all of them?

 

[Blizzard]

erm?

having multiple threads for different topics that will get maybe 1 post every two months makes more sense than just having one general topic for all of them?

This thread had been getting semi-regular posts for solely UDK activities and seemed fine as far as I can tell. *shrug* If anyone has regular updates for news/projects related to CryEngine 3, posting them in another thread would keep that thread more alive. If no one is posting CryEngine 3 stuff regularly, then it's appropriate for that thread not to be bumped, I guess. I personally don't think this thread needs the extra posts to stay alive.

It would probably even be advantageous for someone to make a new CryEngine 3 or Unity specific thread, as long as the OP was dedicated, since they could link lots of information, tutorials, and keep it updated with news on that specific engine. That way those threads would be more helpful to people who are interested in those engines than this thread.

 

[Blizzard]

Well this is different. It's a 6-month bachelor's project short film by one guy (with music by another guy). Only base textures and audio were from the internet.

It says "realtime", but I don't know if it was actually recorded in realtime or if the UDK engine was just used to generate all the movie frames.

It is not safe for work and kind of cheesy, but some of the environment work is pretty sweet. If he did the human modeling and animation himself that's still rather impressive to me, even if it is campy.

Movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8DiWUWPy6uU

Environment flythrough:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKs14H0Z-hI&feature=player_embedded

Forum link: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/886393-DYSTOPIA-UDK-shortfilm

 

[Blizzard]

"The Environment took about 2 month, the characters 2 month, and about 2 month for the rest of the film (animations, effects.... )"

Image spam time from the Dystopia short film project mentioned above. These are shots I took from the YouTube video and thus they may effectively be downsampled and whatnot.

 

[Blizzard]

Last four images:

 

[Risk Breaker]

Can't see the video right now, but judging but those pictures, it looks fucking impressive. I'll make sure to watch it later. Thanks for posting it.

 

[Blizzard]

Here is another post with details from the guy who did it:

I used the engine video capture methode (console command "startmoviecapture"). tiledshot wasn't used for the video
Framerate in DirectX9 is 40fps average only the opening shot with the city scape is with 16 fps the slowest scene. But I didn't had time to do any performance optimization.
The DirectX11 version(the one in the video) is way slower it is about 15 fps average. lowest drop is 4 fps when the camera is super close to the chracter and tesselation becomes to complex.
Tesselation is the main performance killer when it is disabled it runs almost as good as the DirectX9 version.
My PC is a I7-2600 3,4 GHz, 8 GB Ram and Geforce GTX 560-Ti

I will make some Hi-Res shot soon.

 

[(._.)]

Whats up? me again. I went thought a weird period where I was working on another project for school making models for a coupel different Unity games. I felt out of my elemnet there but I'm back and this time I'm making a small room that is going into UDK. It is due March 13th so I figure I will spend like 3 days on modeling and then the rest doing textures and lighting. The room will be horror themed and inspired by SAW. Decided to make my own little basement torture chamber. I just started today and have been working for like an hour or so. I feel like planning the room out is harder than actually making it. Walls and everything are going to be modular.

Mik (or blizzard if you know) You know if static meshes can overlap. The tiny bit of detail that extrudes at the bottom overlaps by 1 unit. That shouldn't be a problem should it?

 

[sp3000]

Are we allowed to post Unreal Engine 1 stuff

 

[Blizzard]

As far as I know, overlapping static meshes isn't a great idea, but if it's impossible to avoid and it's a small overlap maybe it'll work okay. I imagine you'll know once you build lighting if something weird happens.

By the way, for anyone who didn't check out that Dystopia movie up there, you should totally check it out. Also, if they don't release a UDK update tomorrow, this will be the first month I can remember where there wasn't an update.

 

[(._.)]

ah ok thanks. I don't think it will be a problem.

here is one of the walls with a WIP texture I threw together. It tiles but I think some of the detail needs to be tweaked so it doesn't look as obvious.

It also seems too light but I think it will look darker in UDK.

 

[Mik2121]

Actually, meshes overlap all the time. If you check any of the maps inside UDK you will see tons of overlap (ie, meshes that have half of their polygons inside a wall, etc..). The only "problem" is that you waste part of your lightmap texture resolution on areas that won't be seen, but otherwise it's something fairly inevitable when you work in a modular way. And the Unreal Engine is made with modularity in mind.
What you waste on polygons that aren't being shown, etc... you save on actually instanced elements being less memory-heavy.

I will probably do something sometime soon to show how to do modular stuff and reuse meshes.

 

[Blizzard]

The made it in just under the wire. February UDK update notes:
http://udk.com/news-beta-feb2012

I really don't see much noteworthy, though there appears to be something to speed up navmesh generation. It's almost as if Epic resources are focused on some new version of the engine and upcoming demos or something.