New Unreal Engine question

They've also tweaked the built-in bloom filter and added their custom film noise filter to make the general look more distinctive.

ME2 changed stuff again, it's a bit more clearly UE3 but the art style is now unique and polished enough to separate it from the dozens of other UE3 games.

 

I thought that was more about having at least some level of deferred rendering, like a light pre-pass system. Every game today uses a screen space post process implementation of "AO" but only some are able to use it for indirect lighting only. Uncharted 2 is a good example.

 

Sortof. The annoying thing is that Unreal does ambient first in the base pass, at which point depth is available. So there aren't too many reasons why it couldn't do AO properly.

It's one of those things that really really bugs me

 

Came across this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGf0oGGGQqQ

 

You can try it out for yourself if you download the UDK.

Don't expect anything of that quality on the consoles though, performance is roughly a 1/3 of your average UE3 scene (or worse). The depth of field in particular absolutely decimates performance when it kicks in, producing unplayable framerates on my OCed GTX 260 @ 1024x768.

Still, that doesn't mean you won't see some of the effects demonstrated in some upcoming games, you just won't see them all at once and in such complex scenes.

 

About baked lighting.

Can baked shadows affect your character even if it's baked? If I walk into a shadow, would it darken my character, or would my character not react to being in the shadow?

 

Yes. You can make objects in shadowed areas become darkened but it wont be according to shadow sillhouette. ME2 does it and lots of other games with baked shadows.

 

Yes it does, for eg. in Gears 1 and 2 your character will be darkened when under a baked shadow, its the same case with virtually every game that uses baked shadows.

Though I must say that the way Resident Evil 5 does it is pretty nice, from what I understand it uses baked shadows for almost everything in the environment that's static but has its characters with a shadow casting spot light in a different layer, this spot light only casts shadow in the layer that has the player. This way characters are able to receive real time shadows from environments instead of the regular darkening and lighting up when passing through them.

 

Goody, just downlaoding UDK and it is going down with 1.2MB/sec. Will page some eye candy later!

 

Not sure if we can gauge perfomance based on that scene as it runs like ass no mather where you are. Just point camera to sky and place yourself out of map and it still runs at 10fps with nothing but fog to render on my 4890. Disabling fog doesn't change framerate. Even greatly enhancing shadow quality and res didn't change framerate. This in DX9 mode as DX10 mode seems to take ages to compile shaders and yet to wait out the mofo to be done. There is also DX11 mode and tesselation support.

 

When it says "High Quality DOF for Filmmakers" I'm pretty sure it's exactly for offline rendering.

 

Yes but scene in editor view has no DOF and still runs like ass never exceeding 10fps even outside of level box and into sky. :S

EDIT: Well hell.. in editor viewport it runs worse becouse it seems to be doing everything realtime. Like the UT3 map was about 10fps yet when I choose to play in viewport it jumped to around 40-60fps and looked the same at same res and settings.

Took screenshot of the UDK and the same testmap aswell as previous test map which is a map from UT3. The DOF sure smokes perfomance andforest was sluggish but I ran it with a 4890 and had the below tweaked to increase default graphics quality. Couldn't get DX10 to work thus no MSAA enabled (forcing doesn't work).

Spoiler

ImageReflectionTextureSize=2048 (default 1024)
bUseMaxQualityMode=True (default false)
CompositeDynamicLights=False (Default true but it means less quality for lights)
ShadowFilterQualityBias=4 (Default 0)
MaxAnisotropy=16 (Default 4)
MaxShadowResolution=2048 (Default ~1k)
MaxWholeSceneDominantShadowResolution=2048 (Default ~1.2k)
ShadowTexelsPerPixel=4 (Default ~1.27)
ShadowFilterRadius=2.5 (default 2)

All the below where false by default.
UseVsync=True
AllowSubsurfaceScattering=True
bEnableVSMShadows=True
bAllowHardwareShadowFiltering=True
bEnableForegroundSelfShadowing=True

To bad there was some garbage forech frame captured at bottom to fill it out to 1680x1050 when rendering viewport was 1680x908.

UT3 testmap (increased fog color intensity).
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut32kmzl.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut33qmt2.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut344m9a.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut35fmle.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut363muk.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkut3kmog.jpg

Forest DOF map.
http://www.abload.de/img/udkdof-36mku.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkdof-42m5e.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkdof-5bmim.jpg

Rain effect at forest DOF map.
http://www.abload.de/img/udkdof-2um38.jpg

Forest map.
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-72m18.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-5wm13.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-35m0z.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-2umkw.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-6vmrn.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-4lmev.jpg
http://www.abload.de/img/udkforest-1tmac.jpg


The bokeh DOF sure cripples perfomance. "High Quality DOF for Filmmakers" and I wonder how it stacks vs 'homemade' bokeh DOF shader for Crysis.

http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/1959/00049.jpg

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1433357&postcount=1405

 

They didn't have the shader code in UDK? I'm sure you can grab the code from sebastian @ CryMod.

 

Gotta love Lightmass. Bloom is much better now too.

 

Speaking of DOF, anyone remembers Mirror's Edge ? that game had a gorgeous DOF filter.