The character models in UE3 games use normal mapping beyond anything SE has shown with their proprietary engines. I don't think it's artistic choice as much as a limitation of the engine.
Square-Enix Acquires Unreal Engine 3 License
- Thread starter Hardknock
- Start date
The character models in UE3 games use normal mapping beyond anything SE has shown with their proprietary engines. I don't think it's artistic choice as much as a limitation of the engine.
It's true - but I think this is more due to artistic style than anything else. Aside from a face scar here or there, Japanese characters typically have smooth features.
TurnDragoZeroV2G
Regular
I think you're letting your imagination get the better of you. Square cetainly didn't buy UE3.0 because it offers super-secret normal mapping/parallax mapping techniques.
I'm really surprised by this. Epic must be making so much money.
Normal mapping isn't at all complex.
No it isn't, but a lot of software companies are having a hard time competing with the level of NM that's being done with UE3. Can you name any game engine that does?
Perhaps UE3 just has superior tools for transfering a hires (million plus poly) model into a normal mapped 10k poly model. This along with ue3's multiplat focus could help SE save time (and money) in developing games this gen. The biggest thing I take out of this move is SE is going multiplat efficiently. By this I mean trying to limit the "porting" process as much as possible by deving to ue3 which eventually will do very well (technically) on both ps3 and 360.
If a company licenses UE3 do they also get tech assistance for free or do they have to pay for that seperate? (yearly support fee?)
That characteristic Gears of War look is due to excellent art direction, and very high-resolution normal maps, not some magical qualities of the engine. You don't get a cood art director bundled with the engine; the high resolution comes partly from a constrained world with few characters and models, and partly from a good streaming system - it is unclear if it's part and parcel of UE3 or if it's something they developed specifically for Gears.
That technology takes about 5-10 mroe lines of publicly available code per shader, and an extra height map texture for the objects... So Square probably has some other reasons instead.
Muhahahahaha...
It is pretty complex, as the industry can't seem to agree on how it actually works. Everyone uses tangent space maps, but past that point things get fuzzy with Z-up/Y-up, binormals, mirroring Uvs and such stuff.
Then comes the actual workflow question of how to construct your lowpoly geometry to properly capture the highres detail... Believe me, it's quite a challange.
It's a question of how much memory you cna spend on a single character, and how big your budget is to pay artists to create all that detail. Gears has how many characters? Two or three types of armor for humans and maybe 4 for the Locust...? Certainly not 50 individual characters...
Epic's own artists suggested at GDC 2006 to cut up the model for normal mapping calculations...
Do you know if they charge for UE3 support? per visit or yearly/monthly etc?
Obviously outside of the cost of the engine. (1 million afaik)
I can't remember a presentation where sony clearly stated that rsx can read in any part of the cell.
There are graphs who show effective bandwith ( read/write) for cell accessing gddr ram (not that fast) and for rsx accessing the main ram (faster).
Anyway rsx can acces main ram and the bandwith is hight. Anyway modern pc gpu have a lot of bandwith available a 256 bits bus with some ggdr can match the combined bandwith rsx has with the two memory pool it can acces.
cell send data to the gddr pool for the rsx to read it.
That's accessing the RAM. There's 35 GB/s BW between Cell and RSX where Cell and RSX and read and write directly to each other without having to go through RAM.
