Any Unreal Engine Experts Here?

Renzatic said:
I finished up the texturing, and paired it alongside my other truck. Think I might've gotten the scale a little wrong, but oh well. That's what I get for eyeballing things, and it's supposed to look sorta crafted/modelish anyway.

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What kind of project is this? Apologies if you already said. So is this a hobby or are you being paid, and how many hours do you estimate it took to make these?
 
Huntn said:
What kind of project is this? Apologies if you already said. So is this a hobby or are you being paid, and how many hours do you estimate it took to make these?
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It's a hobby. I've had this idea bouncing in my head for awhile, and I've been slowly trying to realize it.

I'd say that, overall, I probably have about 9-10 hours in both of them.
 
Well another UE tutorial is needed befire I seriously get to work with my target project. I decided that UEv5 is the way to go, and as soon as I started a UEv5 Basics tutorial, I was pleased at the interface changes made. I like that when you start a new project, you are given choices of first person, third person, open world, where basic mechanics, physics, and lighting are included, or you can choose empty, If you want a dark, blank slate to start with.
 
Hey, Huntn. I'm aping some of your style!

Field.jpg
 
Huntn said:
I want to know by virtue of making something like this, that you could walk around in, and experience via virtual reality, have you been temped to make the UE plunge? :D
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I'm always tempted, but hey, I've got enough to learn on my plate as is. :P
 
Renzatic said:
I love mist.

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This looks great but is a tad dark on my iPad, if I faced this in a game. Unless it was dark on purpose, I’d be looking to turn the gamma up a bit, but to be fair, I’d have to be in the game looking at a full screen rendition, not a 2x3” image on my tablet to accurately judge. :)

I assume Bender has similar atmospheric and lighting controls as UE? Of interest is how UE and I assume Belder and other DCC handle light, static objects the illumination of the surface from a texture standpoint is baked, permanent versus how a movable object is handled using dynamic lighting which takes more processing power to compute. Push a button and you have editable fog.

For anyone not familiar, after you have “baked“ a scene, if you go in and edit, say move a boulder, what will be left behind will be a blank or black spot where the boulder used to be. The scene lighting would require baking (again) so that the ground texture would appear in that formerly blank spot.

Regarding Unreal5 I purchased several courses at:
www.udemy.com

Online Courses - Learn Anything, On Your Schedule | Udemy

Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 213,000 courses and 57 million students. Learn programming, marketing, data science and more.
www.udemy.com www.udemy.com

As a new student, I got significant discounts. The Complete UE5 Beginner's course is most excellent, it’s normally $100+ but I paid $15 and frankly this is possibly the best course I’ve taken regarding UE from the standpoint, of being thorough, clear, and not rushed as most of the free UE courses offered at Epic seem to be. I’m on my 18th lecture, which most are relatively short (5-15 minutes) focused on some part of the UE interface, and some parts of the interface will have multiple parts. Of course I duplicate what is being taught in my UE5 install. and document with my outline format notes, so they take longer than the run time to complete.

I decided to take this course, even though it is a beginners course, and much of this is repeat info, because switching to UE5 I wanted to sure I understood what changes there are from UE4, I don’t want to be faced with not knowing about some new feature, and I’ve studied such a mountain of info, a repeat of the basics is good for me.
:D
 
Huntn said:
I assume Bender has similar atmospheric and lighting controls as UE? Of interest is how UE and I assume Belder and other DCC handle light, static objects the illumination of the surface from a texture standpoint is baked, permanent versus how a movable object is handled using dynamic lighting which takes more processing power to compute. Push a button and you have editable fog.
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You don't really bake all that much in Blender. It's more like UE5 in that everything is realtime, though the effects it uses are much more intensive, being built more for image quality rather than performance. Instead of baking, you turn on screen space global illumination (which is currently only available in a special build, but will be standard once Eevee next shows up, whenever that will be), and it does pretty much the same thing.

code.blender.org

EEVEE’s Future — Blender Developers Blog

Lead developer Clément Foucault shares his big plans for the future of EEVEE in the upcoming Blender releases.
code.blender.org code.blender.org

Fog and whatnot is handled more like a volume than an camera effect in Blender. My scene is encompassed in a giant cube that pretty much acts like a big, square cloud.

Though for the shot above, I used Cycles, which is a path tracer. You don't have to worry about baking out anything, since it's physically accurate lighting. You just set up your scene, click a button, and wait 10 or so minutes.

I decided to take this course, even though it is a beginners course...
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Don't feel bad. I still do beginners courses myself. You can never learn so much that you can't learn anything more.

...though it can get a little tedious when they go over the BARE BASICS again, and again and again.
 
Renzatic said:
You don't really bake all that much in Blender. It's more like UE5 in that everything is realtime, though the effects it uses are much more intensive, being built more for image quality rather than performance. Instead of baking, you turn on screen space global illumination (which is currently only available in a special build, but will be standard once Eevee next shows up, whenever that will be), and it does pretty much the same thing.

code.blender.org

EEVEE’s Future — Blender Developers Blog

Lead developer Clément Foucault shares his big plans for the future of EEVEE in the upcoming Blender releases.
code.blender.org code.blender.org

Fog and whatnot is handled more like a volume than an camera effect in Blender. My scene is encompassed in a giant cube that pretty much acts like a big, square cloud.

Though for the shot above, I used Cycles, which is a path tracer. You don't have to worry about baking out anything, since it's physically accurate lighting. You just set up your scene, click a button, and wait 10 or so minutes.



Don't feel bad. I still do beginners courses myself. You can never learn so much that you can't learn anything more.

...though it can get a little tedious when they go over the BARE BASICS again, and again and again.
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Yes, Blender is in my future, it’s inevitable. :)

If I was to guess baking is not as big a thing in blender because it’s not intended as game engine, where a lot of dynamic events take place? Is it intended as a video production platform? Even that would be static If my assumption is correct. In other words there is just one recorded version of a video. It‘s the game engine which is real time constantly changing. Not intending to make this sound jugemental in any way.

What this beginners UE tutorial reveals is that there is bunches I still don’t know! :D
 
Huntn said:
If I was to guess baking is not as big a thing in blender because it’s not intended as game engine, where a lot of dynamic events take place? Is it intended as a video production platform? Even that would be static If my assumption is correct.
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It's actually the opposite. Lighting is a computationally expensive process, and can drag down performance considerably if you push it hard enough. This is especially true of bounced lighting, aka global illumination, which, until recently, could only be faked in realtime engines.

Baking takes this lighting information, and bakes it down to a image spashed with various hues, saturations, and values that's overlaid on your scene. The calculations are already done long before anyone loads up your scene. The downside to it is that it's entirely static. If you were to move, say, a crate in your scene after building your lighting, you'd be left with a big black splotch where it once stood. The upside is that with a bit of careful planning, and good use of dynamic lights, you can end up with a scene that looks just as good as something that looks and behaves realistically, but renders out 1000x faster.

To kinda put things in perspective for you, think of the difference between Blender and Unreal as being the difference between one engine that's major concern is producing one pretty picture within a long timeframe, and one that can produce of a series of them in a very, very short amount of time. With Blender, you don't have to worry about maintaining smooth gamplay. It's all about the end result. So rendering an image, aka a frame, in 30 seconds to 10 minutes isn't a concern. All you care about is how it looks. Unreal, on the other hand, is expected to render out a frame every 16 milliseconds, or 60 frames per second, to make it seem like you're moving about and interacting in a real environment. Cheats and shortcuts have to be made to get those render times down, while still producing something that looks realistic.
 
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Renzatic said:
It's actually the opposite. Lighting is a computationally expensive process, and can drag down performance considerably if you push it hard enough. This is especially true of bounced lighting, aka global illumination, which, until recently, could only be faked in realtime engines.

Baking takes this lighting information, and bakes it down to a image spashed with various hues, saturations, and values that's overlaid on your scene. The calculations are already done long before anyone loads up your scene. The downside to it is that it's entirely static. If you were to move, say, a crate in your scene after building your lighting, you'd be left with a big black splotch where it once stood. The upside is that with a bit of careful planning, and good use of dynamic lights, you can end up with a scene that looks just as good as something that looks and behaves realistically, but renders out 1000x faster.

To kinda put things in perspective for you, think of the difference between Blender and Unreal as being the difference between one engine that's major concern is producing one pretty picture within a long timeframe, and one that can produce of a series of them in a very, very short amount of time. With Blender, you don't have to worry about maintaining smooth gamplay. It's all about the end result. So rendering an image, aka a frame, in 30 seconds to 10 minutes isn't a concern. All you care about is how it looks. Unreal, on the other hand, is expected to render out a frame every 16 milliseconds, or 60 frames per second, to make it seem like you're moving about and interacting in a real environment. Cheats and shortcuts have to be made to get those render times down, while still producing something that looks realistic.
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But in your reference to light, if it was a still image there would be no concern, yes? And for a video a ten minute scene would be recorded like a movie, but you are saying there is dynamic lighting running the entire time?
 
Huntn said:
But in your reference to light, if it was a still image there would be no concern, yes? And for a video a ten minute scene would be recorded like a movie, but you are saying there is dynamic lighting running the entire time?
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Yup. It's a dynamic light as far as the renderer is concerned.

This video might help you out a bit. You can see Cycles is rendering in much the same way as Eevee, it just takes longer to resolve the image you see onscreen because it's having to do so many more calcuations behind the scenes.

...it's also good at illustrating how the differences between path tracing and rasterizers aren't all that great anymore.

 
Huntn said:
Brushes in UE- They look like simple mesh shapes, (cube, cylinder, staircase) but are not. They can be used with additive or subtractive qualities to rough out geometry in a level. Holy crap, I had no clue until this course. 😐

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I thought you knew about those. Brushes (aka mesh primitives in everything-else) have been around since the Unreal 1 days. It's how they used to build whole levels back in the long ago.
 

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