Making good graphics in the editor is easier than you think

  • Two Factor Authentication is now available on BeyondUnreal Forums. To configure it, visit your Profile and look for the "Two Step Verification" option on the left side. We can send codes via email (may be slower) or you can set up any TOTP Authenticator app on your phone (Authy, Google Authenticator, etc) to deliver codes. It is highly recommended that you configure this to keep your account safe.

pinnacle

New Member
Jan 22, 2008
122
0
0
Yeesh... you guys are completely missing the point of this thread. Can an admin please change the name to something else? Something like "making good graphics in the editor is easier than you think"?
 

ambershee

Nimbusfish Rawks
Apr 18, 2006
4,519
7
38
37
Nomad
sheelabs.gamemod.net
sure, but the normal maps have all a plastic look. real time lightning ? sure, in the editor, but not in game.
oh well, just wait till angelhe@rt makes a map. then we'll know for sure :)

I work with this engine every day.

Normal maps don't have a plastic look unless they're made that way. Stop arguing the toss based on UT3s art style, because that's not my argument at all.

UT3 has the capability to use full-on dynamic lighting for everything. It chooses not to so that average Joe can still actually run it, something which Crysis failed at epicly.

If you want to copy Crysis or even better than Crysis visuals, I'm telling you it can be done. It just comes at the cost of performance.
 

evilmrfrank

Banned
Apr 22, 2005
1,631
0
36
35
Florida, US
www.evilmrfrank.com
The reason crysis is so slow isn't only because of dynamic lighting. If the UE3 tried to run enviroments like that fully dynamic it would have failed terribly. Both engines handle dynamic lighting different, crysis is obviously more optimized in that area while UE3 is more optimized in other areas.
 

MuLuNGuS

New Member
Apr 14, 2005
96
0
0
and still too much bloom...

it looks the same like this bloom in these noble porn-movies.

so, i call it porn-bloom :D
 

Guyver1

New Member
Sep 13, 2000
126
0
0
www.doazone.btinternet.co.uk
That said, of course UE3 supports real-time lighting. What do you think makes the glow on the ground from your shock core or lights up the area around you when you shoot your gun?

UT99 did that, did the original Engine have realtime lighting or is the shock ball glow simply dynamic...... BIG difference.
 

T2A`

I'm dead.
Jan 10, 2004
8,752
0
36
Richmond, VA
It's the same thing. Both terms mean the engine is calculating lighting on the geometry and meshes with each frame rendered. Static lighting is built into the map, so the engine doesn't do those calculations and it's much faster because of that. All games use a combination of static and dynamic lighting. The goal is to do as much of the lighting as possible statically without hurting the visuals and leave dynamic stuff for special effects and whatnot.

There's nothing wrong or hard about dynamic lighting, but, naturally, rendering more lights in real-time takes more time. Older engines and hardware could only support a few at a time, but as technology advances more and more lighting will become real-time simply for the sake of realism. It doesn't necessarily look any better; it's just more accurate when things are moving around.
 

Guyver1

New Member
Sep 13, 2000
126
0
0
www.doazone.btinternet.co.uk
i find it very hard to believe that you can claim the lighting in the original Unreal Engine is the same as in UE3 and Crytek2. Isnt the latest lighting system per pixel/per vertex while the old engine was per polygon? thats a MASSIVE difference in computational requirements
 

haslo

Moar Pie!
Jan 21, 2008
363
0
0
Bern CH
www.haslo.ch
i find it very hard to believe that you can claim the lighting in the original Unreal Engine is the same as in UE3 and Crytek2.

Of course things have changed. The basic lighting functionality has stayed the same, what changed is the amount of other things the engine supports - normal maps (earlier engines had bump maps, and before that nothing of that sort), multiple texture layers (UT99 just had basic LOD IIRC), dynamic textures and effects (moving, normal-vector-dependent, distance-dependent), post processing (bloom, blur), opacity (partial, full, "animated"), emissive maps (simulating glowing surfaces), distortion effects, and how much of that can be processed in real time with shader functions. And the resolution and number of textures and light maps. Basically, taken to extremes, if you take an UT3 material, you could easily process the surfaces of an entire UT99 level with the amount of computational power UT3 can need for one single complex surface.

The lighting then, the "plastic look", depends on what kind, how much, and what colour specularity the material is defined to have. I'm fairly certain you could achieve the exactly same results with the Crysis engine and the Unreal one, if you tried. Which you don't, because the two are different enough to warrant completely different approaches to materials and texturing.

Isnt the latest lighting system per pixel/per vertex while the old engine was per polygon? thats a MASSIVE difference in computational requirements

If UT99 would just support per-poly lighting, you'd see huge triangles on the floor when a shock ball moves. A rectangular room's floor would have exactly 2 polys available for lighting, meaning it'd interpolate the whole floor between a whooping 3 points each for those two - no matter how big that room is. You don't, so it doesn't.

What was per polygon was primarily pong shading, and that's in fact still used in many places, while lightmaps basically just add another texture layer. Realtime lighting goes beyond that and lights per pixel, always did. And yes, as others said, what changes is the number of dynamic lights computers can process at the same time - that's not a question of engines, but computational power (and maybe how much an engine is optimized for dynamic lights, and how much it trades off correctness for speed).
 
Last edited:

_Lynx

Strategic Military Services
Staff member
Dec 5, 2003
1,965
8
38
40
Moscow, Russia
beyondunreal.com
Oh it definitely beats Crysis if you are talking about hyperrealism ... there is no other engine around that can beat Unreal when it comes to hyperrealisn.

In eating up resources too. The rig that will produce 60fps on highest detail at say 1280x1024 this map, will produce highly watchable slideshow in Crysis with the same settings.
 

DooFi

New Member
Jan 24, 2008
73
0
0
Teutschland
well crysis performs pretty bad on my computer, while ut3 performs pretty awesome. I didn't remove the frame cap, but it gives me very stable 60fps. Crysis onle gets 30 and has massive droppings depending on what you're looking at. (i'm only talking about the demo though)
 

evilmrfrank

Banned
Apr 22, 2005
1,631
0
36
35
Florida, US
www.evilmrfrank.com
Working with the UE3 engine daily I can tell you that the stuff your seeing in Crysis is WAY better and is doing things more advanced than UT3 will ever be capable of doing. Crysis runs slower for a number of reasons, the more obvious is that it has a ton more on screen at any given moment, view distances are simply huge. I honestly think the crytek engine is more optimized for the most part than the UE3 engine. If you were to take the UE3 and make crysis with it and try to reach the same level of detail it would likely fall on its face... But also vice versa, if you were to take the crytek engine and make UT3 with it it would probably also fail right away. Crysis is better looking and is running on the newest technology out, of course it will be better looking and run slower than UT3. the UE3 has been out for a couple years now so you shouldn't expect it to come close to Crysis.