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Making Casa UE4 eps 4

posted Wednesday, 04 June 2014
June 4,2014

For this update I've add a bit more detail into the geometry, added trimmings and gutters, as well as further iron works and some foliage to get a better sense as to how well the use of space is building up towards the final result. The final result of course will be totally different than what’s being represented as part of the concept stage as the act of changing one thing usually means having to change another as to fit to finish.

Also to move things along a bit further as to lighting and shadows I made some adjustments, added a few entities, towards creating a balanced and linear lighting solution that also requires balancing out materials along the way.



Normally this is a pass best left for last as you can find yourself putting in to much time and effort doing the same requirements over and over again but out of the box UE4 is not really set up to give a quality render even as a working solution.

There are are a lot of features in Lightmass that just does not work with out some entity additions that needs to be added or adjusted as secondary requirements to added light elements. Perhaps the single most important parameter as part of the Lightmass World Setting is Diffused Boost that if left at it's stock setting of 1 none of the advanced setting will be effective if they work to expectations at all.

The nature of natural lights is they just don't hit a surface and go splat but rather bounce off the surface based on it's reflective index and when it does so carries along some of the color information along with it and transfers that color to surrounding surfaces and in the process picks up further color information in the next bounce. What you land up with is a hue of different light pooling that if balanced just right looks at the very least nature even if not realistic.

More or less this is what Diffuse Boost does that allows every thing else to work as expected like Ambient Occlusion that by it's self will look like a painted edge with no form of connectivity between other surfaces with in the same area.

The next secondary need is for some form of reflection capture as all materials should have some level of reflectivity index as lightmass bounces light into a given area. To accomplish this requirement a reflection capture needs to take place with in proximity of connecting surfaces and in some cases overlap as to the desired effect. In other words if it looks good then it's good.

It's interesting how reflection capture is preformed to it's real wold counter part by the use of a reflective object, by sphere or box, that suggests that an accurate lighting solution can not be achieved by the use of a single light entity but by the addition of secondary elements that supports the desired result based on observation.

It should also be noted that surfaces that are highly reflective, like metal for example, will not work at all with out a reflection capture and the result will be a black surface render of a surface that is not with in direct line of the light source.

The last thing of note that goes hand in hand with lighting is shadows and although there as somethings that directly or indirectly effects the overall quality the ideals of density does not apply but is controlled by the overall Environment Color used to balance the fusing of the light solution based on other parameter changes like Diffused Boost.

With out a doubt a lot more complex than one is use to as to map lighting for idtech3 but as part of a process it's best practice to focus first on use of space best suited to the ideals of someone moving through an area as well as to what areas a player can or can not be allowed to enter and leave the eye candy for the polish phase.

Making Casa UE4 eps 3

posted Monday, 26 May 2014
May 26,2014

OK in this update of Making Casa I'm going to cover a few questions popping up.

Looks to blocky.

Yes it does as 99% of the buildings are directly converted from brushes and more or less they are just box meshes that do not take well to advance lighting and rendereing system, like the one in UE4. Most problematic is smoothing groups, light, and shadows as they do not like right angles greater than 45 degrees and the result tends to be a hard knife edge corner.

There is however a simple solution to the problem that by chamfering a right angle edge, even by a small amount, the corner now becomes 45+45 and now Sg's, lights, and shadows will create a much softer transition.



Need tessellation.

The ideal for Casa, as a map that will come with the game, is to keep things as light as possible to maintain a high performance envelope to keep the competitive community happy.

Granted it's all going to look a bit dated but I'm sure third party will come up with the eye candy.

Lighting needs improving.

Good lighting is not a factor of lighting alone but an interaction between, lights, shadows, as well as texture levels that are properly balanced. The best practice is to stick with a working level of lights and as part of the polishing pass balance texture levels to match the environment.

Making Casa UE4 eps 2

posted Sunday, 25 May 2014
Note: This is a series of videos of Casa a, well known map for the game Urban Terror, showing work in progress as it's converted from idtech3 to Unreal Engine 4.



In this milestone video all of the cheats of photo sourced windows and doors have bee replaced with geometry as well as balconies added as map objects. A proper sky dome was also added to help improve over all lighting and shadows.

Some things of interest the facades of the buildings themselves were converted directly from brush to polygon by exporting them from the original .map file and the total face count for all of the buildings is less than 10k. By comparison HD weapons will be between 7-10k with player models between 15-20k, give or take based on the design, so the actual filling of a volume of space is highly efficient as compared to doing the same environment over again using brushes.

Also of interest is how much more efficient UE4 is when it comes to map objects in general and although there is a lot of windows and door casings they are all modified versions of a single window object that has been instanced copied so it's memory foot print is equal to the single object.

In all though if not for the less than ideal resolution of the texture images themselves a 1-1 conversion of a brush based .map map could easily be completed in a weekend and be considered done however the hard part creating a mesh based map is the need to have in place a proper source control as the map grows using progressive design ideals.

Source control for Casa was a “MUST” as what was extracted from the .map file was a massive amount of mesh and texture data that in it's raw state was total unmanageable lacking any kind of logical separation between supporting sub-components. A way to think of it is being lost in the forest when your job is to cut down the tree. What tree?

The first iteration of attempt to create a usable source control chain started during testing in UDK as to design pathways that best fits our needs as well as to have in hand a visual representation as to performance differences switching from idtech3 to UE4.

At the time we switched from UDK to UE4 it could be said that we had the working structure for HD done, with the exception of movement mechanics as we were able to run around in game using Casa with our weapons as well as our player models and it was clear as a bell the a game does not inherent engine characteristics but are added by design choices.

Back to the subject in hand in UDK the base work for source control was achieved to some degree by breaking things down into manageable blocks and each block given an identifier and exported relative to world origin 0 0 0. Doing so is not really ideal as to map objects in general but the result is each block would snap into place like a perfectly fitting Lego block.

Anyways to keep things short this is enough for now, with more to come, with a lot more divide and conquer in the mix as we have yet to disuse the pain of redoing the textures.
comments: Feel free to discuss this on our forums

Making Casa UE4 eps 1

posted Monday, 19 May 2014
Been working for a while on a remake of Casa for Urban Terror HD using the Unreal Engine 4 and though you all would be interested in following along.

To start the conversion I broke down the .map file, that uses brushes, and imported into 3ds Max I was able to create the source chain with textures and materials intact. More or less this is what Casa would have looked like if idtect3 had an improved rendering engine and if texture resolution was a bit higher there would be very little need of additional work beyond filling it out a bit more as well as a bit more work in the detail.

At this stage there is a good sampling of old texture work and new physics based material to get a good sense of direction as well as between cheat textures converted to detail geometry.

At the moment I'm building all of Casa inside of a sandbox to also accomplish the development of necessary game assets so although this is not the actual game it's also a good opportunity to show off some of the detailing as to textures, materials, of the HD weapons.

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