Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular, scalable and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Main Features

  • 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
  • Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
  • Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:
    • Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
    • Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows on the scene using shadow buffers. Shadow buffer filtering takes samples on a jittered disc that are rotated per-pixel to detect shadow penumbras. Dynamic branching is then used to refine shadow coverage in penumbra regions.
    • Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
    • Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.
  • All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
  • Volumetric environmental effects including height fog.
  • Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
  • UnrealKismet, our visual scripting system:
    • Gives artists and level designers virtually limitless control over how a level will play without touching a single line of code.
    • By connecting together simple events and actions created by programmers, everything from simple behaviours to complete gameplay prototypes can be assembled quickly.
    • UnrealKismet supports hierarchies of scripts for organizing very complex sequences into manageable units.
  • The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
  • A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
  • Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPCs, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources – with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing.
  • Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.
  • Realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.
  • Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
  • Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
  • In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
  • Plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.
  • Fully integrated source control, so that artists and level designers can check out content packages, modify, and check in from within the editor.
  • All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste; customizable key and color configuration; viewport management.
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Blog RSS Feed Report abuse Latest News: De-materialisation (Behind the Scenes VFX part 2)

About Eden Star with 8 comments by Alivender on May 24th, 2013

Hello everyone! Marcin Dudkowski here again. Last time I posted, I talked about my visual effects compositing pipeline. Today I have more behind the scenes information and also something interesting to show you.

Do you remember the IKA Alien from our previous post? It has been mentioned that it feeds on matter. More to the point, in Eden Star you, as a player, will also be able to de-materialise objects , although for a different purpose. One of my responsibilities at Flix Interactive is to make sure this process looks powerful and beautiful. Here is a prototype:

To keep true to the "behind the scenes" promise, I am going to explain how this effect is created and controlled. At the very core of it lies a synergy of lights, particle systems and animated materials. The latter is built upon a system of masks, which I want to talk about. I am going to get quite technical from this point on. Tread carefully :)

De-materialisation masks

The image above depicts Unreal3's material editor with the aforementioned functionality stripped to bare minimum for better understanding. To produce required monochromatic masks I am comparing a simple black to white gradient texture against a 0 to 1 parameter (here called "Progress"). The "If" nodes then translate them into pure white on the left of the point where the parameter is of equal value to the gradient, and pure black on the right.

By adding a tiny value ("EdgeWidth"=0.02) to one of the gradient instances I am able to produce a "Darker Mask" with a small offset. I can then extract said offset by subtracting one mask from the other. From this point I have a set of textures I can use to create a glowing disintegration edge, and to turn any object fully visible on one and fully invisible on the other side of it.

Now, changing the values of the "Progress" parameter would visually wipe the entire material into the strangulating clutches of nothingness... ehkm, in an organized and orderly fashion. However, using a more erratic texture instead of a simple gradient will produce more interesting results. From this point, all that is left is adding a bunch of embers, glow-dust, lights, god-rays etc. and the effect is ready :)

This concludes my mini-tutorial on the disintegration effect for Eden Star. I had to keep it rather short, but I hope at least some of you found it enlightening. Sharing my knowledge has always brought me great pleasure, so if you guys have any questions about visual effects in general, please do not hesitate to ask me. I will respond to everyone. Let's fill this comment section below :)

Thanks for reading! I am leaving you with an image update on my work on the scene I showed you in my last post. Till next time!

Eden Star in Space

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Post comment Comments  (60 - 70 of 131)
.Nawwx
.Nawwx Jan 17 2010, 2:47pm says:

Best engine ever

+2 votes     reply to comment
Nyamas
Nyamas Jan 16 2010, 12:29am says:

this looks like a really good engine, never heard of it before tho

-4 votes     reply to comment
chaosmaster4
chaosmaster4 Jan 17 2010, 11:22am replied:

ARE YOU JOKING?!
have you never heard of gears of war, Borderlands or unreal tournament?!
I...I....I'm Speechless!!!

-3 votes     reply to comment
alpha234
alpha234 Jan 10 2010, 11:36pm says: Online

we need some staff for a udk warhammer 40k game if you are intrested just visit astartes productions
Moddb.com

0 votes     reply to comment
chaosmaster4
chaosmaster4 Jan 18 2010, 12:05pm replied:

you could have written more details ^^
third person shooter based on the warhammer 40k universe.
players will jump right into the battle with a multiplayer squad based campaign following the assault on Khoronus IV and even the fall of a chaos Titan!
Other mp modes include huge warfare game modes, where Marines face off against Chaos!
but still in the basic developement -.- we are still looking for new additions to our team if anyone is interested ^^

+1 vote     reply to comment
Highmist
Highmist Jan 18 2010, 12:50pm replied:

Sounds interesting, looking forward to it being on Moddb. Cant help any, but....yea
UT3 is the best Mod-friendly Graphical engine. Im still for soure for Easy-to-use Mod friendly engine, but UDK has me wanting to learn :P

+1 vote     reply to comment
PlanMan
PlanMan Jan 10 2010, 5:20pm says:

I wonder if the development kit has network capabilites, if it does I'm in great shape.

0 votes     reply to comment
Alexander0430
Alexander0430 Dec 30 2009, 5:01am says:

i think this engine is best of all... I think

+1 vote     reply to comment
pixo45
pixo45 Dec 14 2009, 11:31pm says:

Medal of Honor Airborne uses this engine, it rocks!

+2 votes     reply to comment
mackan4762
mackan4762 Dec 7 2009, 3:30pm replied:

it does have all the materials models and sounds from ut3

+2 votes     reply to comment
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