Epic Games has released a significant update to its game engine and development tools. The new version brings performance optimizations, rendering and animation features focused on rendering realistic characters (realistic hair, eye, skin and cloth shading, capsule shadows to ground characters to the environment, Lightmass Portals for improved indoor lighting, fast physics simulation for characters), new audio features (3D spatialization for stereo assets, sound focus, raycast-based sound occlusion), and improvements to VR rendering and support for the latest SDKs. More on Unreal Engine’s website.
Unreal Engine 4.11 released
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Very impressive! I’d really love to use it more for rendering however some of these issues are a real problem:
– Loading, reloading heavy meshes is extremely slow. I’m pretty sure 100 000 polys will hang it for 30 minutes. It is a shame as It would be tempting to use for cinematic animation where asset optimization takes time (e.g arch viz).
– Cloth tech(APEX) requires max or maya with the plugin. Good luck with Blender or anything else.
– Not exactly video production related however huge project build size with 150+MB for an empty project. Can be optimized, but tricky. Unity is pretty much 10x less.
The downsides to UE4 has been keeping us from switching from Unity. Even when the upsides are so awesome. The FBX importer is supposed to be updated any day now, if it hasn’t already (haven’t seen it in the notes). I can’t believe how long they thought the way it imported scenes was ok. They showed off that it will keep the local axis of objects, and the hierarchy like Unity does, but I haven’t seen them showing import speeds. I can import a large FBX into Unity with thousands of objects in a hierarchy, and it does it extremely fast, and without making duplicate materials. I can move and organize materials and if I reimport, Unity still finds them and knows not to overwrite them or make a duplicate. Somehow UE4 turned 30 materials into hundreds in one import I tested, not reimporting, a fresh import. From 3ds max with standard materials. If I organize my materials in UE4 and reimport…Surprise! More materials! I have 4.11 installed at home and will try it this weekend to see what has been improved in those regards. Until they fix the FBX importing, I’m only going to play with it, not anything serious.