It feels like it needs a color pass, right now it just feels like weird foggy farm that is supposed to be dark out but its not dark? So maybe some cooler night colors to bring in a darker feeling and contrast the warmer lamp sections? I think it also feels a little odd because their seem to be a lot of lamps, almost looking like collectables from an N64 game floating on the road. I think just art directing the color and light a little more would increase the drama and interest a lot.
I plan to post more detailed videos on my YouTube channel, where I’ll outline everything I've implemented so far. Primarily to track the progress of my project and to share with others.
I am working on visibility function like this as well and I was really hoping there was someway to do just a single material layer or something along those lines but so far I have not discovered anything so I just have a dynamic material with alpha that swaps between two when I trigger the postprocess effect. For large invisible things I also of course switch the collision at the same time.
Maybe you’re aware of this already but just incase you aren’t: Depending on what you want to do, one alternative could also be Material Parameter Collections. They’re kind of global material parameters that you can refer in the material and change outside of the material.
I have used that in the past for exactly the same reason for archviz and it never even passed my mind to use it as a parameter for controlling this kind of effect. That makes a lot of sense thank you.
I've never thought of tzeentch like that but that would be way better. I think between the goofy planning memes and Bull Horn Nipples plus random Egyptian theming his aesthetic is just so all over the place.
Make your base item as a Blueprint. Have it contain a basic static mesh and anything else every item will need. Put in all relevant variables and organize them nicely. Then create a function for each action it will need to take such as pick up, place etc. If those will be the same for every item fill them out, if one will be different leave it empty but give it an output. Now make a child of that blueprint. When you go into the child set the mesh and all variables, you can then go to the function menu and choose the Override function and scroll till you get to your function. Choose it and open it. This will allow you to add functionality specific to this child upon the same action.
If an object does something have the object do it. If the controller does something have the controller do it. If an item gives you a point for activating it have the item handle it. Sometimes it's a blend. For instance regaining health. Your controller should have an actor component that handles gaining and losing health with functions you can call to simplify this. So if you activate a healing item its activated function would send an interface to the player calling the Gain health function. It's not always clear cut but partially it's based on where you will know to look for and find functionality. Plus modularity. If only one thing ever happens In the game when you activate an item it may as well be on the controller but if there are many possibilities it would get messy to keep it all in one BP. So modularizing it between other objects and components makes it cleaner and easier to control.
I was trying to do something similar to this to create physics lanterns that swung from the players hand. I eventually landed on Skeletal Mesh as the best answer but there is also the option to spawn and attach the children rather than have them built into the same blueprint. So no physics or collision on the main blueprint but the spawned and attached children still have it. I was able to get it to work but the problem was if the spawn attach wasn't perfect it would send the spawned mesh spinning into the nether. Its needs a very accurate physics asset.
What quality is welcome here? I took a screenshot in 4K resolution (3840x2160) and uploaded it here. Perhaps the image has shrunk a lot and because of the colorless textures, everything has broken down into pixels a little.
I don't think its the quality, its the focal point, your depth of field in the render is shallow so the left wall and right area are sharp but all the detail in the center is lost/blurry which feels a little weird. Looks cool otherwise.
Its looking a lot better especially the swipe from left to right. Feels like there is momentum now. I think they just stop a little early, like if he is swinging that hard it should follow through and extend on the opposite side instead of just stopping tucked in like it currently does.
You can use a flip flop but a more secure way is to use a Bool Variable or an Enum for a state. You activate the chest, from that event it goes to a branch that asks is the chest closed? That is your Boolean Variable. If it is closed - the True Pin connected to a new Set Chest Closed to false then the Start Pin of a timeline with a float curve in it of .25-.5 seconds from 0-1.
Technically Unreal engine already automatically generate all the LODS and applies them unless you turn it off. This shouldn't really require much of your PC unless these are like 8k textures or something? Or you have an incredibly low spec pc.
Have you turned off all versions of culling in the settings? Also in the object itself you may have to set its screen size to something like .o5 or less.
hi, I think it has something more to do with me export or something because i checked it in blender and reimported back to Maya and its broken the same way
This has happened to me in 3ds Max. I solved it by cutting the skin weights, deleting it then pasting them back in. It just sometimes happens and I don't know why. Like it works perfectly in the software then I export it and Unreal and Blender both show it as broken. I do the cut and paste deleting the old version and it works fine upon export. No idea how easy this is to do in Maya but I believe it is an Autodesk issue.
Adding on, would it be anything like how telekinesis functions? I’ve read up on that and seen tutorials and it does make sense, I’m just not sure how to integrate a lasso animation or something with that ability
You could use a cable component/spline, have it attach to target and then link the two things. I'm sure youtube has a spiderman webbing tutorial or even a cowboy lasso tutorial based on Red Dead you could find.
It looks like you don't have enough Vram or memory for it to load the textures at the appropriate quality. This happens often if they are virtual textures or if they are extremely large and your pc cant handle loading them.
I would cut the lens flare as its actually really annoying flickering constantly in the center of the screen, it can start in the beginning but I would fade it out. The other thing I would do is start more around the object to the left and swing in a curve to the door so you get to see more of the model, otherwise its just a head on view for most of the scene.
The first two characters, the woman and the older man still feel really uncanny valley, its mostly their odd animations but the skins just looks too plasticky and the older mans hair looks so bright in the darker room. The second set of characters look much better, the animations are more effective and due to the skin having more wear and texture just catches the light a lot better, I would say overall you need to tweak the contrast a bit more and maybe soften some edges.
Unreal Engine can with Control Rig though it can be a lot of learning and tweaking for a small project, DAZ 3D can do characters and posing well enough, but honestly for quick dirty storyboards your best bet is probably blender, snagging some free or cheap human models, quickly posing them and then rendering out each storyboard frame.
Normally you would just use a mix of animation and IK connection to sockets. Like having the left hand always attempt to connect to a weapon socket named Foregrip and the right hand always attach to a socket called Grip or Handle. Then when you switch or receive a weapon you have it send an interface message or variable to the AnimBP telling it to make sure your in the Rifle animation section or pistol animation or bazooka animation etc. Generally anything else like shooting anims and ADS is then done with a mix of Montages and IK setups.
You have two fairly easy options. Create a landscape material that uses a grid as its base, you would have to create this but it would not be super hard. Or the normal way to do this would be to either create a voxelized style world with no landscape (this would make it easy to lock everything to grids) or to project your grid onto the landscape either through the material or a decal system.
You would normally do a blend of the 2. Splines for the long easy stretches and modular pieces for the in-between areas. If you mean to have The grassy sections between the sidewalk and parking lots those would normally be modular pieces or another spline of a different type. Also generally towns/cities are not built on extreme slopes so the ground would be fairly flat anyway?
Thank you do you have any tips for more curved shapes for the modular pieces in between? Probably just model the best I can in blender for it? And yes you are right but the city is based off Denver Co.
For smooth curved objects you need them to be hi poly enough to curve well, if they don't have enough polys they will get jagged fast when trying to curve. Also obviously using a tri planar material which I assume your using or something similar will make sure the textures don't look odd. Lastly even when it comes to Denver or San Fran or other cliffy or hilly cities they generally don't just run up steep hills, they will create switchbacks and plateaued sections which I would not create with the landscape tool but instead as a modular piece, just a big low poly piece of ground using a triplanar material so you can scale them and place them semi easily. Effectively just give yourself a kit of parts for landscaping the environment with kitbashable earth chunks. Then use splines to add the road guards, streetlights etc etc
As long as the armor has also been animated to match you can attach it via a socket as a skeletal mesh with its own animBP. However from an optimization standpoint this does mean your layering mesh on mesh where replacing the chest for instance will save you some there but if its not an issue its fine.
Try thinking of it like a curve, or even use a curve in the animation speed, it should start slow with the guy struggling to swing but once it gets going it should end pretty fast. After all he has to pull it back to swing it forward. Maybe even throw him a little off balance at the end of the swing showing how hard he swung. Or do that for a heavy or charge attack version.
I think I added this to a notepad sometime back when I first faced this rendering issue with my old GPU and searched for solutions on YouTube. The value was 0 as well, not any limiting number.
I believe they may be asking if you hand placed each mesh directly from your content drawer, if you used the foliage tool to place the trees/rocks etc, if your have any instanced content that is spawning upon the beginning of the render. Are you using any blueprints or code to trigger or start things or is it just a basic landscape + Atmospheric + meshes?
Oh I get it now. Except for the grass, I have hand placed each mesh directly from the content browser, let it be the rocks or trees. There are a couple of contents spawning in some specific sequences, as well some instances of fire particles from the starter content. I noticed that I didn't mention using the ultra dynamic sky for lighting, instead of the in-built directional light.
So honestly with all those moving parts its most likely something along the way that is causing a crash as it conflicts or fails to start correctly maybe even trying to draw an overly significant amount of VRAM that it normally would not need. You may want to try placing the trees via the foliage tool as well. You can also force lower quality LODS in the model settings if you don't want to see if its an issue with the models.
It feels like it needs a color pass, right now it just feels like weird foggy farm that is supposed to be dark out but its not dark? So maybe some cooler night colors to bring in a darker feeling and contrast the warmer lamp sections? I think it also feels a little odd because their seem to be a lot of lamps, almost looking like collectables from an N64 game floating on the road. I think just art directing the color and light a little more would increase the drama and interest a lot.
If you weight paint each a single segment 100% to a bone with no blends, it won't warp when it animates.
I plan to post more detailed videos on my YouTube channel, where I’ll outline everything I've implemented so far. Primarily to track the progress of my project and to share with others.
I am working on visibility function like this as well and I was really hoping there was someway to do just a single material layer or something along those lines but so far I have not discovered anything so I just have a dynamic material with alpha that swaps between two when I trigger the postprocess effect. For large invisible things I also of course switch the collision at the same time.
Maybe you’re aware of this already but just incase you aren’t: Depending on what you want to do, one alternative could also be Material Parameter Collections. They’re kind of global material parameters that you can refer in the material and change outside of the material.
I have used that in the past for exactly the same reason for archviz and it never even passed my mind to use it as a parameter for controlling this kind of effect. That makes a lot of sense thank you.
Head on the nail. Tzeentch minis are awful. Especially the Horrors. Not only are the sculpts bad. Their very design is bad.
I've never thought of tzeentch like that but that would be way better. I think between the goofy planning memes and Bull Horn Nipples plus random Egyptian theming his aesthetic is just so all over the place.
Make your base item as a Blueprint. Have it contain a basic static mesh and anything else every item will need. Put in all relevant variables and organize them nicely. Then create a function for each action it will need to take such as pick up, place etc. If those will be the same for every item fill them out, if one will be different leave it empty but give it an output. Now make a child of that blueprint. When you go into the child set the mesh and all variables, you can then go to the function menu and choose the Override function and scroll till you get to your function. Choose it and open it. This will allow you to add functionality specific to this child upon the same action.
That is great. Thank you very much.
If an object does something have the object do it. If the controller does something have the controller do it. If an item gives you a point for activating it have the item handle it. Sometimes it's a blend. For instance regaining health. Your controller should have an actor component that handles gaining and losing health with functions you can call to simplify this. So if you activate a healing item its activated function would send an interface to the player calling the Gain health function. It's not always clear cut but partially it's based on where you will know to look for and find functionality. Plus modularity. If only one thing ever happens In the game when you activate an item it may as well be on the controller but if there are many possibilities it would get messy to keep it all in one BP. So modularizing it between other objects and components makes it cleaner and easier to control.
I was trying to do something similar to this to create physics lanterns that swung from the players hand. I eventually landed on Skeletal Mesh as the best answer but there is also the option to spawn and attach the children rather than have them built into the same blueprint. So no physics or collision on the main blueprint but the spawned and attached children still have it. I was able to get it to work but the problem was if the spawn attach wasn't perfect it would send the spawned mesh spinning into the nether. Its needs a very accurate physics asset.
What quality is welcome here? I took a screenshot in 4K resolution (3840x2160) and uploaded it here. Perhaps the image has shrunk a lot and because of the colorless textures, everything has broken down into pixels a little.
I don't think its the quality, its the focal point, your depth of field in the render is shallow so the left wall and right area are sharp but all the detail in the center is lost/blurry which feels a little weird. Looks cool otherwise.
Its looking a lot better especially the swipe from left to right. Feels like there is momentum now. I think they just stop a little early, like if he is swinging that hard it should follow through and extend on the opposite side instead of just stopping tucked in like it currently does.
Coffee Tables
Coffee Tables
Is the model UV Unwrapped? Because currently it just looks like its being stretched or scaled wrong.
You can use a flip flop but a more secure way is to use a Bool Variable or an Enum for a state. You activate the chest, from that event it goes to a branch that asks is the chest closed? That is your Boolean Variable. If it is closed - the True Pin connected to a new Set Chest Closed to false then the Start Pin of a timeline with a float curve in it of .25-.5 seconds from 0-1.
Technically Unreal engine already automatically generate all the LODS and applies them unless you turn it off. This shouldn't really require much of your PC unless these are like 8k textures or something? Or you have an incredibly low spec pc.
Have you turned off all versions of culling in the settings? Also in the object itself you may have to set its screen size to something like .o5 or less.
hi, I think it has something more to do with me export or something because i checked it in blender and reimported back to Maya and its broken the same way
This has happened to me in 3ds Max. I solved it by cutting the skin weights, deleting it then pasting them back in. It just sometimes happens and I don't know why. Like it works perfectly in the software then I export it and Unreal and Blender both show it as broken. I do the cut and paste deleting the old version and it works fine upon export. No idea how easy this is to do in Maya but I believe it is an Autodesk issue.
Adding on, would it be anything like how telekinesis functions? I’ve read up on that and seen tutorials and it does make sense, I’m just not sure how to integrate a lasso animation or something with that ability
You could use a cable component/spline, have it attach to target and then link the two things. I'm sure youtube has a spiderman webbing tutorial or even a cowboy lasso tutorial based on Red Dead you could find.
It looks like you don't have enough Vram or memory for it to load the textures at the appropriate quality. This happens often if they are virtual textures or if they are extremely large and your pc cant handle loading them.
I would cut the lens flare as its actually really annoying flickering constantly in the center of the screen, it can start in the beginning but I would fade it out. The other thing I would do is start more around the object to the left and swing in a curve to the door so you get to see more of the model, otherwise its just a head on view for most of the scene.
The first two characters, the woman and the older man still feel really uncanny valley, its mostly their odd animations but the skins just looks too plasticky and the older mans hair looks so bright in the darker room. The second set of characters look much better, the animations are more effective and due to the skin having more wear and texture just catches the light a lot better, I would say overall you need to tweak the contrast a bit more and maybe soften some edges.
Unreal Engine can with Control Rig though it can be a lot of learning and tweaking for a small project, DAZ 3D can do characters and posing well enough, but honestly for quick dirty storyboards your best bet is probably blender, snagging some free or cheap human models, quickly posing them and then rendering out each storyboard frame.
Normally you would just use a mix of animation and IK connection to sockets. Like having the left hand always attempt to connect to a weapon socket named Foregrip and the right hand always attach to a socket called Grip or Handle. Then when you switch or receive a weapon you have it send an interface message or variable to the AnimBP telling it to make sure your in the Rifle animation section or pistol animation or bazooka animation etc. Generally anything else like shooting anims and ADS is then done with a mix of Montages and IK setups.
You have two fairly easy options. Create a landscape material that uses a grid as its base, you would have to create this but it would not be super hard. Or the normal way to do this would be to either create a voxelized style world with no landscape (this would make it easy to lock everything to grids) or to project your grid onto the landscape either through the material or a decal system.
You would normally do a blend of the 2. Splines for the long easy stretches and modular pieces for the in-between areas. If you mean to have The grassy sections between the sidewalk and parking lots those would normally be modular pieces or another spline of a different type. Also generally towns/cities are not built on extreme slopes so the ground would be fairly flat anyway?
Thank you do you have any tips for more curved shapes for the modular pieces in between? Probably just model the best I can in blender for it? And yes you are right but the city is based off Denver Co.
For smooth curved objects you need them to be hi poly enough to curve well, if they don't have enough polys they will get jagged fast when trying to curve. Also obviously using a tri planar material which I assume your using or something similar will make sure the textures don't look odd. Lastly even when it comes to Denver or San Fran or other cliffy or hilly cities they generally don't just run up steep hills, they will create switchbacks and plateaued sections which I would not create with the landscape tool but instead as a modular piece, just a big low poly piece of ground using a triplanar material so you can scale them and place them semi easily. Effectively just give yourself a kit of parts for landscaping the environment with kitbashable earth chunks. Then use splines to add the road guards, streetlights etc etc
As long as the armor has also been animated to match you can attach it via a socket as a skeletal mesh with its own animBP. However from an optimization standpoint this does mean your layering mesh on mesh where replacing the chest for instance will save you some there but if its not an issue its fine.
Thank you, that makes sense, I'll try both those things!
Try thinking of it like a curve, or even use a curve in the animation speed, it should start slow with the guy struggling to swing but once it gets going it should end pretty fast. After all he has to pull it back to swing it forward. Maybe even throw him a little off balance at the end of the swing showing how hard he swung. Or do that for a heavy or charge attack version.
I think I added this to a notepad sometime back when I first faced this rendering issue with my old GPU and searched for solutions on YouTube. The value was 0 as well, not any limiting number.
I believe they may be asking if you hand placed each mesh directly from your content drawer, if you used the foliage tool to place the trees/rocks etc, if your have any instanced content that is spawning upon the beginning of the render. Are you using any blueprints or code to trigger or start things or is it just a basic landscape + Atmospheric + meshes?
Oh I get it now. Except for the grass, I have hand placed each mesh directly from the content browser, let it be the rocks or trees. There are a couple of contents spawning in some specific sequences, as well some instances of fire particles from the starter content. I noticed that I didn't mention using the ultra dynamic sky for lighting, instead of the in-built directional light.
So honestly with all those moving parts its most likely something along the way that is causing a crash as it conflicts or fails to start correctly maybe even trying to draw an overly significant amount of VRAM that it normally would not need. You may want to try placing the trees via the foliage tool as well. You can also force lower quality LODS in the model settings if you don't want to see if its an issue with the models.