Author: Ruslan Nazirov
Quick Tip #6: Optimizing performance of VXGI in UE4
Before optimizing VXGI, make a complete scene first (or at least a level block out) – many parameters depends on the environment. Do not use specular tracing in very glossy environments (average environment roughness should be > 0.2) and with manually tuned reflection captures. For the best performance do not use movable spot/point lights and […]
Quick Tip #5: Texture planning for modular environments
Let’s imagine that you want to create a texture, which has different areas, related to the specific meshes. For example, sci-fi panels. If you just randomly create these areas on texture, you will get bad grid snapping and as a result much longer mesh placement, especially for big environments. How to avoid this? Texture planning! […]
How to use Image Plate Plugin for Unreal Engine 4
In this quick tip I will show you how to use new Image Plate Plugin for Unreal Engine 4, which allows you to mix any videos with your scenes in UE4. Follow these steps: 1. Create UE4 project and activate Image Plate Plugin 2. Capture or find a video, which you will use as a background3. […]
Quick Tip #4: How to build lighting in a big landscape.
If you tried to build lighting in a big landscape in UE4 with a lot of foliage, you probably noticed that it’s almost impossible to do this if you don’t have a supercomputer or two (and even then you probably will get a lot of warnings, like lightmap UV overlapping for your foliage or lightmaps issues for […]
World Machine + UE4: Full Workflow
1. Create required landscape in World Machine. I’m using GeoGlyph macro library to speed up the whole process of landscape development. 2. Create required height maps for landscape layers. You can use default erosion outputs, like Flow, Wear, Deposition maps. Or you can use some external macroses, like ReFlow from GeoGlyph. Then you need to […]
Distant Landscape Meshes for UE4
Let’s assume that you’ve read my previous article and made a landscape for UE4. Sometimes it’s enough to start adding details, especially if you have a big landscape. But in most cases, you have a small playable landscape and it’s a good idea to add additional background landscapes to enhance visible borders of a level. […]
Layered materials in Unreal Engine 4
Some time ago I finished first vehicle for my project “Stranger Worlds”. Vehicle’s codename – Thor. During development, I solved on of the biggest problem for me – how to make materials for a complex asset with hundreds of parts and achieve a clean result. Before that, I used two different approaches in texturing – […]
Quick tip #3: How to increase tessellation quality
This tip might be useful for those people, who tries to achieve the best possible quality of their in-engine static renders. Big values of tesselation multiplier are not suitable for real-time games at this moment and I recommend to use parallax occlusion mapping instead. Default tessellation multiplier in UE4 locked to the value of 15, […]
Quick tip #2: Mood presets in UE4
Sometimes it would be useful to have different mood presets for game levels. In this tip, I will show you how to create mood preset with blueprints, so you can easily put it into your scene to set up the global mood for your scene.