Unreal Engine 4

Future plans

By Aleksey Savchenko

Introduction

My name is Aleksey Savchenko; I’ve been in industry for around 16 years.

I’ve been working on about 20 titles on leading roles, 12 of which are on Unreal Engine 3 and 4 with primary expertise fields as producer and narrative designer.

I’ve worked in Boolat, GSC Game World, Vogster, the last seven years an executive producer in Black Wing Foundation, from January 2015, a technical evangelist at Epic Games and from April 2016 – a Licensing Manager at Epic Games.

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Contents

1. What’s new in UE 4.12:

Sequencer.

Unreal VR Editor (Preview) and DaydreamVR Support.

Cooking Blueprints to C++ (Preview).

Platform SDK Updates.

2. Plans for UE 4.13.

3. Best practices. Paragon.

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What’s new? Sequencer. Overview

Sequencer combines the power of a non-lineareditor with 3D animation editing to allow you toproduce in-game cinematics as well as asequence of shots for film, television, andprevisualization.

Rearrange shots like a traditional non-linearediting package.

Create alternate takes of a shot and rollbackwith ease.

Make per-shot tweaks and spawn shot-specificactors.

Designed for collaboration.

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What’s new? Sequencer. Intuitive User Interface

The user interface design is inspired by the best of Matinee and traditional 3D softwarepackages. The interface allows you to view, edit, and organize your animation data in a clear andconcise manner. 3D content creators will find the interface intuitive and familiar. Automatic track creation based on actor

type. Standardized keyboard shortcuts. Auto-keyframing. Embedded track and key editing/creation

widgets. User-definable track coloring. Keyframe shapes and colors defined by

interpolation behavior. Folders and labels for organization.

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What’s new? Sequencer. Cinematic Cameras and Viewport

A new cinematic camera actor coupled with new camera rig actors provide filmmakers as well asnovices with the ability to create realistic camera shots with ease. A new streamlined viewportallows you to view a sequence of shots for dailies in filmmaking.

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Cinematic Camera Actor with properties tomimic real-world cameras.

Customizable lenses and filmback settings. Focal length. Look-at tracking. Camera Rig Crane and Camera Rig Rail Actors. Cinematic Viewport . Embedded timeline and transport controls. Frame numbers indicating shot in and out cut

points. Overlays and framing helpers for composition.

What’s new? Sequence Recording

Sequence recording allows to recordgameplay and immediately place therecorded elements into your shot. You caneven make a recording while playing backa previous recording.

Record gameplay into skeletalanimation, transform, event, and audiotracks.

Automatic track generation for re-editing the recording.

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What’s new? Unreal VR Editor (Preview) and Daydream VR Support

The new "VR Editor" mode allows to navigate and editlevels while immersed in virtual reality! You can selectand move objects, and even grab the "world" itself andfreely drag, rotate or scale your entire level! Withmotion controllers in VR, you have one-to-one controlover objects and your perspective.

We're happy to announce that 4.12 support Google'snew Daydream platform! Daydream is an exciting newmobile VR platform that brings high quality VRexperiences to Daydream-certified phones. UE4includes full support for the platform, including themotion controller that comes with every Daydream set.

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What’s new? Cooking Blueprints to C++

To reduce the VM overhead thatgoes into executing Blueprints,we’ve added a feature that letsyou package Blueprints intonative source code.

This feature is still experimentaland should not yet be reliedupon for shipping games.

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What’s new? Platform SDK Updates

Xbox One: Upgraded to March 2016 XDK. Playstation 4: Upgraded to PS4 SDK 3.508.031. HTML5: Updated to Emscripten 1.35.0. Android: Updated to NDK 11c. New CodeWorks for Android 1R4 installer replaces

previous AndroidWorks 1R1 (located in Engine / Extras / AndroidWorks).

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Other Cool New Features and Improvements in UE4.12

Planar Reflections and High Quality Reflections Dual-Normal Clear Coat Shading Model OSVR Support (Preview) and Vulkan Mobile Renderer (Preview) High Quality Mobile Post-Processing and Improved Shadows

for Mobile GPU Particles on High-end Android and iOS devices Grass and Foliage Scalability Web Browser Widget for UMG on iOS Twist Corrective Animation Node Full Scene Importer and Actor Merging Embedded Composite Animations Network Replication Optimizations Custom Data in Network Replays Audio Localization (Preview) Landscape Collision Improvements And many more!

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Plans for UE 4.13

Improved Render for mobile platforms

Platform SDK Updates

Improve UMG/Sequencer integration

Optimize Blueprint -> C++ conversiontool

Physics Performance improvements

General bandwidth improvements

Import/export FBX animation datainto/from Sequencer

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Best Practices. Paragon

Animation:Improved the 3 main stages of animation processing: Tick (GameThread) Update (Generate Blend Weights) Evaluate (Decompress and Blend Anims)Animation processing takes ~23x less time.

Significance: LOD system relies on distance, but during big

fights is becomes less beneficial. Significance system is defined by game logic (who

is more important now?) Depending on object's significance appropriate

LOD is picked.

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Best Practices. Paragon

Character Movement: Reduced number of components -> Less transforms to

update. AI use nav mesh on servers for collision. Can disable client collision resolution for certain LODs.

Character Physics: PhysX too heavy, lots of bodies - very complicated

scenes Wrote our own small rigid body solver "AnimDynamics"

- No collision support.- No game thread work.- No interaction with other physics objects.- Very simple, fast updates.

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Best Practices. Paragon

Clothing: Using Nvidia's APEX as clothing solution. Worked closely with Nvidia to improve

performance. Clothing calculations take ~10-15x less time

than 4.10

Particles: Improved particle initialization, pre-compute

as much as possible. Added auto attach and detach particle systems

when activating/deactivating- Cuts down on transform updates.

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Best Practices. Paragon

GPU:Screen Space Ambient Occlusion: Early Z Pass.

Deferred Decals: Separate buffer (DBuffer) CustomDepth/Stencil and Deferred Decals

to visualize abilities on individual characters. Full screen pass to highlight characters

behind walls. Environment decalsEffects, targeting.

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Best Practices. Paragon

LODs: Artists create 5 LODs for skeletal meshes.

- Start with high-poly- Bake maps from high-poly on low-poly

HLOD (Simplygon)- Merge meshes- Merge materials- Baked material attributes

Triangle count:- No LODs - 16.6 million- Regular LODs - 2.3 million- HLODs - 1.79 million

Draw Calls:- No LODs - 3940- HLODs - 3400

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Best Practices. Paragon

Shadowing: PreShadows - dynamic objects moving

in a static environment should receiveenvironmental shadows.

Shadows from phys. asset on skeletalmeshes - cheap decision.

Performance improvements: Screen Space Subsurface Scattering Separate Translucency Particle Cutouts Blood and Eye Adaptation User Interface (SMeshWidget)

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Questions

Aleksey.savchenko@epicgames.com

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