Epic Games has released Unreal Engine 4.12, which adds quite a bit, especially cinematic tools. Those who created games or mods in Unreal Engine 3 or 4 will know about Matinee, the interface to animate objects in a scene. It has finally been replaced with Sequencer, which is designed to feel more like Adobe After Effects or Adobe Premiere. They also add a bunch of features to DirectX 12 and Vulkan, but both are still in experimental preview. Vulkan, for instance, only implements rendering features for mobile, not desktop.
Beyond Sequencer, mentioned above, Epic has also added a bunch of new rendering technologies for high-end graphics. This includes High Quality Reflections, Planar Reflections, Grass and Foliage Scalability, and Twist Corrective Animation Node. These are quite interesting for someone like me, who has been getting back into pre-rendered animation recently, but finds that typical, production renderers (such as Cycles) are quite heavy, slowing me down. Epic was interested in bringing Unreal Engine into a video production workflow, even back in Unreal Engine 3, and it's good to see a lot of attention in this area. It might be enough to move me over at some point, especially for animations that don't have a hyper-realistic style. Even better — this level of visual quality should land in some games, too.
Unreal Engine 4.12 is now available on Epic's Launcher.
I wonder if you can use the
I wonder if you can use the sequencer as a regular Nonlinear Video Editor, the same as I use Blender.
You know, when I was on
You know, when I was on LinuxGameCast, I asked what people on Linux use for a video editor, listing VLC's side-project, mentioning Blender at the end. The chat were all like "lololol Blender is 3D." Nope! It has a video editor in it, too. Funny how few know this.
I use it to do Ken Burns
I use it to do Ken Burns effect slideshows of my bicycle sightseeing pics.
It’s actually quite capable, if you spend the time to go through the convoluted details… 🙂
I believe that you can add a
I believe that you can add a video file into the mix, if nothing else they would want to be able to put a logo.
Also, a 2D video file might limit what you are doing. This sequencer can do 360 degree stereoscopic video output, and you would need to figure out how that 2d video would fit into it.
As someone who does a little
As someone who does a little Arch Viz and now in VR, Epic is the fucking shit. One great American company. I’m still partial to the look and feel of CryEngine, though I have seen what some of these guys can do with Unreal and it’s sometimes even better looking than what I’ve seen done in CE. Anyway,i love these builds and support. Also, im a bit bias as Epic has bought both Workstations, and GPU’s through my company, and I consider them one if my favorite clients.
Wow just shill away with this
Wow just shill away with this obvious Turfing, This is why the internet has become such a bad place and needs to be more regulated with respect to commercial endorsements!
The internet has become very much lake the early day of radio/TV, before the government and consumer protection agencies put a stop to such abuses!
Let’s get write-ups like this properly labeled as promotional!
I blame the anonymous
I blame the anonymous commentors myself.
+1 for that. Couldn’t say it
+1 for that. Couldn’t say it better myself. 🙂
Governments (or the new
Governments (or the new aristocracies) don’t regulate radio/TV, they try to manipulate opinions… so the web is the last democracy space in the world though it could disturb the new slave world rules by new masters.
edit: ruled
edit: ruled
“Vulkan, for instance, only
“Vulkan, for instance, only implements rendering features for mobile, not desktop.”
I thought that Vulkan was going to have the same reach no matter the end platform, so why this statment. I do not think that it is the Vulkan API’s limitation more so than it is in the Unreal Engine’s SDK package that is limited to mobile only Vulkan at this time. The Vulkan API is not to blame, nor is it Cycles’ fault for slowing you down.
Blender keeps getting more and more features from the community, and hopefully there will be some Vulkan based Blender ecosystem based software coming online also.
Any ways Krita 3.0 is now available with some newer animation related features so that may warrent a thorough review.
Unreal Engine 4.12 only
Unreal Engine 4.12 only implemented mobile features on the Vulkan code-path. They were a launch partner with the Samsung Galaxy S7. I'm not talking about the Vulkan API, itself. I'm just talking about Epic's implementation of it.
Also, for Cycles, I'm saying that a realtime raster-based renderer would be interesting to investigate for my animation work. I only have a single PC with a single GTX 670, leading to ~10-30s/frame render times. I'm very impressed with Cycles' quality, but Unreal Engine 4-quality might be good enough, and its realtime performance could prevent my "kick off a render overnight… see a glitch in the morning… lock my PC down for another two hours to fix the boo-boo" situation.
As for Blender, Ton Roosendaal mentioned in a recent keynote that it could be interesting to repurpose the Blender Game Engine as a high-speed, high-quality renderer to offset Cycles. Basically, partially justify the expense as a better OpenGL Render. It was said as a "wouldn't this be cool…" forward-looking statement, though, so don't take it too seriously yet.
As for Krita — I've actually never heard of it before. Thanks for the tip!
AMD has open sourced its
AMD has open sourced its FireRender/FireRays middleware/software libraries for the acceleration of ray tracing on the GPU, and The Vulkan API will allow for much HSA like acceleration of the compute part of the ray tracing on the GPU, as both Vulkan and OpenCL will compile into SPIR-V. So I expect great things from Vulkan for future Ray Tracing more into the near real time regimen of ray tracing done on AMD’s GCN ACE units. I’ll expect that Vulkan’s multi-graphics adapter support will be great for spreading those workloads across 2 or more of those AMD RX 480s for some very affordable multi-GPU ray tracing from future versions of Cycles/other, and Blender/other software rendering packages.
I think that Imagination Technologies hardware Based Ray tracing units are the way to go, but there has yet to be any design wins for the PowerVR based Ray Tracing functional blocks from Apple, and I would really like Apple to adopt a more professional oriented real Graphics tablet that could run OSX and have the PowerVR custom SKU IP for the hardware based ray tracing done on the PowerVR GPU.
Speaking of Apple, it looks like Apple is finally getting an external TB3 GPU adapter, all be it in the form of a TB3 5K display with an on board GPU, so with TB/TB3 being a PCI tunneling protocol and able to tunnel the PCI protocol via Tbs/TB3’s tunneling protocol, maybe users will be able to plug a Mac Mini or MacBook into the display and get some extra GPU assistance.(1)
It’s still up in the air if this new display will work with other non Apple computing products, but if the GPU in the display is connected up via the PCIe standard then it should appear as just another PCIe based GPU to any PC/laptop with TB/TB3 capabilities, Should Apple provide the drivers for Windows/Linux for this rumored 5K display.
(1)
http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/01/apple-readying-new-external-5k-display-as-current-model-goes-out-of-stock-may-feature-integrated-gpu/
Well, then the fact that you
Well, then the fact that you can now import whole scenes from Blender/Max/Maya into Unreal, even with skeletal bones, ought to be useful to you?
So, if you are looking to do 2D renders, Unreal may be a great choice. But for high-quality renders, it can still take quite some time.
For further info, Blender is currently in the phase of updating their renderer code to do use OpenGL 3.3 and higher, so they can benefit from real-time scene viewports.
They are also adding some denoising algorithms to cycles so that you can get by with a much faster render while still achieving a similar quality image.
All of this is cool stuff, so thanks for keeping us updated.
I hope that there will be a
I hope that there will be a direct OpenGL to Vulkan translation layer in the future, so that applications like Blender can be gradually ported over to Vulkan a little bit at a time while still being able to utilize OpenGL calls. I have read some articles, and seen some posts where the posters have been stating that there have even been improvements of OpenGL based code that make use of some OpenGL to Vulkan wrapper code calls into the Vulkan API for performance improvements of legacy OpenGL based code. I Know that OpenGL is still getting improvements and is still in active support from Khronos, but that OpenGL to Vulkan direct translation work is showing some interesting results.
A direct OpenGL to Vulkan translation layer for any OpenGL based graphics software may just allow for some extra gradual adoption of the Vulkan feature set for better multi-GPU adapter usage even for OpenGL based software projects with the right amount of work done through an OpenGL specialized extensions/translation layer that makes use of the Vulkan graphics API.
The “cinematic camera actor”
The “cinematic camera actor” looks a lot like the camera tool Blackbird Interactive created for Unity (Cinemachine). If so, it should be a VERY powerful tool for some rather nice looking dynamically generated cutscenes.
Be good to play around with the VR editor too.
Cinemachine is a far more
Cinemachine is a far more powerful procedural / real-time camera tool than what they have shown here. http://www.cinemachine.com
Although I anticipate every
Although I anticipate every new release Unreal makes I am still not excited about this one. It has quite a bit for us (Android developers) but it still lacks in the things I might expect. For instance, where is Paper 2D? Still the same as before. Where is spline 2D animation? Still frame sprites. Why do I encounter bugs when I collapse nodes in Blueprints? I mean of course it’s better to write in c++ but I am a visual person as well as thousands of others out there. Unreal could completely revolutionize the (Android) industry if they would not concetrate so much on VR. Sure it seems like it might be the next step but I, as well as many other, think it will not. Keeping this in mind I have to give kudos to Unreal for coming as far as they have with a publicly released game devolpment tool encompassing many diverse platforms. Still, I am hungry for serious consideration of Paper 2D development. I am not the first to mention this.