haukethiessen

@haukethiessen@mastodon.gamedev.place

Tech Artist & Unreal Enthusiast - Tech Artist at Limbic Entertainment, working on Park Beyond
Opinions are my own
He/Him

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froyok, to random
@froyok@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Happy to announce that since February 1st I'm now Principal Product Manager on Substance Painter. :D

haukethiessen,

@froyok Is this an actual published/available book?👀
Sounds like something I'd love to read.

froyok, to random
@froyok@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I was playing Portal Revolution and got a soft lock with my last automatic save: I pressed the last button which triggered an autosave, all while the screen was going dark to tell me I was out of time.

So when the save reload it re-fade to black and reload back to that same save. 🙃

haukethiessen, (edited )

@froyok Same happend to me, had to replay the entire previous level, starting from my last manual save game😑

froyok, to random
@froyok@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Looks like the latest version of the id tech engine has "blueprints" now. :D

(from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELFSdlFmDNI at 44:49)

haukethiessen,

@froyok I knew I wasn't the only one who pauses these behind-the-scenes videos every time an internal tool is shown😅

haukethiessen, to Unreal

Even though #Unreal allows you to specify light colors using temperatures in Kelvin, there is no corresponding material function to use the same behavior in materials. It's easy enough to add though, using FLinearColor::MakeFromColorTemperature() as a reference.
Very useful especially for VFX.

For example, you can have embers that change color as they cool by animating the temperature over the lifetime of the ember particles.

haukethiessen, (edited )

@apq 😮 I really didn't manage to find this.
Well, it was still nice to rebuild this😅

haukethiessen, to Unreal

Are there people out there using the custom node in 's material editor? Is there a smarter way to work with it than having VS Code open on one side, Unreal and the other and copy&paste your code over after every change? As soon as code gets more complex, this becomes a slog.

haukethiessen,

@froyok Thanks! I was afraid that was the best possible answer, as the inclusion of hlsl files is a bit finicky for my liking😅

haukethiessen, to Unreal

I didn't realize it for a long time (and I suspect most people don't), but Unreal doesn't adjust vertex normals when a mesh is scaled non-uniformly. So even if you squash a sphere into a disk shape, the normals will still point in the same directions as before.
To fix this, you need to multiply the normals by the inverted and transposed LocalToWorld matrix:

_benui, to random
@_benui@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Digital Foundry is the Cinema Sins of video games

haukethiessen,

@_benui While Digital Foundry is probably to blame for this specific example, I don't think this is a new phenomenon.
Gamers have always picked up a few technical terms and then formed their own theories about how game development works and how to spot "bad" games.

c0de517e, to random
@c0de517e@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Nvidia Geforce experience requires now to register with a login? Well, I never liked you to begin with, uninstall!

haukethiessen,

@c0de517e Wasn't that the case for years now?

haukethiessen, to Unreal

I tried some very convoluted ways to do this, but it turned out to be quite simple: Adding procedural stars to your night sky in
Nothing fancy here, just create a Perlin gradient noise based on the camera vector and adjust it so that only the brightest spots remain.
Useful if you need to save on memory, as it potentially saves you from having to use a Cubemap.

haukethiessen,

@froyok There are cases where it can cause issues. I just adjusted the tiling so that the brighter stars actually cover multiple pixels, but with smaller stars and a lower screen percentage, it can get flickery.

haukethiessen,

@froyok Now that you mention, it would probably help to adjust the tiling based on the resolution (as long as the game doesn't use dynamic resolution😅)
But there are probably smarter ways to do this.

djlink, to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

"c++ is hard, let's use blueprints."
The blueprint: 🙃

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

image/png

haukethiessen,

@haifisch @djlink Unreal offers all the tools needed to create nice and tidy blueprints. You can create functions, organize functions into several classes/blueprints and have a lot of options to align or collapse graphs, create comments, etc.
These blueprints from hell are just created by incompetent people and if given the chance, they would create the same mess in C++ or whatever tool they're given

haukethiessen, to Unreal

To all the users who feel validated in their engine choice: The decline of means that Unreal is losing its primary competitor. Simultaneously, the use of in-house engines is becoming less viable for many companies, as CD Project Red's switch to Unreal shows.
Just give Epic 1-2 years, and you'll see adjustments to their licensing options to adapt to this altered market situation.📈

haukethiessen, to gamedev

Shader experiment of the day:
When hex tiling is used to hide texture repetition, the coordinates are usually rotated per tile. That works great for chaotic surfaces without a noticeable directionality, but doesn't work for textures where the orientation matters. So I added a switch to just offset the coordinates randomly instead of rotating them. And for brick walls, tiles, etc, there is the option to use stepped offsets, so that the tiles are still aligned to the same grid:

haukethiessen,

I finally found the time to write a tutorial on how to implement this hexagonal tiling material:
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/haukethiessen/BPb7/cheap-hex-tiling-for-every-occasion
The two most interesting aspects that I haven't seen described anywhere else:

  • use of dithered UVs instead of sampling textures multiple times
  • stepped offsets instead of rotation for grid-like surfaces like brick walls, etc.

haukethiessen, to gamedev

Currently refining my 3D 9-splicing shader (should probably be called 27-slicing).
It enables level designers to scale objects freely without noticeable stretching, as long as there is an area at the center of the object without too many details. Combined with a relatively cheap triplanar mapping implementation, it's quite robust.
Still, there a few issues I have to figure out for this to be production-ready.

haukethiessen,

@glassbottommeg Not sure about the added vertex shader cost. It's not too bad right now, but I already have a list of fixes and features needed for the shader to be really useful, so the final number of instructions could be high. So probably not something to be used in combination with Nanite.
The use case I'm mostly interested in is using this shader in a Sims-like game. Players could freely scale the furniture without breaking the visuals. So for that scenario, the cost would be justified.

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