Unreal 4
Just Mind Blowing… Don’t have words !
what I’d hoped for with the Unreal/Blender lash up. An Unreal backdrop landscape with Blender generated character/Characters animated. Good pair
I wasn’t aware the character was created / animated in Blender… got a link for that?
On the video itself - it is a pretty damned good demo of what you can get from the (now free) UE4. Would be interested in how much time/effort went into making it. It’s a good short, demonstrates what it needs to well, and there could be some lessons/inspiration for the Gooseberry team in any “making of” details Epic would care to share.
Oh, and as it appears to be a forum thing now, this video means BGE is dead 
Really digging the rocks in that demo, especially the ground rocks around 1:20.
The character was made in Maya.
That’s what I thought. Thanks for that.
It’s really great stuff! I subscribed to UE4 just to try animation/cinematic rendering features a while ago. Sadly it just choked on 100 000 triangle environment mesh as it started converting it for use within the engine…
There’s TREMENDOUS potential with all of it but the main problem is that you have to PREPARE all that mesh and animation data to be fast, usable and playable in engine. There are a lot of iterations involved and you cannot expect to finalize your works into lowpoly baked instances as you’re still working with everything as it is very time consuming. There must be a lot of iterations involved as you build it all up unless you’re doing some Episodic and systematic content (such as tv show).
In contrast with Unity you can just overwrite your FBX and all reloads fine so iterating between main DCC application and engine is really fast.
Long story short - I truly hope this is the future and I hope data transition between DCC apps and engine will become seamless. Let’s be honest we do not even need 30fps, we’d be happy writing frames at 0.01fps as it still beats render time especially at high resolutions. This is also the reason why Blender can have immense potential if it develops the viewport/game engine to render things as well as possible because data transfer is not an issue.
I tried the UDK3 engine a while back, had subscribed to, what I believe was UE4 before it was free (he paid monthly). It really was impressive, with all the textures pre programmed. I never knew if all of that stuff is okay to use unedited for your game, or if there’s certain things that’s for sale and certain ones almost like a demo of the team?
if you haven’t tried it recently try it again. They have improved quite in this area. It’s still not as seamless as Unity in that respect but it’s much better. A lot of the improvement they did to get that character in the Open World animation should be available with 4.8 including much better handling of higher poly characters with blendshapes, etc.
If you guys haven’t seen it already. There is a pretty extensive making of segment in Unreal’s Twitch stream that goes over how they made the demo. It’s impressive to say the least. No matte paintings, the number of foliage, trees, flowers etc. is mindblowing, and Ai driven Deer. All in realtime on a 100 Square foot mile grid. Craziness. It took the team about a month to make. The character itself is a high poly mesh transferred directly to the game engine. They created the demo to show that the engine could make high quality animation without having to compromise, the other reason was to showcase open world type games like Skyrim etc. Check it out when you get a chance.
Btolputt, i was talking about the end goal, the potential for blender integration. not whether this particular charactrr mesh was borne out of blender or maya or wings or whatever. The intent is For Blender meshes to be imported easily into the UE4 domain. Period.
That’s up to the Blender devs. IMO, game engines are where it’s at. I think Blender should concentrate their efforts on becoming a great DCC tool for game content creation, but the BF has to want to do that. All indication so far implies that the BF is more interested in their open movie projects etc (don’t blame them since that’s a source of revenue, though the benefits to Blender aren’t as great as they would have you believe, imo). The software is almost there it just needs a slight push in that direction, imo.
URL?
…and some more characters to make forum software shut up.
I think this is it. It should take you to where that section of the GDC talk starts. It’s pretty long.
I am a garage indie and current market for games sucks for indies. It wasn’t easy to break through in 2011, but starting from 2012 and on it became virtually impossible to run sustainable indie game dev business. Nowadays it all comes down to marketing / PR in one way or another (either having useful networking and getting almost free PR through established indies and PR personas; or paying established PR houses for well thought out campaigns).
So I see game dev artists branching into animations and SFX for movies, and having Blender to do it all is a good thing. Whether it’s feasible to have it with complete, stable fully featured tool set or have a little bit of everything, but not great at all of those aspects is a different story 
So hows Blender ‘integration’ with Unreal compared with MayaLT? I am noob in game area, and what I heard is that in MayaLT that is pretty much one click solution? And as far as I manage to gather that and viewport are only advantages over Blender?
UE demo: The Kid - 3Lateral
(article on designing the kid)
Well there are a couple of scripts that were created for Maya that makes transferring an animated character much easier and ofcourse FBX works as intended. A few scripts or tools in Blender would be nice. Also if rigify could be modified or tailored to work for game rigs that would be cool too. I think there was someone who was working on that here. Have no idea how far along that went. Liek I said here isn’t much needed in Blender just a few scripts or tools to make creating and baking character animations easier, maybe some workflow enhancement here and there would be nice. To me the software that did this the best is still XSI. Now I’m sad.
Depending on what you mean by “concentrate their efforts”, I agree. I don’t think the Blender Foundation should turn all of their focus toward game content creation but, given the amounts of money that get paid to Blender due to game content creation focuses (Valve, Epic, etc), it seems fair that it get a little more focus.
That said, as pointed out, the Blender Foundation/Institute is focused on their open-films. Given the leadership LIKE making open-films (and have already told us that they intend to continue fund-raising & making their current one when they finish it as a trailer) - I honestly don’t think this is going to change. 
Lots of thanks. Yes, it was long, but still shorter than the time it took me to find where my jaw had ended on the floor :D.
One of the best decision I did in 3D in the last couple of years was to kiss bye bye to Vue betting instead on 3D game engines.