unreal 3 engine revealed!

[dreamcast]

March 25, 2004 - By appointment only at GDC 2004, Epic unveiled a demo of Unreal 3.0 engine, hot on the heels of releasing UT 2004 to retail shelves. Powered by an unnamed next-generation nVidia card, the demo displayed environments, character models, and some incredible bells and whistles.

 

 

In one demo, the presenter moved a floating lantern around in real-time through a medieval dungeon, with the light from the lamp bouncing round realistically and beind partially obstructed by the actual construction of the lantern, which was of the type you might expect a lighthouse guy to be carrying around. Even more impressive, the edges of the shadows blur a bit as the source of light and the source of the shadow move further away. When the lantern is held close to a wall, the small scrollwork on the outside of the lantern casts a crisp shadow on the wall. As the lantern moves away, the shadows start to get a bit fuzzy.

 

What was even cooler, however, were bump-mapped textures that looked completely three-dimensional but were in fact completely flat. Using a new technique called visual displacement, a wall made up of irregular stones actually seemed to project out beyond the polygonal model. As the viewpoint moved around, you could see different edges on each of the stones. We bounced back and forth between the "wire-frame" version of the world and the final rendering pass to show that we were in fact seeing a standard, flat surface, amazingly. What's more is that the texture did not noticeably blur no matter how close we got to it. The same effect was seen later in some slats on a box.

 

Another demo took us through several hallways housing rotating blocks displaying features of the new engine, such as shiny High Dynamic Range Lighting (basically an extremely realistic glowing effect of reflected light on a surface), multiple overlapping animated textures, and a cool light reflection trick. With this last one, they placed a creature pacing back and forth in front of the light, which came through a rotating stained glass window. Each pane of the stained glass was filtering through a different color of the light spectrum, and each of those colors reflected onto the model. They also combined ragdoll physics with this lighting effect, in the form of a flexible, glowing tube.

 

The lantern was still here, though, and at one point, the lamp was set underneath a table. Light from the lantern shined through the slats of the table and cast shadows on the wall at the point above the table. Kinda hard to describe, I guess, but hopefully we'll be getting some screenshots and renders soon so we can share the coolness of the new engine, which the presenter seemed to suggest wouldn't produce a final product until late 2006.

 

There was also a character gallery, with various beasties on spotlighted display. The average model was between 5000-6000 polygons, and it reminded me a lot of Jurassic Park -- amazingly realistic textures and animation, with skin stretching and contracting as the creature moved.

 

The trick with this, as with the first environments we saw, was that the artists created a high-poly version of each model and then used those to create new normal maps which were applied to lower-poly models. The result is an incredibly realistic appearance for a modest amount of assets. One final trick was in store for us: one particularly nasty beastie had some impressive wings. The wing membranes allowed light to pass through so that, even when we're looking at the underside of the wings, we still saw the light coming through, throwing the veins within the wings into stark contrast. Now that's good graphics.

 

One final demo took us to a large outdoor area where the wind made the grass and flowers wave. It also managed to turn the vanes of a large windmill as well. While watching these flowers sway in the breeze, we heard that these assets are created dynamically according to certain parameters set by a level designer. Hills that rise at a certain angle will have their grassy textures overwritten automatically by stony ones. Build a hill high enough and you'll start to see snow filling in. Setting values for vegetation and so forth, the designer can worry about the lay of the land and let the details fall in where they ought to.

 

You can't really compare it to the Half-Life 2, engine, because this relatively short presentation is all we've seen of Unreal 3.0 engine, and I'm sure both engines have some tricks up their sleeves we just might not see until we get our hands on a build. But from what I saw, the Unreal 3.0 tech is certainly no slouch, and we'll have more info as soon as it becomes available.

[unre@l]

Hhhhoooolllyyyyy SHIIIIIIIITTTT!

[pseira]

Nai kalo 2005 ki ama omws, 8a doume game me ayti tin engine