(Backlog) Unreal is my New Favorite Toy

Okay so the games simulation has me using Unreal Engine 4, how exciting!

I’ve not used Unreal 4 much, I dabbled into unreal 3, that was fun but unreal 4 feels like a new beast entirely! Exploring the use of a PBR workflow for the first time will be interesting for sure as previously I’ve been using the no physically based specular workflow, which has it flaws.

PBR is a lot simpler than the old 7th gen shaders, so in terms of reflectance; specularity has been replaced with the much more efficient and much less ambiguous Metalness map. Specularity had the issue of allowing ‘unrealistic’ values of reflectance whereas metalness doesn’t allow this as much, as it’s a pretty simple concept if it’s a metal, it’s white on the map, if it’s an insulator, it’s black… simple in theory.

Unreal 4 was one of the first commercially available game engines that used PBR, so it was effectively spearheading the dawn of PBR in videogames, and since then, it has quickly become industry standard, with the shader’s increased efficiency we’re seeing rendering programs such as Marmoset Toolbag and Redshift making use of this technology to create photorealistic renders in realtime with very little computational effort, especially when you consider the amount of time and resources it takes mental ray to get a similar quality render.

Unreal 4 is going to be an interesting program to get to grips with that’s for sure, even after some minor toying about I can see why the engine is popular, it’s very easy to use, a nice drag and drop system, good documentation, a visual scripting workflow using blueprints and regular maintenance from the developers, always nice to see. Epic games seem like a cool bunch.

My biggest favourite thing in Unreal so far is post processing, I love toying about with the sliders to see what effects I get and also seeing what impact it has on the system, coming from a highly technical background Unreal satisfies many aspects of my curiosity and the more technical part of this module is really getting me excited to see what both it and I can do.