..UE4 or Unity? We’ve been testing UE4 over the last few days. Incredibly powerful real-time tool set, there is not doubt. It’s very easy to import scans in quickly and to bake lighting.

…however

.

To get in the mood, please check out this track:

There are some drawbacks with UE4 currently:

It doesn’t support Forward rendering. SSRR is broken in VR mode.

Without forward rendering we cannot port our awesomely realistic skin shader from Unity. UE4’s skin shader is lacking.

Reflections (ONLY)

SSRR only works in mono 🙁 as it’s a very intensive post processing effect. SSRR’s effect really grounds in objects to their environment, as it can simulate intereflections really well. I would imagine it can be activated in some way through an ini file or a hack but it will bring the frame rate down to about 20 FPS. Without this effect UE4 VR demo’s are really lacking that extra punch of realism. You will notice this in all the on-line video demonstrations.

Hopefully Epic will be adding Forward rendering support in the coming months (?) as well as better synced MSAA in stereo and SSRR in stereo with speed optimizations.

We want to use UE4, we need to use UE4 because at this point in time Unity just cannot match the interior rendering capabilities of UE4. Similarly, UE4 at this moment in time cannot match Unity’s powerful custom shading options.

Here are some examples of some naughty naked scans in UE4. These scans are not supposed to be viewed and rendered with this shader, they will look harsh as there is no absorption of light into the skin. Using our custom skin shader in Unity they look much tastier.

..it’s as if the “RealisticRendering” room was made for this very purpose! 😉

To view these peeps in VR, set your desktop to 1280×800 and look through the Rift!

Day Rendering

Evening Rendering

Night Rendering

Dark Rendering

It takes minutes to set-up these rooms with the scans. I’m very confident we can make some great looking environments with UE4 …IF we can get Forward rendering support for better skin shading.

Product Release

We are close but yet still quite far from release, we are aiming to have something ready for DK2 launch. We could release some scan products soon, in empty environments. It all depends on the demand?

Peace out!

V