Kevin Reichwein's GDC Insights

Post date: Mar 15, 2015 7:3:34 PM

The first useful thing I learned from GDC was at an Unreal Engine 4 Blueprint tutorial session on the Expo floor. A couple updates ago, they FINALLY fixed the feature where you can click on an output pin and select “Split Struct Pin”.

What this does is it breaks a pin into its component parts. If you use split struct on a Transform pin, it will break it down into Location, Rotation, and Scale pins. If needed, you can then break it down even further by using split struct on those pins to reveal the X, Y, and Z pins.

For example: before if i was trying to get an object’s transformation in blueprint, I would have to create a “Get Actor Transform” node, attach a “Break Transform” node, and attach a “Break Vector”, “Break Rot”, and “Break Vector” to the Location, Rotation, and Scale pins, respectively, in order to expose the individual X, Y, and Z pins of each. Now it can be done all from within a single node using Split Struct Pin. This feature is amazing, I’m so glad they finally got it working. It saves a lot of time and keeps your blueprints very clean.

My second insight to share from GDC is of a program called Popcorn FX. It is a middleware particle effects program, far more powerful than cascade (and cascade is already pretty powerful), and it has plugins that integrate it directly into both Unity and UE4, and it is free.

The only downside is it isn’t as user friendly as Cascade, lots of things require you to do some scripting and I believe it uses C++, which is a bit different from the Python that I am familiar with.

However, if you are willing to tackle the scripting challenge I highly recommend this program. I have been playing around with it for a day now and am slowly getting the hang of it.

One of it’s really cool features is the statistics in the upper right hand corner, which shows you a lot of useful data pertaining to optimization including particle system layers, particle count, memory and overdraw. My favorite feature so far are the selection of samplers. These can allow you to spawn particles from the surface/volume of a mesh, from color data of a texture, from procedural turbulence wet maps, and even from certain spectrums of an audio wave! This was recommended to me by a senior VFX artist at Infinity Ward and if any of you are into particles you should invest some time into this program, it is awesome. Unfortunately, the Unreal Engine 4 plugin is still in closed Alpha, so getting your hands on it might be a little tricky. I was speaking with one of the devs at their booth and he got me into the Alpha. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share the plugin, but I will ask. You can create an account on their website to request access to the closed Alpha but I’m not sure how freely they are handing it out. In any case, that’s only for the plugin; the actual editor is available to everyone and I’d suggest taking a look at it.

    Another useful program I came across was a motion capture program called Faceshift.

What impressed me the most about this program was the lack of bulky equipment and camera rigs. It can work using an xbox Kinect. This program is not free however, I believe the price was around $1,500. Which is actually really affordable. The reason this caught my eye was because of the limitations we have with facial animations for our thesis projects. Even if we had just one of these on a workstation we could take turns and get amazing animations for our characters. It really would be amazing if we could get realistic facial animations on our thesis characters. Many past projects have tried animating them manually, but from the ones that I have seen they all turn out choppy and unrealistic.