What does the Unreal Engine 5 technology mean for us? Will we benefit?
jdavison67
Posts: 650
DAZ people!!!
I was curious if any of the Unreal Engine 5 technology could be leveraged in the DAZ universe?
I'll let those with more smarts comment, and see what you guys think this could mean, if we could utilize a bit of their format ..... for improved render times with more hi rez characters in a scene...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
JD
Post edited by jdavison67 on
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Comments
If somebody will make GoUE5 plugin for Daz Studio, like there is GoZ, then it will make a difference.
Will be more interested to see Genesis 8 characters with clothes and hair in UE 5, though.
Without licensing the use of the UR game engine inside DS or developing a whole new way to export and license assets from DS or allow a direct way to load DAZ assets directly into UR I don't see it benefitting DAZ or us in much of a way. Game engines are already more powerful and versatile than the iray rendering engine, but they are 2 different worlds and the only common denominator is the quality assets sold in the store for use in DS.
Reallusion has already capitalized on the DAZ store benefitting from a whole marketplace of mesh assets they didn't have to create. In my experience, many wannabe game developers are more about using what they can find on the web or export from other game/.apps than spending money when they don''t have to, so marketing DAZ assets to them isn't a win win plan IMO (just look at the failed Morph3D). Now with the new UR5 tech and having to spend less time optimizing mesh to work, maybe more wannabe game developers will look more at places that have quality mesh that they thought they couldn't use before since it wasn't optimal for game design, like DAZ content. If so DAZ had better come up with a new division/plan to search for assets used in games without licensing since that is already prevalent and will only get worse.
Think about it, the main reason DS exists is so users can have a platform to use DAZ content and as such, the use of said content in DS drives the sales in the marketplace. I sometimes wonder if DAZ wouldn't be better off getting rid of DS and just selling mesh assets in specific formats and licensing like the usual 3D stores like turbosquid or CGTrader. I see way more pirate sites with DAZ content on them than the usual 3d stores, probably because DS makes it easier to export and use. I use Unity, Unreal, exteral apps like Max and Blender, but I am also a DS fan and user and want DAZ to succeed, so i am all for them finding a way to utlize the new UR5 tech into the DAZ univverse and not the other way around since that would be beneficial to DAZ and the DS users and DS users are the ones that need to benefit since their use is what drives sales.
You bring up some very good points...
I too would like to see UR5 tech in DAZ...to benefit this community...
My reasoning may be selfish, but I would love to be able to make dense scenes with lots of characters, without the extreme render times...
JD
I could see this benefit as well... I always wanted to put one of my custom characters in a game....or at least animate them similarly....
JD
I'd like to see renders of Daz Studio characters in Unreal, not the low res game characters in most demos. Lighting and the expensive backgrounds are nice, but animation of the characters lack something.
the answer is Eventually
yes. it will get to us at some point. one comment I've heard is, to get that kind of performance atm requires an SSD HD and the latest top end Nvidia card to get that to perform on a PC - as well as a top end CPU, etc etc etc.
so yes. we'll get it.
Eventually.
some peoples still a little missinformed about "the current unreal 4" with they "too high characters" from daz, currently the unreal 4 can handle characters around millions polygons, you can exporte a daz character using a 1 million "assets(cloth acessories and hair) and load in unreal just fine, ofcourse "low ending machines probably not gonna be able to load that character" but you can load and play fine any daz character as long its around 100 to at best 200k vertices(the best would be under 100k), unreal already can handle "billions" of polygons, but ofcourse it can't handle let's say assets multiple assets with "millions of polygons" you still have to make normal maps to reduce assets and bla bla bla, but for sure you can use daz characters you even already have a pluging to export daz characters into unreal:
https://unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/daz-to-unreal - if you don't want to go thourght the trouble of configure stuffs or is on a early work and want to "speed up things and maybe later change/improv the configurations.
now going back to "characters" while using million or billions "polygons" "assets"(non characters) will be fine, the issue still in playable or even npc/monsters characters, because while is awesome have a 1 million" polygons count character in screen, imagine the nightmare for the "animator" to work on it, even if as someone told try to export the weight data" still would not go perfect and need some "help which can still be a nightmare and while is awesome to have a ultra detailed character to be fair that "details" only gonna really be "important if you really want details like poros to be "modeleded" otherwise i really don't see too soon having "ultra high poly animated characters to appear in game, even for "animation" they don't exist, even many 3d studios like pixar and square enix while they use "more polygons" characters that "extra polygons" normally goes to things like hair, fur or "more twinkles in cloths or when is really important to have a twinkle in a character otherwise a "cinematic character still "not a many millions of polygons as some peoples believe the base "body" still let's say is "low poly" (in the sense which it at best gonna be around lets say 200k or 500k vertices), what gonna go high will be details in outfits, hair and others extras which they need and even that is made with care to not be too much to make "ultra hard for the animators to work with it, because again animate a million or billion polygon character is not the same of animate a hundred or thousand polygon character, the more polygons you put the most complex to proper adjust all the weight influence map will be, even for daz i'm pretty sure one of th reasons the characters goes down in polygons from the past was exactly because of that, the most complex the character become the more hard will be to adjust the stuffs.
Unreal 5 can be a big game change for daz not only in the sense of "make game" but also animation and even render, because you gonna be able to render amazing scenes in real time with unreal using the "same assets" you are using inside daz ofcourse it would means which you would need to "configure things like light for yourself and for that gonna need to "learn a little" more but, still something, what is matter now is how "daz is looking into it, because reallusion iclone already started to look to "that side" now is time to daz also try to do that and start to improve the compatibility of daz with unreal and others stuffs, it could really be a great change for daz if they don't want to loose it.
some of those "maps" are supposed to be removed with the new nanite, maps like normal map and bump are no longer needed and even with the new lumien system with real time ilumination for what they told maps like specular and maybe ambient occlusion will not be necessary anymore, most of the effects will be the "mesh" alone.
More versatile, yes. More powerful...? How so?
well to be fair you can render inside game eginers "millions or billions of polygons in real time, it's just different, while inside daz you can render and 'small area" with billions you can do the same in game engine but with a big world, what normal render gain in "quality of "small area" you gain in game engine in "render many stufff in a large area", with then not being high poly.
at least for games, it's a game changer. imagine not needing maps anymore (except the diffuse map). Then its just two steps for most objects:
1. import source geometry, plug in albedo map into a universal Disney shader,
2. tweak roughness setting. done.
Whereas before you had to worry about LOD and baked maps like bump and ambient occlusion.
If it looks good enough, I'll definitely render in UE5 instead of IRAY. Especially for big scenes. (I don't do animating). IRAY doesn't even have the Disney PBR shader, which is a bummer. it really makes shading a lot simpler.
One thing I really don't understand is why HAIR and NATURE (i.e. trees, rocks, etc) look pretty darn crappy in most Daz assets, meanwhile UE is killing it in these areas. I mean, the rock textures in that demo are insane and the new hair from UE's Groom looks photoreal.
(Ultrascenery and some PA hairs notwithstanding).
Photoscanned assets really help, now that they purchased Quixel. DAZ's Photoshopped assets can't really compare with good photoscanned assets.
Epic Games said that one could run UE5 and the demo they showed off on a machine with a RTX 2070 and SSD , which is not that bad right now on price. By the time UE5 goes into preview in 2021, the RTX cards should be even cheaper by then. These are exciting times.
I bit the bullet and bought the Animation Bundle at Reallusion. It's at 50 percent off right now. they are running a Covid Special. It's a really awesome program and works great with Daz assests. And also the live connect is free to UE4 for indy devs making under 100k which is not hard fo rme. I don't make anything at the moment. lol
while it renders live, getting stuff in there and setting it up is very tedious.
not click and load like most DAZ studio users are used to.
I am also finding I need to use Blueprints more and more to do stuff too, fortunately they exist because I know nothing of C++ and visual studio
they said ps5 even had non-RTX cards on it
this means my gtx1080 ti might be put to use! yay!
actually you can, if you had purshuased quixel license "before" epic had bought quixel you still have rights to use quixel scans in whatever you want without have to pay any extra fee, now if you are using quixel "after" epic had bought it then you can still use it but "only inside unreal" and still have to pay the 5% fee usage which they explained to me, which does have a trick.
you only have to pay the 5% fee after you had made the 1 million, you have to pay once every 3 months or what they call "quarter", but you only have to pay if you had made in that quarter at last a minimum of 10.000,00 on that quarter after the 1 million if you don't made at last 10.000,00 you don't need to reporter and only report in next quarter:
here the info:
Do I need to report revenue forever?
You are required to report revenues on a quarterly basis after your product generates more than $1,000,000 USD. In any quarter in which your product generates less than $10,000 USD, you do not need to report revenues. If your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product is no longer being sold, no revenue reports are due.
Can you walk me through a few example royalty payment scenarios?
Game developer XYZ Games released a title in February 2020.
In Q1 2020, the company makes $500K on the title. $500K is less than $1M, so no royalties are due and XYZ Games does not have to report revenues.
$500,000 < $1,000,000
If royalties they have already been paid, Epic will reach out to XYZ Games and return them.
In Q2 2020, the company makes an additional $700K, for a total of $1.2M.
$500,000 + $700,000 = $1,200,000
We deduct the $1M royalty exemption from the total.
$1,200,000 - $1,000,000 = $200,000
Royalties are due on this amount at the rate of 5%.
$200,000 x 0.05 = $10,000
XYZ Games reports its revenues and pays Epic Games $10,000.
In Q3 2020, the company makes a further $300K. We have now passed the $1M threshold, and the amount made in the quarter is greater than $10K, so royalties are due on the full quarterly amount at the rate of 5%.
$300,000 > $10,000
$300,000 x 0.05 = $15,000
XYZ Games reports its revenues and pays Epic Games $15,000.
In Q4 2020, the company only makes $5K. Although we have now passed the $1M threshold, the earnings this quarter are less than $10K, no royalties are due and revenues do not have to be reported.
$5,000 < $10,000
In Q1 2021, business picks up, and the company makes $100K. We have now passed the $1M threshold, and the amount made in the quarter is greater than $10K, so royalties are due on the full quarterly amount at the rate of 5%.
$100,000 > $10,000
$100,000 x 0.05 = $5,000
XYZ Games reports its revenues and pays Epic Games $5,000.
basically for what i get you only have to pay whenever you have passed the 1 million start mark and whenever you made 10k or more in quarter, if in the quarter you made less than 10k it means which you don't have to pay,, which means you only have to pay if you product sold a minimum value otherwise you can enter in a stage where you never need to pay anything as long you stay at less than 10k for each 3 months.
The problem with Unreal Engine 5 is not the graphics horsepower. The reason why they executed this demo on a PS5 is the Nanite technology. With this the geometry can be streamed and scaled in real time. But Nanite is not just a software, it relies on a special hardware component in the new consoles, called high bandwidth cache controller. This designed to allow a hardware-based, fine-grained streaming, so the devs don't need to write software solution for the whole problem, the hardware will just deal with it on the fly, so the application just need to address the actual content on the SSD, and the hardware will automatically caches the needed 4K pages in the memory. This is not possible with the current hardwares on PC, so while UE5 will support a lot of actual hardwares, the Nanite component will won't work on them. The closest thing what the PC have is the Radeon Pro SSG with the SSG API, but this is only one hardware with one, very special software, that don't even work with explicit graphics APIs. And I don't know how the Radeon Pro SSG handle the new culling pipeline in Nanite, even if the GPU can stream the content on the fly, the geometry pipeline might not be able to handle the culling and the scaling.
I'm testing nearly the same thing for the new Xbox. Correctly prototyping a concept, where the protagonist would shrink in real time, so at first her height is normal, and with a push of a button, she is shrinked to 2-3 mm. The problem is obvious, there need to be a seamless transition on the geometry and textures, because with normal height the grass don't need to be detailed, but in shrinked mode the details should be there. My solution is rely on the DirectStorage API and the sampler feedback streaming. These these works really well, and the transition smooth. Normally the grass is verly low poly, but after the shrinking, even the extremely tiny details can be exposed, and this is without any loading screen. This is not possible on PC, because the DirectStorage API is not present, and the Direct3D 12 Ultimate only allows sampler feedback, which is very limited compared to sampler feedback streaming. So on the PC prototype, a loading screen comes up on every shrinking and growing session. Not optimal, but there is no other way.
Thanks for this explanation. It make more sense to me now. We are still under a long way to achieve that on the PC.
well to be fair the unreal 5 only gonna release in the next year, nothing can stop then to "improve it and find a way to work, otherwise could be a little "dumb" release a new feature which "only work in console x or y or both, specially when comes to "triple AAA games and indy devs" the big majority gonna still releasing pc games" and it's could make that feature pointless, this is just a early version we still have some long way until the release and things can change until then.
any notion that one will be able to access all of that power in Blender UE4-5,Houdini etc,without leaving one's current comfort bubble is utter folley ( not meaning YOU Wendy, as you clearly are willing to do the work)
I see the same mentality over in the Iclone & poser forums.
There are some who are constantly demanding that Reallsuion,or Bondware, take such & such advanced feature, of some other complex application, and simply "put it in" My little program and hide all of its complexity behind my familiar push button interface so I dont have to venture outside of my comfort bubble.
NOT.. THE ...WAY.. THIS.... WORLD.... WORKS
To those who say "I need to see some DAZ G8 models in UE4" not those optimized game models"
I have to ask, why are you not exporting them to UE4 and seeing for yourself how they look after doing the work of material tweaks etc??.
$$Zero$$ cost to try :-)
Wolf, I'm not impressed much by Unreal 4. Unreal 5 looks good with the expensive backgounds and nice lighting, but the question remains if it can do a good job on animated characters, but maybe it will by late next year when it comes out. Right now I don't have the time or energy to check it out on my own. I suffered a stroke I'm still recovering from June 3rd last year. My right hand is more functional but not good enough. Maybe I'll have more movement by the time UE 5 is ready next year. DAZ Studio is better for stroke survivors I've found.
I've always liked the nicely lit, but truthfully, woefully unrealistic natural environments in Unity & UE4 but truth is you had to have like one of those $1500 GPUs for it to be usual in 'realtime' in a game. At least UE5 fixes that but the natural environments are still unrealistic looking. The realistic high constrast lighting is what saves them. High contrast lighting is not equal to realism.
Explained in more detail here: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-this-is-next-gen-unreal-engine-running-on-playstation-5
Realism isn't an end in itself, though. Nor is there anything particularly creative about the pursuit of realism for its own sake. The goal in the visual design of games is immersion. It has to combine with gameplay to hold the player's attention. The game World of Warcraft is not visually realistic, and yet it is highly immersive.
this.
without 'motivation' - story, game, fascinating and novel visual immersion - even the coolest and technologically advanced immersion demonstration usually leaves the everyday viewer with "that was cool, hmm, now what are we gonna do".
Even the Unreal 5 demo - while it dropped my jaw as an industry participant and follower (mostly follower :), the 'story' it showed, left me empty, in that I remember little more than the flying scene near the end (oh, cool!) and lots of falling rocks and cool rats/bugs and a flashlight. Contrasted with the 'kara/quantum dream(?)' demo that sony did for the playstation 4 (i think) a few years back, I'll never forget that demo - ever (look it up), and relative to today's graphic standards... the pixels didn't matter.
I sometimes assert that the guy who can make your eyes tear up with stick-figure-based stories is the most brilliant artist of all.
I see the power of the story writer and visual creator/director being enabled, big time, by the interactive nature of UE5 (even Iclone) and it's paradigm. Not a new concept, as a few years back that full-length movie that was generated with a game-engine (war-context, forgot the name), being driven and filmed in realtime with a joystick/controller, much like reality TV - but more scripted. That is where I'd go if I were an aspiring film-maker today. As a story-teller I certainly wouldn't be bothered with aniblocks or hand-created keyframes if I didn't have to be.
Over in the DAZ Art Studio forum, in one of the comics or NPR threads, there's a recent brilliant image using a DAZ cyborg in a twin-motion (mostly autogenerated background/world engine) and StoneMason urban environment (from the DAZ store). Otherwise no DAZ or DAZ Studio involvement - external environment. My takeaway is DAZ and a few similar companies are content houses, and while DS is a very capable visualization tool that can be extended to small production projects - I do it regularly - serious virtual story-telling is still hindered by the clunky technology, and that is changing rapidly. Wolf359 spent 6 years generating 93 minutes of animation with DS and other tools. It's impressive. Watch a decent gamer operate Fortnite or the like with coordinated friends in the virtual session, record it with fraps, add some good tunes, and ... I think you're getting a glimpse of a big segment of the future of 3D story-telling industry.
FWIW, this all relates to motion 3D. DS is fully capable and satisfactory as static image generation tool (their roots), but trying to animate 3D with DS is like generating animated cartoons (not comics) with photo-shop, and photo-shop is no slacker in its domain either - but while it can be done... it's generally not the right tool for the job, to my thinking.
2c,
--ms
This. (again)
Give a viewer half a reason to, and his/her imagination will fill in all the gaps between reality and your crappy animation :) People did not suddenly start to enjoy video games and cinematic only when they began to approach photorealism.
I am not that familiar with UE and it took me a couple of years to operate almost comfortably in Unity without programming games itself.
That is, why I am looking forward to somebody elses experiences with Genesis 8 characters in Unreal Engine.