demagogue on 7/11/2009 at 01:37
If the most restrictive part is just baking megatextures at the very end of development -- you could do basically everything else on a modern desktop -- then I think I'd rent some CPU time on a big system to do that last job. I'm looking some up online, and some of the deals look reasonable enough to make it worth the cost.
Renzatic on 7/11/2009 at 02:00
Question is, are you able to bake a huge megatexture on an average machine at all? If it's just a question of time, I sure most people would manage. After all, it used to take hours upon hours for people to export large Quake 1 maps back in the day. As long as you get successful results afterwards, it won't be too terrible an issue for your average modder.
...unless of course it literally takes DAYS to render one out.
belboz on 8/11/2009 at 05:51
think I'll stick to source, dont think unreal engine could do what I know source can do, even though other people dont realise the thing what source can do.
NamelessPlayer on 8/11/2009 at 06:57
Q6600 3.2 GHz (8x400), 8 GB DDR2-800 (960 MHz 5-5-5-15). That should probably let me bake a decently-sized megatexture in a day, and I at least have a decent fallback system to play classic games on now while I leave my flagship doing that. Heck, they could probably speed it up quite a bit if they got the process to work through OpenCL, letting modern GPUs do the work instead.
Of course, I'd still imagine the process of making such a megatexture in the first place to be a big pain in the ass, especially if you want it to look GOOD.
Volitions Advocate on 9/11/2009 at 00:37
One thing I like about this idea that always confused me about making mods from scratch (TC's i guess) is how you separate the games assets with your custom ones.
I guess it sucks that you don't have any stock materials to work with, but if that's what you wanted then why don't you just go make a UT mod?
In any case. I don't have a lot of time to run around taking pictures of things, and I'm not visually artistic enough to create a detailed texture on my own so in the past I went looking around and found some for-pay textures that you can buy and download and use royalty free. But today I got curious and typed "free textures" into google and got a multitude of links with thousands and thousands of images, They're all raw photography but with a little photoshop/paint shop pro skills all you'd need to do is come up with a good tile-able diffuse and normal and you're set. And you're not messing around with a bunch of stuff that you're not going to use in your materials editor. And with the way the material editor in UE3 works there's not much beyond the original image editing that needs to be done.
This is a really exciting development.
Renzatic on 11/11/2009 at 05:45
Just a little heads up here. For those of you wanting to give the UDK a run for its money, but need some tutorials to show how things are done, I suggest hitting up...
*advertisement*(
http://eat3d.com/) Eat 3D*advertisement*
for all your learn-on needs. It's aimed mostly at Photoshop/Max users alongside UnrealEd, though the tricks and tips are about universal and will work with any other editing packages. I picked up 3 of their videos myself, and it taught me tons.
Worth a look if you've got some cash to spare.
Judith on 11/11/2009 at 14:27
Seconded, I've learnt a lot of things from these tutorials, thanks to Ren for pointing me towards those.
Quote:
I guess it sucks that you don't have any stock materials to work with
Btw. there are lots of stock textures/materials/meshes in UDK to begin with, mostly from UT3 or Gears maybe.
Ostriig on 11/11/2009 at 16:22
If we're talking about learning U3Ed (for money), it's also worth bearing in mind that the UT3 Collector's Edition comes with a suite of video tutorials on its second DVD. I only watched the first couple of them, so I don't know exactly to what depth the entire "course" takes you, but they seemed pretty well done.
Renzatic on 11/11/2009 at 16:45
I'm gonna guess the ones that come free with the collectors edition are aimed specifically at getting stuff in and working with all the various features Unreal. The Eat3D stuff, at least the ones I watched, are more about making stuff in high end 2D/3D editors, with Unreal just being used to show off the end results.
It's neat stuff. Not really aimed towards the stark beginners, but if you know a little bit already, it'll teach you a helluva alot more.
