Month: January 2017

Vertex-based Animations using Morph Targets in UE4

Posted on by Cyber Shaman

I’ve been working on a third person exploration and adventure game called ‘The Nomad’ for the past 8 months, and I wanted to share some of the techniques I had learned in this time.

The topic of discussion today is Vertex based animations.

Before we get to that, let us digress for a wider examination of animation pipelines in general, to gain a little perspective.

Animation is probably one the most important factors in making a game feel responsive and lifelike (not to be confused with realistic). Animation is in essence the art of making something static feel like it is in motion.

Human beings are great at perceiving motion and as such it’s one of the more prominent ways with which games engage players, both mechanically and aesthetically.

In 3D animation, there are a few broad categories with which animation is implemented, each with their own pipelines and quirks:

  1. Vertex animation: This used to be the most widespread way to animate things back when the first wave of 3D games came out and the hardware wasn’t usually capable of handling the complicated (and expensive) concatenated transformations of skeletal animations. It’s easy to do but hard to reach good results with. It also happens to be what we’re talking about today.
  2. Skeletal animation: This method is the most commonly used for 3D animation nowadays, and when supplemented with the powerful tool of Inverse Kinematics it can achieve really smooth and organic results. It’s probably the most flexible out of all of these methods, and the sheer number of tools for this pipeline make it a very attractive option.
  3. Procedural animation: This method is a little less commonly seen, and I can guess that’s because it is probably non-trivial to implement and has very specific use cases as opposed to the other two methods. Some games that use it to good effect include Grow Home, QWOP, Overgrowth and so forth.
  4. Physically-based Simulation: Similar to the procedural animation though slightly different, this is animation that utilizes simulation of some natural substance like fluid, cloth in order to create the animation of the mesh. A popular game that uses this method is Journey with its cloth creatures and main character created almost entirely out of cloth.

With that out of the way, let us explore how to get vertex animations in UE4.

The method that is described here involves morph targets.

In a morph target animation, a “deformed” version of a mesh is stored as a series of vertex positions. In each key frame of an animation, the vertices are then interpolated between these stored positions.

That’s fairly simple to understand. And you can see why it falls under the blanket of a vertex animation.

The kind folks at Epic have written a MaxScript that enables any Editable Poly mesh with keyframed animations to have its animations written out into a texture. The only downside to this method is that the mesh can have at max 8192 vertices.

In your Engine installation folder look for “Epic Games\EngineVersion\Engine\Extras\3dsMaxScripts\VertexAnimationTools”

It’s straightforward to use and this tutorial will explain the details behind it and the material you will need to create in order to view this animation in the engine:

But just in case, here’s a screenshot of that material too:

whisky11-debug

Hope this is helpful to someone!

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Unlit

Posted on by Cyber Shaman

ABOUT:

I worked on a team of 4 programmers (including myself) to build a 2.5D Platformer called ‘Unlit’ in a time period of 4 months. The engine we built is called the Whisky Engine and is written using C++ with a few libraries like OpenGL, GLM, SFML etc. The engine is built on a component-based design.

MY ROLE:

  1. Physics programming:
    a. Implemented the physics engine.
    b. Used SAT to implement AABB colliders
    c. Also implemented were colliders for spheres and planes, and raycasting.
  2. Gameplay programming:
    a. Implemented, tested and fine tuned player input.
    b. Unlit is a platformer, so most of the gameplay revolved around input and how the player can traverse the world.
  3. Level design:
    a. Implemented 3 out of the 4 levels that we had in the final release of the game. Did so using our custom built level editor.
  4. Environment Artist:
    a. Modeled and textured all assets except for the main character. Used Blender, 3DS Max and Photoshop.

CREDITS:

1) Egemen Koku: Tools Programmer/Engine Programmer
2) Lisa Sturm: Producer/UI Programmer/Gameplay Programmer
3) Sai Narayan: Physics Programmer/Level Designer/Gameplay Programmer
4) Volkan Ilbeyli: Graphics Programmer/Engine Programmer

SCREENSHOTS:

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Cloth in UE4

Posted on by Cyber Shaman

 

I’ve been working on a third person exploration and adventure game called ‘The Nomad’ for the past 6 – 8 months, and I wanted to share some of the techniques I had learned in this time.

The topic we are going to explore today is Cloth, and how to implement it in Unreal 4. Before we do that, let us examine some of the purposes that cloth is applied to within games.

Cloth is an extremely important part of a game developers toolbox. It is a material that exists in abundance in reality, and regardless of scenario and settings, every game can probably make some utilization of cloth, or use cloth physics to achieve some convincing visual effect (I’ve seen it used for hair as well).

The screenshot below is of the game ‘Journey’, a personal favorite of mine, and a wonderful game that takes cloth simulation and applies it to creatures, mechanics, architectural flourishes and even the main characters entire body.

journey_12

 

How Unreal 4 implements cloth is using the APEX Physics SDK. The technical details of this implementation are beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say that in order to bring cloth into Unreal 4, you will need to use either the standalone APEX cloth tool or the APEX cloth plugin built into Max or Maya.

https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload#?dn=physx-apex-sdk-1-3-0

You will need an NVIDIA developer account to download it. It’s a quick and free registration thankfully.

This article isn’t a tutorial on how to implement cloth, only a demonstration of it, but here’s a link to the tutorial I used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTOELBNBt04&t=1003s

He makes use of Blender to attach, rig and skin the cloth mesh, before exporting it into the APEX cloth tool.

In the cloth tool, the cloth simulation is defined by painting the max displacement values directly onto the cloth mesh. The character model must also have collisions generated for it so that the cloth can collide with the character model.

The simulation can be previewed and the environment settings tweaked to observe how it reacts under different parameters. The simulation asset can then be exported and saved as a separate file.

Import this asset into Unreal and then apply it at the Material level. The cloth should be working now.

Some important tips that hopefully will save you the time I spent tearing my hair out when I couldn’t figure out why the cloth mesh disappeared as soon as I applied the physics asset:

  1. Skin the cloth mesh. If you don’t, bad things will happen.
  2. Make sure the cloth mesh is rigged to the appropriate bone. If you don’t, bad things will happen.
  3. Make sure to disable “Add Leaf Nodes” in the Armature tab of the .FBX export settings in Blender. If you don’t, bad things will happen.

Hope this is helpful to someone!

Ground Fog in Unreal 4

Posted on by Cyber Shaman

I’ve been working on a third person exploration and adventure game called ‘The Nomad’ for the past 6 months, and I wanted to share some of the techniques I had learned in this time.

My previous post dealt with implementing Distance Fog using a Post-Process material.

This time, we are going to explore how to implement a Ground Fog in Unreal 4.

Ground Fog is very important for a variety of reasons.

Here is the same scene as above, without the Ground Fog.

groundnofog
Scene without Ground Fog

A couple of things you can notice:

  1. The scene still looks okay, but overall lacks any visual complexity.
  2. The color of the sand is now too repetitive and dominates the view.
  3. Less easy to differentiate between the foreground and background, the distance fog that we see helps somewhat though.

So, we can see how Ground Fog can add to the overall aesthetic of a level. Let us now proceed to the implementation itself.

fogtexture
Get UV values for Fog Texture

This set of material nodes, is responsible for raycasting forward a certain distance (ML_Raycast), finding a world position and scaling that by NoiseSize.

raycast
Raycast Material Function

This world position is then fed into MF_NormalMaskedVector and what is obtained then is a UV value for the moving fog texture, by masking the input WorldPosition with the Vertex normal.

normalmaskedvector
Normal Masked Vector Material Function

The output of the moving fog is then multiplied (in my case I use Add, it works for this case but might get weird results otherwise), and then you use a if statement to define a World-Z cutoff for the fog.

If the worldZ of the vertex being drawn is lesser than the cutoff value, we multiply the moving fog color value into the post-process output. You can think of this as a simple if-conditional check.

if(PixelWorldZ < CutoffValue)
DisplayFog();

Then, in order to make the fog fade smoothly until the cutoff value is reached, we use another if statement to check the distance between the cutoff Z value and the current pixel world Z value. If the pixel is within the gradient fade range (as defined by GradientRange), then we lerp between the color output of the fog and 1.

if(WorldZCutoff – PixelWorldZ < GradientRange)
LerpBetweenFogColorAndSceneColor();

If the output is 1, we use only the scene color.

groundfogmaterial
Gradient and final material output

The final output of all this is multiplied into the PostProcessInput, and then fed into the Emissive Color.

This material uses the Post-Process material domain. Assign it to a Post-Process Volume, and you should be good to go.

Hope this is helpful to someone!