Episode 3, Update #3
Added 2023-02-22 15:17:08 +0000 UTCHey all,
The last week and a bit, I've mostly been unifying and upgrading the characters. With UE5's recent update, a lot of missing features are now available to me which I didn't have access too before. On a technical level, I can have some decent subsurface scattering on the skin (You can see it on the MC's ear in the preview image) and better translucency lighting which makes the hair look slightly better among other things. To put things into perspective, I started EP1 with UE5 Early Access, EP2 with UE5.03 and currently have upgraded to UE5.1 for the EP3 release.
There will be more tweaks I'll make along the way I would suspect, but for now it's good enough to move forward and start rendering the scenes I've written. That will be my focus for the next several weeks!
Do let me know if you think it's an improvement or if it's getting worse! It's difficult getting feedback, working as a 1-man team...
All the best!
Ezy
Comments
Alright, wanted to make sure that the program I saw was the right one. Considering you're just using G8/8.1 is impressive. My PSU is from last year so I'll probably have to upgrade. Having that little bit of extra power wouldn't hurt in the long run either. I'll talk to Tako as well though about PSU. That's the current issue my 3080 has. Not much of a fan of how loud the fan gets hah. Thanks once again for the great talk!
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-28 06:05:19 +0000 UTCYeah, all the Substance stuff is part of Adobe nowadays. Not sure about the GEN9 stuff either, haven't touched it yet. An 850w PSU might still work. I think Tako runs a 4090 with that. There's some calculators online that can work that out for you. Otherwise, just get a new PSU as well. If you haven't gotten the PSU in January this year, it won't have the 12v port, as they only recently came out. Yep, it's even quiet when rendering. My 3080 sounded like a jet taking off too, the 4090 doesn't make a peep in comparison.
Ezy
2023-02-26 11:41:22 +0000 UTCWill give Substance Painter a try then. Was hoping it was part of the Adobe pack I was subscribed to but of course it's not. T_T It's an Adobe product, right? That was the program that was shown when I searched Substance Painter on google. Wow, Substance Painter sounds a lot more useful than Photoshop! Having the ability to view it in real time would reduce the amount of headache for sure. Now to just make sure my math skills are up to par. Haha. Gotta love learning new information! The 'HD modifiers' was touched on in the video I watched. But that was talking about gen 8 & 8.1 models. So I'm not certain if gen 9 has a standard built in 'HD modifier' for the models. No need to really crank up those sub-d levels then if the render isn't a close up I take it? I see that you've got a bit of experience under your belt to say the least heh. Was curious more than anything. Honestly, fiddling around with programs is how I learned Photoshop and Premiere back in the early 2000's. Been trying the same thing with DAZ. But I realized that it doesn't hurt to ask for help and tips from people more experienced like you, Slockie, and others. Even though you don't have any recommendations, I appreciate the help you've given so far regardless. Yeah...there is so much to learn in regards to making a visual novel, let alone video games in general. Thankfully I have a close friend that will be able to help with the coding end. But the renders, story, and other bits I'm going to be doing myself. Not stressful whatsoever haha. It's what I want to do though so it's worth it. Hopefully Nvidia keeps that ball rolling forward with future generations. Now if they could just not have the cards cost an arm and a leg moving forward haha. Look forward to being able to have a card render as quickly and smoothly as the 4090. You sure you're not sponsored by Nvidia? Kidding ;P Bigger is better for them it sounds like haha. That's friggin crazy! They just have a room dedicated to being a PC case in their place of living? xP The rumored power draw was one of the deterrents for me when they were released. Unfortunately I'm currently rocking a 850W PSU. Not sure how well that would work with the 4090. Don't think it has the new 12v port. Not 100% certain off the top of my head though. I don't plan on overclocking though. Much prefer the card being silent as well. Is it pretty quiet when rendering as well? Because my 3080 becomes a damn jet engine when it renders.
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-26 04:27:16 +0000 UTCI'd say it's way better than photoshop. With Substance Painter, you can paint directly onto a model with all the required textures at the same time (albedo, normal, roughness), giving you a realtime result. In the old school photoshop days, you had to guess because you were painting in 2D, each texture individually without really knowing how it will look on your model. Substance designer is more of a procedural texture generation tool. Very useful for creation a tiling texture and by just changing a few parameters, you can generate a variation of it instantly. It's more of a non-destructive workflow, but also more of technical software as you're not so much painting stuff by hand and rather punching in some numbers and doing math calculations. A model consists of vertices and triangles (or polygons). Every time you sub-d, it multiplies the amount by 4. 2 triangles = 1 polygon which becomes 4 polygons or 8 triangles. etc.etc. Some characters have 'HD modifiers', they only start kicking in and getting better at higher sub-d levels. So if you're looking for really fine micro details, you should crank it up a bit for your renders. Oof, good question... I've been doing environment stuff since the late 90's and sort of grew up with the evolution of 3D. Eventually it became my job so it's hard for me to recommend something specific on how to get started. I started myself by just messing about until I started working together with seasoned professionals. I know it's not very helpful, but I guess youtube has aplethora of resources. It's a tough process, especially if you're trying to learn other stuff on top of that too like the renpy scripting language, writing a story and such. The 4090 has been the most stable, silent and fastest card I've ever gotten my hands on. It's what every high-end release should really strive to be like. Exceeded all my expectations. I think the ASUS one is one of the biggest ones, and Kent and Stoya went for those as well... bloody nutters! 😁 There was some panic about the card supposedly drawing 650 watts and potentially needing a massive power supply upgrade, but I didn't need to in the end. I have a 1000w power supply which is still gen 2.0 and doesnt have the new 12v port. It works fine though, the card is just limited to drawing 450w and thus you can't make use of the overclocking features. But that's fine by me and probably why the card is so silent and never breaking a sweat.
Ezy
2023-02-26 03:23:27 +0000 UTCIt's fantastic that so many programs seem to be able to work with UE! I figured the assets and environments were made strictly in UE. I've used Photoshop a lot when I was much younger. So it was what I got used to. But it's changed so much and I forgot how to do a lot in it haha. Is Substance designer or Substance Painter a better program overall compared to Photoshop(I own Photoshop already)? Always fascinating finding out a dev's creation process. Are the renders done in UE as well? Ohhhhh, the more you know! The sub-d levels deal with the amount of pixels on a model, right? Saw that you could unlock the limit on the sub-d levels. But it seems like there are diminishing returns that aren't really worth unlocking the limit. For not really being a character artist, you sure do an incredible job at character design! But your environments are noticeably high quality. Is there any tutorials or videos you'd recommend watching in order to learn more about building environments? Well you can tell that there are improvements with said fixes you implemented. Thankfully they didn't end up being all talk this time around with the 4090. Considering how the bungled the 2000 series cards. Have you had any issues with the 4090 or has it been smooth sailing? Ah beans, didn't realize they got rid of NVLink. Thanks to Kent and Stoya for testing out multiple ones for the rest of us to know the pros and cons. Haha. They must have massive cases in order to do that, damn! I looked up their size and had to measure the inside of my case to even see if they would fit. And it would barely end up fitting and only with certain 4090 cards since some seem to be bigger than others. I'm rocking a mid sized tower though. What wattage is your power supply by the way?
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-26 01:55:04 +0000 UTCThe assets for the environment I make in another 3D package (3D Studio Max). Those get imported into UE, where I put them together to build the environment. Textures are made through Substance designer or Substance Painter (or Photoshop if you're old school). Those also get imported into UE. Then you can make your shaders to use those textures and do nice things with them. After that, the lighting and its ready to render. Your viewport sub-d levels can't go beyond 3, that's why you have the render sub-d levels right below it. When you hit render, it uses that number instead. I'm not really a character artist (environments is what I have specialised in and know a lot about), but I hate hair for sure. Even with the improvements, it's still using the same shader as before. I just fixed some things in it. Initially when they anounced the 4090, a lot of us were sceptical about the numbers and marketing bullshit, but as the reviewers started getting their founder editions and benchmarking, it didn't seem that much bullshit anymore. It was true, it really did make a big enough difference and sort of justified the money. I'm just running a single one, UE doesn't really support multiple ones as of yet. They also got rid of NVLink, so you can't share the VRAM anymore. I think Kent and Stoya (from Chasing Sunsets) run multiple ones, but Stoya told me that they only share the CUDA cores. Still makes a massive difference for rendering. But they're freaking huge as well. I can only fit one in my case and I don't even have a small case.
Ezy
2023-02-25 12:22:42 +0000 UTCGoodness, just reading about everything you would have to worry about with realtime games stresses me out! Haha. Having not as many restraints must have been some what of a breath of fresh air. Holy hell! What a massive difference in production time! And you built the entirety of the campus grounds and the gym within UE if I remember correctly, right? I didn't realize that the difference between sub-D levels could increase the import time that much. I also didn't even know you could go higher than sub-D level 3. But I currently have no idea as to why the sub-D level can't be higher than 3 on my end(I also had no idea what sub-D levels were until I looked it up after you mentioning it. Haha). Is any optimization done before importing the models or is it just that much easier doing all the optimization within UE? Props to you for throwing your own shaders together though! Especially for the hair since it's such a pain in the ass from what you're saying. Hah, I had no idea that there were sole positions just for hair. Guess that makes sense though considering how hair can be with each individual strand. I'd rather deal with hands instead of hair. Then again, drawing made me despise dealing with hands. Haha. Is the new hair shader different from the master shader you created or is it part of the entire package? I've definitely never done anything dealing with shader programming. But I am relieved to hear that UE makes it so user friendly for building them if you know what you're doing. Just another thing I'll need to end up learning down the road. Makes me excited though to eventually learn how to build my own. Even if it will not be easy for a newbie right out the gate. I 100% plan on picking up a 4090 at this point after talking to y'all within the Discord server. I'm currently having the same issue with my 3080 filling up quickly. Sounds like a jet engine when rendering. Do you have more than one rig for rendering or just the one with the 4090 in it? Nvidia should higher all of you in the server for marketing haha. Because I'm definitely sold on getting one now. Especially since I am going to end up making my own game. Just need to finish getting more comfortable with DAZ and UE before hand. All of this information has been so helpful. Know I've said it before, but I really appreciate this!
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-25 07:39:46 +0000 UTCNo problem, it's nice to see somone have an interest in the technicalities! Yes, it definitely allows for more freedom as the focus is on what I need to show you guys and I don't have to worry about stuff such as "But what if the player goes here, do they get stuck, can they reach it, do they fall through the floor, does this door open, can the A.I. reach it, are the stairs at proper metrics, can I interact with this object?"etc. etc. etc. To put it into perspective, the campus grounds took me maybe a month to build from the ground up, the gym about two weeks. Making that real-time where I would have to take aformentioned factors into account, easily 6 months to a year. Importing characters is fairly limited in terms of the amount of resources you can use, UE is a game engine after all. At the most, I can get a character with sub-D level 3 into it, which is what you see in the EP3 previews. I could probably go one higher, but getting it in initially already takes about half an hour to 45 minutes. And that's just importing a single one. They average about 2 million to 4 million polies, mostly depending on the complexity of the hair geometries and associated morphs. There's no easy way to optimize that without it looking like absolute ass. When one is imported, I start optimizing the material and texture usage. There's often a lot of resource waste where the original character creator has use a 4k pure black texture to tell it to be not fully metallic. I remove those and set a simple shader flag that does that without wasting a 4k texture on it. The hair looks like absolute ass in most cases as well, so I had to make a new hair shader from scratch that does it a bit nicer. It's still not great, but it's impossible to make super awesome hair without dedicating all my time to it and making it completely from scratch. There's a good reason people in the industry take on the sole position of 'Groom Artist', purely dedicated to character hair. UE is very user friendly when it comes down to building shaders. It's all node based which for someone like me, makes shader programming easy to understand. If you've never done any such things before though, it's not going to be easy to get into. Definitely recommend getting your hands on a 4090 if you can and want to dedicate some time to rendering and development. When I just started this project, I had a 2080. Those 8GB filled up extremely quickly. Halfway through EP1 development, I got my hands on a 3080 which helped a bit. Still the 12GB filled up very quickly for what I wanted to do and I had to reduce the texture sizes quite a bit to get it all to work. Then in October last year the 4090's came out and I managed to get my hands on one. I was halfway through EP2, but it made such a difference. Rendering is so much faster and there are very little struggles with its 24GB of VRAM!
Ezy
2023-02-24 10:16:19 +0000 UTCThat's fascinating that there is such a difference between the two uses. Would you say that just making renders allows you a bit more freedom compared to making realtime games in UE? Oh no...was sort of worried that moving a character from DAZ to UE wasn't going to be smooth sailing. Do you have to optimize the DAZ characters prior to moving them over to UE or can it be done in UE? Yeah, still blows me away that you're able to fit so many characters on screen at times. My VRAM already gets angry with just one character on screen haha. I noticed the inconsistency between shaders for DAZ figures. Has been a bit of a headache with diving into DAZ. That was a great idea on your end! Was it difficult throwing together your own master shader? At least you're finally done with making it! Sounds like it will help out in the long run for production. Thanks for answering all my questions by the way! It's much appreciated. :)
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-24 02:12:43 +0000 UTCGood stuff! I'm used to using UE for making realtime games and using it the way that I do for this one, is a whole different ballpark. I don't have to worry as much about the usual optimisations and restrictions, since I'm just making renders with the path tracer, rather than walking around with an actual character doing stuff. Getting a character in from DAZ was also a new process, and that part can be pretty tricky! I wouldn't exactly call that user friendly. There's a few limitations you have to work around to get it to operate at a decent level. Joint Control Morphs don't always play nice and are vastly more limited than what you see in DAZ. DAZ characters are usually not very optimized either and come with a lot of wasted resources, so I do have to try and optimize them. Especially when sometimes I have 20 characters on screen at once. Your VRAM will fill up very quickly with all those 4K textures... Like I mentioned in the post, I've also unified the shaders between the characters. I'm using a mixture of GEN8 and GEN8.1 characters and each used to have their own shader instances of those (either PBR or IRAY or something else) which made them inconsistent. I took one of them and made a master shader, that now every single character uses. This is something I should have really done from the start and I'm happy it's finally done.
Ezy
2023-02-23 10:36:51 +0000 UTCLooks like an overall improvement from what I'm seeing. Especially when it comes to the shadow and lighting on Lily. Has UE5 been fairly user friendly from your experience? Want to try and utilize it with daz but I'm still trying to get comfortable with daz before hand. So I'm just curious.
Twisty Ninja
2023-02-23 03:48:58 +0000 UTCI like the upgrades from what I can see, comparing to the older models it seems like you can capture greater details in the models now the MC's rows looking a lot cleaner and defined. The lighting I can see has improved with better shadows and highlights too. Overall I'm digging it can't wait to see how the rest of the cast comes out, can always see the time and care you put into this
Dek8000
2023-02-22 19:16:18 +0000 UTCConsistency is key!
Penz
2023-02-22 16:30:23 +0000 UTCThe lighting will affect the characters globally, even at a distance. For sure you're right, a lot of the finer detail won't show at a distance. At the very least, I'll get much more detailed close up shots, especially during intimate moments, and I won't have to struggle as much with inconsistencies. In particular the last epsiode was terrible, as the hair of a lot of characters got brighter or darker depending which angle they were facing. Lily's goes from quite dark to quite bright at certain points and it was driving me nuts.
Ezy
2023-02-22 16:18:46 +0000 UTCI think it's an improvement. If you didn't mention the ear I prob wouldn't have noticed, it is cool though! These are all close ups. Do you notice a difference in scenes that hold multiple characters ? I am wondering how different UE5.1 looks/feels vs UE5.03 when you add more bodies and it's harder to show close up level of details.
Penz
2023-02-22 16:06:27 +0000 UTC
