Episode 3, Update #3
Hey 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 (5)
Looks 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.
Good 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.
I 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
I 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.
The 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.