iOS for Architecture?

[taz1004]

I've been trying to convert some of our levels to iOS and having some difficulty matching quality. I didn't expect to match the PC quality perfectly but hoping that it would be close. But it's not even close. Reflections are crappy, lightmass calculation for some reason isn't as good as PC version, and other limitations combined makes it look very flat. Can't even make a good looking glass material.

So I tried looking for other examples of iOS games and they all look inadequate of architecture use. Do others agree with me on this or can anyone share an example of great quality iOS version that could be used for architectural visualization?

[seenooh]

Did you try enabling gama correction?

[Xenobite]

you can always bake textures in 3d app with some nice rendering setup and use them on "unlit" material
reflections - they are not that good on IOS - if you want to make them "real"
refractions - you might try to fake them but it won't be easy - they won't work for most stuff (windows for example)

big problem with IOS environment reflections is that you can't get full 360 spherical (or cubemap) environment

[taz1004]

I'm sure gamma correction is not the issue here and yea I'm aware of the limitation in reflection and refraction. I have a library of quality spheremaps and none of them look good. Baking the texture may work on small apartment type but not for big outdoor development. That'll be too much textures. I just haven't seen any example of great quality iOS version.

[taz1004]

This is basically the difference I'm getting.

[Tom Shannon]

Looks like you're getting the old "uncompressed lightmaps" issue on mobile there: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/...ighting-Issues
We actually just swapped the Red and Blue values of all our lights for iOS to fix the color issue. You'll also get poorer quality texture-maps scene-wide because of the PVRTC. It's brutal. No specular and no real normal mapping also are a big hit to the quality of arch-vis on mobile.
BTW, the PC version looks fantastic!

[taz1004]

Thanks. I've always turned off compressed lightmaps so that wasn't the issue. I forgot to update this thread but I did play around with it a bit and got it to look fairly close to the PC version. And it's running pretty good on the iPad2.

Limitation on the reflection still is a problem however. Sphere map may work for this little loft but for larger outdoor project, it will be a limiting factor. Hope Epic includes cube map in the near future.

[Tom Shannon]

nice! That's looking really great. Super-impressive

[micahpharoh]

That looks fantastic. Care to share any tricks you found useful?

[taz1004]

I added little bit of constant warm emissive to all mobile materials. I found that to be the best way of balancing color. It is a chore however because one value doesn't work for all material so I had to tweak each material separately.

[Boshko Savich]

I remember i we found somewhere that one guy r add "-SimMobile" to the shortcut of Mobile previewer so that will start -open gl es 2,0 rendering-, im not sure what is it about but u can try it.

[sew900i]

post 2 pic of my working stuff on IOS

[CatWare]

Was wondering how did you managed to do the glasses, they look very plausible on the ios, mind sharing?

Also, how did you managed to get that vibrant look and little texture loss?

Doing a similar project and bumping in a few problems with the mobile stuff

[taz1004]

Was wondering how did you managed to do the glasses, they look very plausible on the ios, mind sharing?

Also, how did you managed to get that vibrant look and little texture loss?

Doing a similar project and bumping in a few problems with the mobile stuff

I don't mind sharing as I believe more people using UDK for architecture will make the whole sector grow and grow together. But I don't know what to tell you because I really didn't do anything special except color correcting it with emissive constant like I've said. Maybe you can post your images and perhaps try to figure out what you're doing wrong? And as for glass, it looks crappy on my end too. I don't know why you say it looks plausible. I just used plain texture with about 50% alpha and adjusted it in mobile color. And used busiest spheremap I have as reflection map.

[CatWare]

Ok, I managed the glasses, but I'm getting alot of jageddy lines, and having alot of problems with lightmaps. We are taking too long to make them and they are not perfect. Is there a way to do lightmapping automaticly? (udk create uv set is awful)

Examples:
Jaggedy



Lowres shadows:


WeirdShadows

[taz1004]

A lot of it, you will have to resolve it through trial and error since those seems to be coming from your unfamiliarity with the engine. You can enable anti aliasing for jagged edges. It's hard to tell what's going on in that shadow image. It does look like lightmap compression issue but I'm not sure.

And as for lightmap, doing it automatically means you're letting the computer decide. Computer can never layout UV's better than you. We use Maya and its automatic UV mapping. It does a descent job most of the time. Then we clean up the part that looks bad.

Working with UV is always the tedious part but you will get faster. I can layout a UV of fairly complex mesh in matter of minutes. But it used to take hours when I first started.

[CatWare]

I think I have AA turned on when i posted this pics:

MobileEnableMSAA=True
MobileContentScaleFactor=2.0
MobileVertexScratchBufferSize=300
MobileIndexScratchBufferSize=10
;Default mobile shadows to on so they work in PIE/PC
MobileModShadows=True
MobileTiltShift=False

Am I turning it on correctly?

[MereMortal]

That looks awesome well done.
Can I ask how you turn off compressed lightmaps ?

[taz1004]

As for the AA, I believe there are some known issues with it on latest build and iPad2. For uncompressed lightmaps, open BaseLightmass.ini and set below to false. Please beware that doing so will increase file size of your level by 3 times at least. Use it only if you require the quality.

bAllowLightmapCompression=True

[JulienCoffin]

Hi Taz, love you thread learning a lot from it! But I was wondering did you pay the $99 to put it on an app, as I would love to know how heavy would be the app, is it a couple MB or is it above 20Mg.
Also as you dont mind sharing your knowlegde, did you fix the opacity issue for your plant leaves for the ios??
And last 2 questions as now you had to play with the emmissive constant to get a better renders if now you go back in the editor preview it s not looking that good anymore right??
The last one, not sure if you can help but I m just confused IOS support animated materials like water in a creek, which can be seen in the "Epic Citadel" but no way to get the sky material to move??? What s with that?

[taz1004]

But I was wondering did you pay the $99 to put it on an app, as I would love to know how heavy would be the app, is it a couple MB or is it above 20Mg.

Yes I did have to pay the $99. And because I used uncompressed lightmaps, the app is about 200MB.

did you fix the opacity issue for your plant leaves for the ios??

No, those were stock UDK vegetation and I didn't bother troubleshooting them. I just deleted them.

And last 2 questions as now you had to play with the emmissive constant to get a better renders if now you go back in the editor preview it s not looking that good anymore right??

It looks same in editor preview as it does on my iPad2. As for emmisive constant... I haven't had time to play with iOS version lately but on newer versions, color grading is available for mobile and I may mess around with it instead of emmisive constant.

but no way to get the sky material to move??? What s with that?

I didn't know sky material can't move... where did you get that information from?

[JulienCoffin]

Hey Taz, Wow 200MG, well I not yet to the point of looking into that but 200MG is not cool : (, that would be so hard to share, but as you said its uncompressed, so would be good to know how heavy it is when compressed.
Thanks for the answers really appriciate it, soon I ll have some stuff to post.
About the sky well you know when you r in the editor in realtime you have the clouds moving, but if you go in the mobile previewer they dont move anymore, must be some material properties that IOS is still not supporting i guess.

[Graylord]

Just a question, why do you keep writing MG? It's megabytes.

[taz1004]

What's MG? Mega Gig? I said MB and 200MB isn't that big. FairwayHD solitaire game on my iPad2 is 275MB and Drag Racing is 257MB. And they both have no 3D content. And typical video I make are about 400~500MB so UDK is actually smaller. I wont be making compressed version but you will never get it down to 20MB.

That sky has lots of expressions which are not supported on mobile. There are other lighter ways to animate sky for mobile.

[Tom Shannon]

I think I have AA turned on when i posted this pics:


Am I turning it on correctly?

If you are using mobile AA, you can't use any of the other lighting features such as bloom, DOF or god rays. (However I just can't get it to work at all, but that's the official line)

[JulienCoffin]

Lol, sorry about the confusion with MG, I mean MB just a mistake. 200 MB is not really big for us but for some people with small anderstanding of computer, I was hoping for an easier way to share it. But no biggy. THanks