February 2013 UDK Available Now!

[rexoli]

February 2013 UDK Beta Upgrade Notes


Epic Games, Inc. has released the February 2013 Unreal Development Kit (UDK) Beta, the latest version of the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) that provides access to the award-winning 3D game engine and professional toolset used in blockbuster video game development, architectural visualization, mobile game development, 3D rendering,digital films and more. The latest UDK beta is available now at http://www.unrealengine.com/en/udk/downloads/.

New Substance Engine Integration for Smart Texturing

Starting with the February UDK, developers now have direct access to Substance, a leading toolset used for the rapid authoring of high-quality materials and dynamic textures. Substance can improve workflow by substantially reducing the iteration time for texture creation, and at the same time shrink download sizes.

The native integration, which ships with free content and tools in UDK, enables the real-time generation of Substance textures based on parameters set by users in the Unreal Editor or in Unreal Matinee. The parameters and base texture are created by an offline tool called the Substance Designer (an interface similar to UE3’s material editor) which generates a file that is then imported into the editor.

As an added bonus, for a limited time all UDK developers are eligible to receive a 50% discount on both the Substance Designer 3 commercial license, which offers all the latest professional tools for efficient texture creation, and Allegorithmic’s Bitmap2Material, an incredibly powerful tool for generating full, seamlessly tiling materials from any bitmap image.

To see how Substance provider Allegorithmic put the integration’s features to the test and reduced production time by 80%, visit the UDK showcase for Beneath, a special demo that shows how developers can benefit from what’s inside UDK right now.

Beneath demo screenshot

It’s easy to get started using Substance. Be sure to check out Allegorithmic’s video tutorials and Epic’s dedicatedSubstance documentation on UDN.

Thanks to Substance provider and Unreal Engine integrated partner Allegorithmic for the discount and also for generously sponsoring Make Something Unreal Live 2013, our student game development competition in Europe.

For full list of features and updates, click here: http://www.unrealengine.com/news/feb...upgrade_notes/

Click link to go to the February 2013 UDK download page: http://www.unrealengine.com/en/udk/downloads/

[Chosker]

good job there. I'll see if I get try Substance any soon

[Hello_World!]

So is substance like Speedtree or Scaleform? Meaning that... is it free for us?

[XilenceX]

So is substance like Speedtree or Scaleform? Meaning that... is it free for us?

Nope... they just have some sort of a free texture converter into substances. However the Substance designer 3 is bloody expensive even at the discount... so yeah yet another update with support added for some external App that I will never use. Anyway some of the files in the (clean) installation seem to have been stripped down so that's a good thing.

[Showster]

Some nice mobile stuff :-D ! Please can we have Android without full UE3. I'm sure they'd be a huge following for it.

[online|offworld]

Keen to try the free tools mentioned here : http://www.allegorithmic.com/integrations/udk

But get asked for UDN password?

[ffejnosliw]

Keen to try the free tools mentioned here : http://www.allegorithmic.com/integrations/udk

But get asked for UDN password?

Try this link:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Alleg...Substance.html

I brought it to their attention. I'm sure they'll get it fixed up.

[ciox]

I'm really glad UDK is still being updated, but another mobile update is kind of a bummer, are there any strong PC features I've missed?

[nicolasliatti]

The link has been changed, thanks for notifying us!

Regarding Substance Designer price, there is also a Not Commercial version for $99 (full featured).
So it makes $295 for a commercial license with the discount (up to March 1st), and $99 for a non-commercial license.

And there is indeed Substance Utilities for free, allowing you to convert any bitmap into substance. You can then import the file into UDK and it will automatically create a material, saving you some production time.

[online|offworld]

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for fixing the link! This is all very exciting

[RNG]

Substance Utilities looks nice. I assume it is OK to use with commercial projects? It says free on the webpage but license on the setup refer to it as trial software and doesn't mention anything about using the output commercially (at least, I couldn't see anything like that when I skimmed through it).

I assume substance utilities downscale the textures you put in to 256x256 and generate procedural detail up to 2048x2048 res in editor? Web site is painfully vague in what substance utilities actually does. If this is the case, I'm both impressed and disappointed at the same time. Impressed because it preserves detail well, disappointed because it doesn't go above 2048 res, you'd think a technology like this would shine even more the higher the resolution got.

I'm also curious about the performance and memory usage of it. Content browser displays the usual memory usage for individual substancetextures, does it have any behind the scenes improvements? How does it handle mipmaps? Can a substancetexture dynamically reduced in size for LOD models? Is there an actual beneficial cost of using substancetextures versus normal textures (other than flexibility of it of course).

[Jerc]

Utilities is free for both personal and commercial projects.

It compress and embed your original texture in its original resolution and allows you to downscale or upscale it dynamically inside UDK (for LOD for example). It does not add detail to the initial textures though, it only gives you more control over the final result.
The 2048 limit is there as a global limit for all substances in UDK as the CPU generation engine can't go higher for now. This limit might be lifted in the future if we integrate the GPU engine.

Memory usage is exactly the same as with standard images, you end up with DXT compressed textures and mipmaps in video memory.

The beneficial cost when using Utilities will mainly be less instructions in your shader since you don't have to tweak your specular and normal inside of your shader, or at least you need less of it.

[XilenceX]

Substance Utilities looks nice. I assume it is OK to use with commercial projects?

I'm also curious about the performance and memory usage of it. Content browser displays the usual memory usage for individual substancetextures, does it have any behind the scenes improvements? How does it handle mipmaps? Can a substancetexture dynamically reduced in size for LOD models? Is there an actual beneficial cost of using substancetextures versus normal textures (other than flexibility of it of course).

Those are exactly the questions I've been asking myself about the implementation of this. ^^
I think for some very specific textures it could be usefull... I am thinking tileable ground textures for example. Anyway the way these are displayed in the content browser seems kinda backwards to me. lol It seems to add even more clutter to it. If their output offers performance improvements over the regular textures that would be well worth it though.
The Beneath demo video was impressive, but a level you can walk through would've been the only way to tell how well the format is holding up.

[Jerc]

I definitely prefer to see thumbnail images of all my game content.

You should see thumnails of the substance outputs exactly in the same way as traditional textures. The only difference is that it adds two more objects to the Content Browser, the substance object itself, and the graph instance from where you can control parameters.
Don't forget that Substance Utilities is only a container for your own art and the goal is to make iteration and import easier.

Also, you will soon be able to download the map and packages from the Beneath Demo

[XilenceX]

You should see thumnails of the substance outputs exactly in the same way as traditional textures. The only difference is that it adds two more objects to the Content Browser, the substance object itself, and the graph instance from where you can control parameters.
Don't forget that Substance Utilities is only a container for your own art and the goal is to make iteration and import easier.

Also, you will soon be able to download the map and packages from the Beneath Demo

Yeah sorry I didn't notice that earlier, I edited my post shortly before you posted. Anyway the map&packages for the demo should be really helpfull to check how well this works. So as RNG mentioned... are the Utilities ok to use in commercial projects?