Unreal 4 goes free

[Neilg]

I guess epic/the ue4 guys got a sneak peak at this - http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/...unch-announced

[vlado]

I guess epic/the ue4 guys got a sneak peak at this - http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/...unch-announced

Yeah, fight to the death...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Mokiki]

Yeah, fight to the death...

Best regards,
Vlado

So they went free and rental only. Don't know if too many people will be happy about this.

[samuel_bubat]

And Valve just made the source 2 engine free, too.
http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/3/8145...ree-developers
Crytek announcement in.. 3..2..1 ^^
Funny they are all free now. Those engines cost some gazillions of dollars in the past.

[flino2004]

The same tactic that autodesk used many year ago with those " illegal" copies floating around....to take more of the market people need to know the software... And this what they are doing and it's not free for commercial use, you still have to pay the 5% fee.

[theedge]

Actually, some fields do not even have to pay the royalty, so 100% free.
As stated on EPIC website :

The 5% royalty starts after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. Pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization.

[cheerioboy]

And now Unity is also free more or less, http://unity3d.com/. They've rolled all the features that used to be Pro only into the Free version. The new Professional version seems to have more features geared towards bigger companies. Unity's new lighting, GI, reflection stuff looks interesting. I'll need to test it all before I jump ship now

[flino2004]

Is anybody here is using or testing Cryengine?

[Neilg]

I gave it a go way back. It's a little easier than ue4 to get off the ground but lacks some fine control that ue4 has. never took anything far enough to realise if one was a clear winner though, ue4 was $20 a month so we sacked off cryengine research.
it's landscape/scattering & surface painting tools are amazing though. You can make beautiful things immediately whereas ue4 needs some reading to even start.

[Companioncube]

just saw Epic's talk from GDC about this cinematic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zjPiGVSnfI

impressive stuff.

[werticus]

Real time 30fps - free engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zjPiGVSnfI#t=01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLYgssrKI-I

I appreciate that vray can do better - but this is 'good enough'. And at 30fps just murders pre rendered for most uses.

Come on vray, where is my 30fps?

[vlado]

If this is good enough for you, then that's great. Unreal and Unity will certainly come in useful in a lot of cases. I don't see any point in us trying to go into that area though.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

NOT VRay related, but more a Max question:
Following on from my comment in another thread, I really would like to understand why we can get "realtime" engines that can handle huge spaces with trees, grass, buildings, characters running around etc, but navigating that same scene in max kills the viewport?

[vlado]

NOT VRay related, but more a Max question:
Following on from my comment in another thread, I really would like to understand why we can get "realtime" engines that can handle huge spaces with trees, grass, buildings, characters running around etc, but navigating that same scene in max kills the viewport?

Because in 3ds Max, you can also *edit* every single aspect of that scene. 3ds Max must maintain a lot of additional data structures that allow you at any time to change materials, lights, edit meshes, animate stuff etc. It can't cut corners like hide trees that are far away, or use LOD to simplify far away geometry (because the geometry may not have any LOD levels at all) or use UVs to bake lighting (because the mesh may be without any UVs at all). All of that editing must be undo-able, redo-able and so on. 3ds Max is also extendable, meaning that you can write a plugin that displays custom geometry in the viewports (take for example, ForesetPro). All of these things add up bit by bit.

There's of course room for improvement and I'm sure the guys at Autodesk are looking into that.

Best regards,
Vlado