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UE 3 (and RO:HOS) Modding Guidelines

Yoshiro

Senior Community Manager
Staff member
  • Oct 10, 2005
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    Until I can get the art department to get me their version (if they have any different specs they are working from) the following is Epics guidelines for UE 3 development and modding.

    From Epics Technology page:

    Characters

    For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

    * Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene. (yoshi note: It is best to be conservative here, but you need to have enough detail so the normal sits on top without looking bad)
    * Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
    * Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

    Normal Maps & Texture Maps

    We author most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.

    Environments

    Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.

    Scale

    The following is the RO:HOS real world scale conversion

    1uu=2cm

    Standard Player Height = 92 UU
    Standard Door Height = 128 UU
    Single Door Width = 64 UU

    Vehicles/Tanks

    Our tanks have roughly an interior created of 80,000 Triangles, and an exterior of about 10,000 triangles.

    Additional information:

    We use 4 (for PZ4, T-34 uses 3) texture pages 2048 each. One for each of the following, driver/Hull MG, Turret, Basket/ammo, and a tiled page. For the tiled page we included walls, cylinders (because they do not need to be normal mapped) wires, nuts/bolts, and things with writing on them. Also include on the tiled page things that are not directly in the cameras view. Only bake things that are going to be directly in front of the camera (Like optics for example)

    So if the tank interior has 3 main metal colors, make a black tile, green tiles and white wash tile (for the walls) then float the appropriate UVs on the correct tile
     
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    Reactions: Basic_Infantry
    cool - thanks
    In addition I would be very interested to get an idea of the estimated tri count and texture map sizes recommended for vehicles/tanks that could be added to the game (whether or not they actually feature in retail HoS, as yes, i fully understand it's not a given that they will.)

    Looking at Ue3-
    I imagine the allowed tri count in particular shouldn't be any higher the standard for Ue3 vehicles (whatever that figure is), primarily as a result of a potentially greater proliferation in maps.

    Also, would it possibly be the case that due to the extra complexity of tank system similar to the one in Ro (ie. interior models, multiple crew positions, coding and the like - all of which would be expected in HoS) that the visual element is compromised in the interests of keeping the package from getting to large/complex?
    Or is this purely a graphical issue, with no bearing on performance outside your gpu?
     
    Upvote 0
    Hate to be a nag

    Hate to be a nag

    but can we get any kind of updated approximation? I was satisfied with this till I remembered it's from Epic's page and you've not confirmed how close the polycounts, environment polycounts and scale are to the Epic ones.

    I would think people like Iron Europe would really need to know this.

    Thanks for the great work so far team
     
    Upvote 0
    How tall is the Soldier you are using?
    The standard UDK Bot is 2 Meters tall.

    If I am making a door, that is 2 Meters tall ( 100 uu`s ; 1uu = 2cm)
    the character will just fit in, but from a first person perspective, eevrything will lookk a bit too small.
    So if we work with real life models in a 3d Modeling programm. (Lets say I want to make a model of the Reichstag), I would need to scale the model by a few percent (20% or so) to make it look right from A first person perspective.

    My question is: How tall is the Soldier Modell you are using in ROHOS?
     
    Upvote 0
    Here's a bit more info for you guys;

    Standard Player Height = 92 UU
    Standard Door Height = 128 UU
    Single Door Width = 64 UU

    Player Height = 88 UU

    Of course, these are just guidelines. Hope that helps. :)

    Could you upload a simple scene with some example objects, that
    we could use as a guidline for our own objects?
    A part of a house, with a door, windows and stairs, a playersized cube
    model ... or such things ....

    cu, JM
     
    Upvote 0