Haha if you have the means to donate you can subscribe to our Patreon for as little as $1 per month! No pressure, of course. I just make these videos to share information and solidify my own understandings :)
You are a god among men in the unreal community. I really want to thank you for being generous and sharing everything you have learnt. Like another comment has said, I feel rather guilty to feast on such incredible content.
Much of what youre teaching us here is seemingly unobtainable information unless one studies/really gets into it - Or pays for it. Regardsless, you are an absolute treasure, Charles. Much love
Just woke up, saw this video, and must say... Even that I don't fully understand the shader, this DevLog gave me inspiration and motivated me so much to the day! Thanks, Charlie!
You're assets are exactly what I'm aiming to build BUT I'm just starting learning game dev. It's a quality i have never been through in any tutorial material. Amazing work!
I don't understand how this works yet, but I am determined to. Thanks so much for sharing all this information, it's incredible! I always appreciate your videos, you've accomplished some really amazing things, but a lot of the stuff in this video in particular is really innovative and interesting, and it's a great in-depth dive to some fun places. Thanks again!
Absolutely astounding Charlie, I've been checking the development of Prismatica every now and then in the discord and the progression is amazing! Can't wait for the full release!
2021charlie: I can add 800 characters into prismatica while still getting 50 fps 2022 UE5 comes out: so I added 10,000 characters and still 120 fps at 4k resolution.
It's a pleasure to see stuff that actually make sense in a real production context! You absolutely following the right path and I think with some more care that master material could be made even more efficient :D
Thank you! And yep - it's definitely still a WIP. Someone gave me the idea of baking the finished Atlases to very small Render Targets so the atlassing function doesn't have to be run every frame, so I considering people aren't going to be swapping out their equipment multiple times a second I could re-bake it when equip changes. And then all I need to do is add some switches to create a "lite" version for villagers/NPC's in safe zones that don't need all of the gore/damage related stuff
@@PrismaticaDev That's a nice idea. You could also consider adding a ShadowPassSwitch that removes all the vertex animations from the shadows, maybe you'll find out that nobody notices the difference (you could try the same with the Opacity Mask, making the material opaque for the shadows and reducing the alpha tests) :D With the amount of math you have it could even make sense, instead of making another material permutation, to add some actual BRANCH (the if statements that don't get translated to ternary operations you can write only in custom nodes), if with them you can remove a significant amount of instructions they actually work best. One more practical thing I want to suggest, for the Fabric of Reality, to atlas all those params you could use a CustomNode that puts all of them in an array and convert the UVs to a 1D index that fetches from that array, it should be more performant and cleaner
@@PrismaticaDev "Some value" is an understatement haha, I've learned more useful shader techniques from your videos alone than I have from way over 200 hours worth of courses focusing on this exact topic. Seriously, you have a gift worth noting and I say credit where credit is due! Though, I'll probably have to go over this one a couple of times to really wrap my head around it haha.. But honestly this very topic has been puzzling me for months! Cleared up a whole bunch of question marks already! Top work man, and an absolutely MASSIVE thank you! :D
I loooove this hybrid low/high poly art style you're running with. Looks fantastic! Edit: you did this all in blueprints? And got four drawcalls? This is... So so damn impressive... Man, my mind is blown.
most promising indie game so far. the quality and complexity of features r just astonishing. expecting to see how things gonna change after release for u guys, it will be huge
I know it's dumb to think that someone who makes a medieval fighting game doesn't do research but it's still very nice to hear that you know what a brigandine is, because it's quite surprising how many there are of devs who just don't care about the details at all and don't know anything about the subject, sometimes not even the basic things, see the weapon manipulation animations in SCUM as an example of that. Edit: right after I published this I saw how does the brigandine look underneath the cloth, so, I'm sure it's a limitation of the system and you know this without me, but it should be made of little sheets of metal overlapping each other slighly rather than being one piece, it is visible that it's made of pieces when the cloth is in place though.
Haha yeah the only problem with having the plates normal map underneath the fabric when it tears is that I would basically need to have 2 textures. I figured that the tearing shouldn’t be entire chunks of the armour that no one would notice unless they were really looking for it haha. I’m a huge medieval history nerd so it’s important to me that all of the armour looks functional, even if it isn’t strictly historical. The benefit is that it’s incredibly easy to animate with realistic armour because it’s literally designed for maximum mobility and segmented around the joints. As for the animations, I study HEMA and have a motion capture suit so we should be looking at some very cool animations down the line! (No spin-to-win ;) )
@@PrismaticaDev That's dedication right there, much respect to you, I wish I could stop procrastinating and do something worthy of being called an art piece like your game is. Edit: sounds like I am belittling your work by calling it simply a matter of stopping procrastinating, in fact I do know that you put countless hours and your soul into this, oh and I didn't forget Andrew too, tell him some random dumbass on the internet says hello.
@@sharkpetro2288 if you need help preventing procrastination, joining a community and being active is a great way to force yourself to get stuff done. Same with making DevLogs, committing to posting on Reddit a few times a week and streaming! :)
First off, amazing! I think the vertex paint of the "morphs" is a pretty slick workaround of using skeletal mesh merge since morph targets to the merged mesh are not supported. I've been looking at morph targets by calculating the FMorphTargetDelta. Gender, fat, and muscles are the big ones I want to use so RGB 'em on the vertex is a great solution! The only other big one I may want to use is age.
Amazing! I have just finished creating a dye system for my game... But my material skills are nowhere in the realm of yours. In my dye system I change entire materials for different dyes on the character equipment and my draw calls are poo. Very impressed! 😍 My stuff is toon-like as well, but less BOTW than yours. And mid-poly solid shading. Great food for thought. 🤘🏻👌🏼❤️👏🏻💯💯💯💯
Dude, this is just crazy. The best lesson on RUclips that I have seen. Although I didn't understand everything. Obviously, we need to review and revise. Especially about the damage system and the localization of impacts. I would also like to draw your attention to such a thing as texture array. In this case, you can use 64 tile materials on 1 texture in 4k. Or 16 materials of 1k. Do not confuse them with texture atlases, since texture atlases cannot be tiled, this is exactly a texture array. A feature for opengl. Perhaps this will simplify the math in your case. I don't know if this feature is available for unreal engine. But this is even in Godot.
Hey there! I think the texture array is actually a default setting in Unreal known as "Shared Sampling" where a bunch of different textures can share the same Texture Sample. Also I have a couple of videos that are a bit more in-depth about the damage system (I think the devlog before this one?)
This is the first video of yours that I have seen. (Now subscribed and liked of course). I think that if you ever made this an asset for unreal and unity it would sell like a game on its own. Incredible work, you have given me a ton of ideas! Thank you.
It's definitely a possibility, although I don't think it's "plug and play" enough to sell as an asset since it requires very specific authoring inside Blender and a lot of pre-planning when creating assets. Hopefully this video serves enough as a tutorial for anyone interested in adopting this kind of method though :)
Funny, that I've been working on the same system for my game for a month now. This is a really powerful thing. You did it very well :) I think I will finish it soon and release it for free.
Hey dude! Just discovered your channel as I was looking for an advanced animation tutorial on Unreal. I'm not looking for advance animation tutorials anymore but for more channels like yours. Cheers! Looking forward the next videos
Awesome video ! I've literally binged your whole channel in the past few weeks, all your videos are top quality. Thanks for what you're doing. One question though, which plugin do you use for skeletal mesh merge? And does the materials of each mesh automatically merge into the final material, or you need to do a bit of legwork to set the parameters by yourself?
Hey hey! I used to use a marketplace plugin called SKmerge, but there's a vanilla one included with Unreal 5 that I use now (you still have to enable it in plugin settings) As for the materials merging - if the default materials on the meshes are the same then it will merge them all in to 1 material slot. For the parameters, they get set manually each time I equip a new item. There's a lot of organization and planning that goes in to it haha
@@PrismaticaDev damn I didn't know there was one included in UE, there's absolutely no information about that anywhere 😮 Thank you again, now it's time to build that material !
@@PrismaticaDev Alright last one 😅 : is it possible to transfer cloth simulation from the individual sk meshes to the final merged mesh? I'm pretty sure I've seen your character's cloak simulating physics, but I can't find a way to make it work
@@notepan The plugin I used to use sort of did that, although the cloth-enabled meshes had their own material slot. So it's possible, but I don't know how to do it manually haha. The easiest way would be to use a Master Pose for just the cloth-enabled stuff
2 года назад
Man, I am blown away by this work. Great job. Pretty cool.
awesome Intro and now the Graphicstyle comes really together. Love how it looks now. For the Intro, you made a Sequencercam and used your car as a VR Pawn? Cool Idea
Thank you! I'm really happy with how it's all looking. For the intro, I recorded myself with my Rokoko mocap suit with audio, and then in UE I just played the animation back and synced it when editing.
jesus im gonna have to go through that again and pay better attention but yeah definately alot to think about. kinda genius honestly. it looks like one of those crazy conspiracy boards im half suprised you didnt open with "Mwahahaha i figuired it out I've FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT!!!"
Hey there!! A friend in my Discord server was coming up with some whacky ideas about using Vertex colour to displace characters which is how I settled on the GPU body morph stuff, but most of the other stuff like the Colour Atlas was sort of inspired by games that use colour palettes and shrunken UVs
above and beyond my expectations. i took the naive approach and have separate materials for each mesh. this type of system is too far beyond my skill at the moment. seems really useful though if you want to do big armies later on. or an mmorpg.
It definitely depends on the project - multiple slots is perfect if there are less characters on screen at once. Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for the support! :)
@@PrismaticaDev it's ok Charlie. Once agian, kudos to you mate. Doing us aussie game devs proud. I might look at a system like this later because it truly is a beautiful sight to behold how it's all coming together.
Thanks for the high quality devlog Charlie! It's so meaningful that I watched it 3 times. May I ask you some silly questions about uv atlas? 1.Why do we need the first 3*9 palette like atlas and unwrap element UVs base on it, while the final texture/uvmap matches combined mesh is the 3*3 atlas? 2.Why must we make all the input color parameters into the 3*9 color atlas, instead of use them individually/directly since we split value result for later calculating (damage or roughness function)? Sorry I'm just confused about the relationship between 3*9 and 3*3 atlas and don't know which grid(3*9/3*3) should I follow in blender for uv unwrapping.
Hey there!! The 3x3 atlas is for the actual textures of the character (normal maps, greyscale colour masks) whereas the 3x9 grid is for the actual colour values of certain parts of the character. The only reason I use a 3x3 grid for the textures is because I use render targets for applying damage/wounds to the characters so all the UVs can't overlap. For a simpler and more traditional setup, I would recommend checking out my video on reducing draw calls, as it might be more applicable and simpler :)
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. That's so kind of you I really appreciate it!Wishing you the best and plenty of success in your game development.
Wow that's an interesting approach. You make things with shader stuff that other would do with separate Meshes and texture files. impressive. The best thing is its scalebly via parameter change in editor and safe both performanc faktors, Memory and realtime calculation times. realy inspiring
Was wondering, do you know anything about smoothing out seems for example between wrists and arms? So if you have an bare arm and hand separated for swappable parts, there isn't a seam in the shading. I know how to do this in Blender through normal transfer, wonder if you'd need something similar in unreal/unity/game engine? If you mentioned it here and I missed it I'm sorry!! Great video by the way! I watched it years ago when it came out, and I've come back to it now that I have more experience to understand what you're saying ha hah
Hey hey, great question! I usually do it in Blender using the same method you described. You could manually calculate/change the normals in the shader but it would become more and more expensive with every seam you wanted to fix. The other option would be to do some sort of Normal correction using Geometry Script during the merging process
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks for your reply!! I think the answer lies somewhere probably in the merging process, the problem with doing it in blender is then my "parts" aren't usable as interchangeable pieces in the game engine. So I was thinking finding a way to merge the "pieces" into one model at runtime. I'm just an artist though lmao, trying to do some research on behalf of my programmer. We're using Unity so we don't have Geometry Script, but there might be something similar I can look into.
hey! I just wanted to give an update because I think I figured out my issue! in case anyone else is reading lmao. Basically after doing the data transfer, you can apply the modifier and make sure you have Custom Split Normals in the geometry data. It looks as if it breaks in blender when the character moves, but when you export your FBX to the game engine (unity in my case), it seems to work. I guess they have a different way of handling custom normals? Regardless it seems to work!!
Hey hey! I was using a marketplace plugin called SKmodular, however the basic skele mesh merging functionality is a vanilla plugin in UE5 (just enable it in the plugins options)
god, I love customisation and gore in games and I would just love to be able to make anything close to a system like this, Ive tried my best with customisation and its so messy, and theres no way I could make something this flexible and optimised
idk if you are using a motion capture suit or vr tracker on the first minute but i really curious about are your "Physical Animation" tutorial could be used to fix the collision problem?? when you accidentaly move the hand over the limit and penetrating to the body / arms happens. well i still trying to fix that issue and learn from your video tutorial and i hope i could find the answer. but anyway, your tutorial is amazing 👏👏🔥🔥
Do you happen to do even more in-depth walkthroughs as I’m still new to this? Even if it is on the Patron side of things? Would love to be able to build something like this myself for the game I’m doing. Amazing work by the way!
Hey hey! I have another video about reducing draw calls which goes over similar methods that are more applicable outside of this exact project, however all of my more involved tutorials require at least an intermediate knowledge of materials/shaders/UVs. If you'd like to learn more about the basics, I have a whole playlist of beginner tutorials called 5-minute materials :)
@@PrismaticaDev that is amazing to hear! I have an okay understanding and my friend is a lot more capable then myself. So between both of us we can definitely follow along. Seeing something like this that you have made is just incredible and would definitely help a lot in a number of areas to reproduce it even on a smaller scale. I really appreciate you taking the time to message back by the way :)
Looks fantastic man! Sorry I don't have time to watch the entire video, but I do have a question. You can equip different clothes meshes on your characters. Are those meshes just always loaded but invisible or something? So that you can just make them visible with your master-material whenever you want? Or do you actually have multiple meshes per clothing piece.
Hey Enrico! The meshes get merged together into a new SkeleMesh at runtime using some C+ stuff. If you skip to the very last timestamp there is a little explainer :) So to answer the question, it's multiple meshes for each piece of clothing but they get compiled into 1 skeletal mesh, which means that it's just 1 draw call for the whole mesh once merged (super good for performance!)
@@EnricoUniverse Yep, it's called SKmodular. Although if you know some basic C++ you could implement it yourself by following along at the bottom of this article docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/WorkingwithModularCharacters/
![I refactored the entire game in 20 days! [Prismatica DevLog #12]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mZoI23Tlc6Q/mqdefault.jpg)
![I refactored the entire game in 20 days! [Prismatica DevLog #12]](/img/tr.png)
![Character Movement [Prismatica DevLog #01]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hb8z-V4nMto/mqdefault.jpg)
It literally feels wrong being able to watch this for free. It's incredible, thanks.
Haha if you have the means to donate you can subscribe to our Patreon for as little as $1 per month! No pressure, of course. I just make these videos to share information and solidify my own understandings :)
Faxx
You’re the person who asks for homework at the end of class arent you?
Shut up and do your own research
Im donating wiht my paycheck this month btw @@PrismaticaDev
Charlie is gonna end up making an entire fucking game with one material.
its final form
I think it's called a texture atlas, used in minecraft and other older titles
You are a god among men in the unreal community. I really want to thank you for being generous and sharing everything you have learnt. Like another comment has said, I feel rather guilty to feast on such incredible content.
Thanks so much
Much of what youre teaching us here is seemingly unobtainable information unless one studies/really gets into it - Or pays for it. Regardsless, you are an absolute treasure, Charles.
Much love
That is hands down the best optimization mindset/execution approach I've Ever seen
Thank you! There's still a little bit to go, but I'm really excited on how it's turning out :)
@@PrismaticaDev It's a promising progress within a short amount of time, keep on going
Damn, what a title. Litteraly the best, most competent game developer on youtube
I'm blushing hahaha. Thanks for the very kind words :)
I can't believe that such high-quality tutorials are free. thank you! If this fun game is released on STEAM, I will definitely support it!
Just woke up, saw this video, and must say... Even that I don't fully understand the shader, this DevLog gave me inspiration and motivated me so much to the day! Thanks, Charlie!
Really good to hear my dude!!
You're assets are exactly what I'm aiming to build BUT I'm just starting learning game dev. It's a quality i have never been through in any tutorial material. Amazing work!
I don't understand how this works yet, but I am determined to. Thanks so much for sharing all this information, it's incredible! I always appreciate your videos, you've accomplished some really amazing things, but a lot of the stuff in this video in particular is really innovative and interesting, and it's a great in-depth dive to some fun places. Thanks again!
Really happy to hear that! If you have any questions about anything in particular and why I'm doing it that way, feel free to ask :)
Your development aside - you're very entertaining and charismatic as a presenter. Damn, instant sub.
Love the way you approach achieving so much from the materials graph! great stuff.
Came for the dev log, stayed for the Runescape music. This project looks great, dude! Stoked to see where it goes.
Thank you, Big Idiot!
Absolutely astounding Charlie, I've been checking the development of Prismatica every now and then in the discord and the progression is amazing! Can't wait for the full release!
Thanks so much Quontity :) Glad you're looking forward to the full release!!
This has expanded my mind- it’ll take me a few weeks to digest everything! Thank youuu for the video
Haha I'm very glad!! Hope some of my experiments come in handy :)
2021charlie: I can add 800 characters into prismatica while still getting 50 fps
2022 UE5 comes out: so I added 10,000 characters and still 120 fps at 4k resolution.
Hahaha INFINITY CHARACTERS
It's a pleasure to see stuff that actually make sense in a real production context! You absolutely following the right path and I think with some more care that master material could be made even more efficient :D
Thank you! And yep - it's definitely still a WIP. Someone gave me the idea of baking the finished Atlases to very small Render Targets so the atlassing function doesn't have to be run every frame, so I considering people aren't going to be swapping out their equipment multiple times a second I could re-bake it when equip changes. And then all I need to do is add some switches to create a "lite" version for villagers/NPC's in safe zones that don't need all of the gore/damage related stuff
@@PrismaticaDev That's a nice idea. You could also consider adding a ShadowPassSwitch that removes all the vertex animations from the shadows, maybe you'll find out that nobody notices the difference (you could try the same with the Opacity Mask, making the material opaque for the shadows and reducing the alpha tests) :D With the amount of math you have it could even make sense, instead of making another material permutation, to add some actual BRANCH (the if statements that don't get translated to ternary operations you can write only in custom nodes), if with them you can remove a significant amount of instructions they actually work best. One more practical thing I want to suggest, for the Fabric of Reality, to atlas all those params you could use a CustomNode that puts all of them in an array and convert the UVs to a 1D index that fetches from that array, it should be more performant and cleaner
@@VisualTechArt You're absolutely right about the Shadow Pass haha I can't believe I didn't think of that!
1.5mins in and already super impressed by how well put together your presentation is (mocap presenters), and by how awesome the game aesthetic is!
I love how the displacements allow for such a variety of characters!
the level of genius and inspiration in this video is just wild. Thank you so much for the deep dive. So many amazing ideas
You truly are a gift to the community my friend, I cannot understate how much of a lifesaver you are with every single video you release.
Thank you so much
@@PrismaticaDev "Some value" is an understatement haha, I've learned more useful shader techniques from your videos alone than I have from way over 200 hours worth of courses focusing on this exact topic. Seriously, you have a gift worth noting and I say credit where credit is due!
Though, I'll probably have to go over this one a couple of times to really wrap my head around it haha.. But honestly this very topic has been puzzling me for months!
Cleared up a whole bunch of question marks already! Top work man, and an absolutely MASSIVE thank you! :D
I have no idea about coding. No idea about game development. But even I can tell this is just brilliant.
Hahah I'm glad you think so :P Maybe Game Dev is something you'd enjoy!
I loooove this hybrid low/high poly art style you're running with. Looks fantastic!
Edit: you did this all in blueprints? And got four drawcalls? This is... So so damn impressive... Man, my mind is blown.
most promising indie game so far. the quality and complexity of features r just astonishing. expecting to see how things gonna change after release for u guys, it will be huge
Thanks Sandbox
2 legende in one place ty for the both for all your work to the community
I know it's dumb to think that someone who makes a medieval fighting game doesn't do research but it's still very nice to hear that you know what a brigandine is, because it's quite surprising how many there are of devs who just don't care about the details at all and don't know anything about the subject, sometimes not even the basic things, see the weapon manipulation animations in SCUM as an example of that.
Edit: right after I published this I saw how does the brigandine look underneath the cloth, so, I'm sure it's a limitation of the system and you know this without me, but it should be made of little sheets of metal overlapping each other slighly rather than being one piece, it is visible that it's made of pieces when the cloth is in place though.
Haha yeah the only problem with having the plates normal map underneath the fabric when it tears is that I would basically need to have 2 textures. I figured that the tearing shouldn’t be entire chunks of the armour that no one would notice unless they were really looking for it haha. I’m a huge medieval history nerd so it’s important to me that all of the armour looks functional, even if it isn’t strictly historical. The benefit is that it’s incredibly easy to animate with realistic armour because it’s literally designed for maximum mobility and segmented around the joints. As for the animations, I study HEMA and have a motion capture suit so we should be looking at some very cool animations down the line! (No spin-to-win ;) )
@@PrismaticaDev That's dedication right there, much respect to you, I wish I could stop procrastinating and do something worthy of being called an art piece like your game is.
Edit: sounds like I am belittling your work by calling it simply a matter of stopping procrastinating, in fact I do know that you put countless hours and your soul into this, oh and I didn't forget Andrew too, tell him some random dumbass on the internet says hello.
@@sharkpetro2288 if you need help preventing procrastination, joining a community and being active is a great way to force yourself to get stuff done. Same with making DevLogs, committing to posting on Reddit a few times a week and streaming! :)
It’s so insane how detailed this is
First off, amazing! I think the vertex paint of the "morphs" is a pretty slick workaround of using skeletal mesh merge since morph targets to the merged mesh are not supported. I've been looking at morph targets by calculating the FMorphTargetDelta. Gender, fat, and muscles are the big ones I want to use so RGB 'em on the vertex is a great solution! The only other big one I may want to use is age.
Incredible concepts that can be used for so much. Thank you for sharing!
This is the greatest Unreal education video on the internet. Period.
Prismatica is absolutely stunning and I can't wait to play it!
Thanks so much Toaster :) We're very excited to release a demo at some point!
@@PrismaticaDev I cant wait!
Would you ever do a tutorial on how to set this up? It looks amazing! I am very excited for this game to enter Early Access (if it goes that route).
Your channel's definitely going to blow up soon, man. Keep on keeping on!
Haha thank you Ziru! I hope we can get the videos out to help more people :)
Amazing! I have just finished creating a dye system for my game... But my material skills are nowhere in the realm of yours. In my dye system I change entire materials for different dyes on the character equipment and my draw calls are poo.
Very impressed! 😍
My stuff is toon-like as well, but less BOTW than yours. And mid-poly solid shading.
Great food for thought. 🤘🏻👌🏼❤️👏🏻💯💯💯💯
Thanks to people like him, new indie game developers can make games :)
Dude, this is just crazy. The best lesson on RUclips that I have seen. Although I didn't understand everything. Obviously, we need to review and revise. Especially about the damage system and the localization of impacts.
I would also like to draw your attention to such a thing as texture array. In this case, you can use 64 tile materials on 1 texture in 4k. Or 16 materials of 1k. Do not confuse them with texture atlases, since texture atlases cannot be tiled, this is exactly a texture array. A feature for opengl. Perhaps this will simplify the math in your case. I don't know if this feature is available for unreal engine. But this is even in Godot.
Hey there! I think the texture array is actually a default setting in Unreal known as "Shared Sampling" where a bunch of different textures can share the same Texture Sample.
Also I have a couple of videos that are a bit more in-depth about the damage system (I think the devlog before this one?)
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks for devlog! This is extremely useful! This methods blow up the brain!
i will definitely go back to this video once i learn a bit of unreal
Great to hear :) Feel free to check out all of my Tutorial videos for some broader understanding! :)
so exited for it to come out
"excited"...
@@jyashi1 Nonono, he was so excited that he exited his browser accidentally
@@PrismaticaDev Standing up for your viewers... I like it 😂
52:53 lul, thanks for the shader displacement explanation!
This is the first video of yours that I have seen. (Now subscribed and liked of course).
I think that if you ever made this an asset for unreal and unity it would sell like a game on its own.
Incredible work, you have given me a ton of ideas!
Thank you.
It's definitely a possibility, although I don't think it's "plug and play" enough to sell as an asset since it requires very specific authoring inside Blender and a lot of pre-planning when creating assets. Hopefully this video serves enough as a tutorial for anyone interested in adopting this kind of method though :)
Funny, that I've been working on the same system for my game for a month now. This is a really powerful thing. You did it very well :)
I think I will finish it soon and release it for free.
Awesome!! I'd love to take a look when it's done and compare notes :)
@@PrismaticaDevmine is not as cool as yours for sure :)
I love the art style, and how you've got it all working is complete wizardry to me. Amazing stuff.
Literally the content I was looking for. I always wanted some reference to know how change a items colors like in Guild Wars 2.
Hey dude! Just discovered your channel as I was looking for an advanced animation tutorial on Unreal. I'm not looking for advance animation tutorials anymore but for more channels like yours. Cheers! Looking forward the next videos
This looks so good. I'm almost disappointed that this is a top down battle arena-like game. This would look great as a closer 3rd person game.
Ever since that time i had trouble with the Cel shader, iv'e been keeping up with your videos since.
And wow! Your game looks fantastic!
OH MY GOD, the devlog is JUST WOW!
Hahaha thanks Zawia :P I might have to do a few more of the vTuber segments haha it was a lot of fun
@@PrismaticaDev 👌👌
Awesome video ! I've literally binged your whole channel in the past few weeks, all your videos are top quality. Thanks for what you're doing.
One question though, which plugin do you use for skeletal mesh merge? And does the materials of each mesh automatically merge into the final material, or you need to do a bit of legwork to set the parameters by yourself?
Hey hey! I used to use a marketplace plugin called SKmerge, but there's a vanilla one included with Unreal 5 that I use now (you still have to enable it in plugin settings)
As for the materials merging - if the default materials on the meshes are the same then it will merge them all in to 1 material slot.
For the parameters, they get set manually each time I equip a new item. There's a lot of organization and planning that goes in to it haha
@@PrismaticaDev damn I didn't know there was one included in UE, there's absolutely no information about that anywhere 😮
Thank you again, now it's time to build that material !
@@PrismaticaDev Alright last one 😅 : is it possible to transfer cloth simulation from the individual sk meshes to the final merged mesh? I'm pretty sure I've seen your character's cloak simulating physics, but I can't find a way to make it work
@@notepan The plugin I used to use sort of did that, although the cloth-enabled meshes had their own material slot. So it's possible, but I don't know how to do it manually haha. The easiest way would be to use a Master Pose for just the cloth-enabled stuff
Man, I am blown away by this work. Great job. Pretty cool.
Considering that you have not developed a game before your channel is awesome.
awesome Intro and now the Graphicstyle comes really together. Love how it looks now. For the Intro, you made a Sequencercam and used your car as a VR Pawn? Cool Idea
Thank you! I'm really happy with how it's all looking.
For the intro, I recorded myself with my Rokoko mocap suit with audio, and then in UE I just played the animation back and synced it when editing.
As for the colour changes and stuff, I used Anim Notifies
@@PrismaticaDev thats of course even better. Cool. I try something similar with VR probably not so accurate but its worth a try. Inspiring 👍🏼
@@IRONFRIDGE Yep, you can definitely get a good starting point with VR methods :) Especially if you have a way to edit the animations!
The character does the devlog? BRILLIANT!
damn youtube not sending a notification for this one, this is downright impressive. OMG TY FOR THIS MASSIVE PIECE
Hahaha hope you learned a thing or two my friend! :)
@@PrismaticaDev Quite a lot, It was mind blowing from start to finish :)
This looks amazing. You got a new subscriber. I am going to watch this whole thing later. Thanks!
Thanks Andrew! Hope you enjoy it :) Thanks for the sub
Absolutely amazing! So excited!
Hope you enjoy the video~!
i dont know anything about anything but the runescape music... this is very intense
You sparked enthusiasm inside of me. Thanks, man.
I bow to you Optimization King.
Haha it's a nice rabbit hole to go down :) Definitely learned a tonne from researching optimization!
jesus im gonna have to go through that again and pay better attention but yeah definately alot to think about. kinda genius honestly. it looks like one of those crazy conspiracy boards im half suprised you didnt open with "Mwahahaha i figuired it out I've FINALLY FIGURED IT OUT!!!"
Hahahaha it definitely feels like that whenever I have to open it on stream
The armour in this game is absolutely incredible,OH CRAP///
Dude you're insane, keep it up.
Nice skirt of plates most game devs won't even consider that attention of detail when it comes to armor configuration
Priceless info. Very useful. It would be nice some advice about 01:10
I have heard that in MMO's they get chars down to one draw call and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how. This is amazing THANKS
SKELETAL MESH MERGING
YESSSSSSSSSSS
MY VERY MILD CAMPAIGNING FOR THE FEATURE PAID OFF
Haha it's a life saver!
That's really incredible !
Thanks Mart :) Glad you like it!
I understood like 90% of everything you said but felt like my brain was a shot glass trying to catch all the water from a waterfall.
Very cool, informative stuff, thanks much!
Cheers David! Hope you learned something :)
Hey Charlie ! That approach is very smart, did you come to this idea on your own or got inspired by someone else's experience ? Thanks for sharing :)
Hey there!! A friend in my Discord server was coming up with some whacky ideas about using Vertex colour to displace characters which is how I settled on the GPU body morph stuff, but most of the other stuff like the Colour Atlas was sort of inspired by games that use colour palettes and shrunken UVs
YO, this is awesome, just discovered your channel
😂 forgot and was instantly reminded that you have a mo-cap suit.
this is top tier🔥
Lol. I love the way you're teaching us using your game dev :)
O_O PogChamp!!!! Incredible stuff
Thanks Alf!! Hope you enjoyed this one :)
This is soo amazing!
Not as amazing as YOU and your support
game looks sick
cant wait!
Hope you enjoyed the premiere :)
It's best guide - full process! It's awesome! You;re cool!
yeah this character really kills me, the look... ah, so smooth.
My mind is blown. Always loved this type of character customization.
@@griff316 glad you're digging it :) I'm looking forward to doing more modelling!
above and beyond my expectations. i took the naive approach and have separate materials for each mesh. this type of system is too far beyond my skill at the moment. seems really useful though if you want to do big armies later on. or an mmorpg.
It definitely depends on the project - multiple slots is perfect if there are less characters on screen at once. Glad you enjoyed the video and thanks for the support! :)
@@PrismaticaDev it's ok Charlie. Once agian, kudos to you mate. Doing us aussie game devs proud. I might look at a system like this later because it truly is a beautiful sight to behold how it's all coming together.
You good sire have blown mine mind with this one.
Thanks for the high quality devlog Charlie!
It's so meaningful that I watched it 3 times.
May I ask you some silly questions about uv atlas?
1.Why do we need the first 3*9 palette like atlas and unwrap element UVs base on it, while the final texture/uvmap matches combined mesh is the 3*3 atlas?
2.Why must we make all the input color parameters into the 3*9 color atlas, instead of use them individually/directly since we split value result for later calculating (damage or roughness function)?
Sorry I'm just confused about the relationship between 3*9 and 3*3 atlas and don't know which grid(3*9/3*3) should I follow in blender for uv unwrapping.
Hey there!! The 3x3 atlas is for the actual textures of the character (normal maps, greyscale colour masks) whereas the 3x9 grid is for the actual colour values of certain parts of the character. The only reason I use a 3x3 grid for the textures is because I use render targets for applying damage/wounds to the characters so all the UVs can't overlap.
For a simpler and more traditional setup, I would recommend checking out my video on reducing draw calls, as it might be more applicable and simpler :)
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. That's so kind of you I really appreciate it!Wishing you the best and plenty of success in your game development.
@@gleaner3485 No worries at all :) If you ever need a hand with anything, join our discord server!
Wow that's an interesting approach. You make things with shader stuff that other would do with separate Meshes and texture files. impressive. The best thing is its scalebly via parameter change in editor and safe both performanc faktors, Memory and realtime calculation times. realy inspiring
wow, this game is beautiful
runescape soundtrack at the background, nice xD
You're a wizard, Charlie!
I'm a whaaat?>??
Was wondering, do you know anything about smoothing out seems for example between wrists and arms? So if you have an bare arm and hand separated for swappable parts, there isn't a seam in the shading. I know how to do this in Blender through normal transfer, wonder if you'd need something similar in unreal/unity/game engine? If you mentioned it here and I missed it I'm sorry!!
Great video by the way! I watched it years ago when it came out, and I've come back to it now that I have more experience to understand what you're saying ha hah
Hey hey, great question! I usually do it in Blender using the same method you described. You could manually calculate/change the normals in the shader but it would become more and more expensive with every seam you wanted to fix. The other option would be to do some sort of Normal correction using Geometry Script during the merging process
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks for your reply!!
I think the answer lies somewhere probably in the merging process, the problem with doing it in blender is then my "parts" aren't usable as interchangeable pieces in the game engine. So I was thinking finding a way to merge the "pieces" into one model at runtime. I'm just an artist though lmao, trying to do some research on behalf of my programmer. We're using Unity so we don't have Geometry Script, but there might be something similar I can look into.
hey! I just wanted to give an update because I think I figured out my issue! in case anyone else is reading lmao. Basically after doing the data transfer, you can apply the modifier and make sure you have Custom Split Normals in the geometry data. It looks as if it breaks in blender when the character moves, but when you export your FBX to the game engine (unity in my case), it seems to work. I guess they have a different way of handling custom normals? Regardless it seems to work!!
Would you make a step by step tutorial on how to set a material like this up for your character? Just the basics.
You had me at *Unlimited*
i n f i n i t e haha
I see you’ve taken inspiration from some of Mordau’s helmets that’s cool lol
Haha yep - I ended up using Mordhau as a direct reference since their helmets are all historically accurate except I can view them in 3D!
Amazing video!
What plugin are you using to merge the skeletal meshes?
Hey hey! I was using a marketplace plugin called SKmodular, however the basic skele mesh merging functionality is a vanilla plugin in UE5 (just enable it in the plugins options)
@@PrismaticaDev Hey! Thanks for the quick reply. I just discovered your channel yesterday, amazing work, keep it up!
god, I love customisation and gore in games and I would just love to be able to make anything close to a system like this, Ive tried my best with customisation and its so messy, and theres no way I could make something this flexible and optimised
Blueprint Assist, my friend! Ctrl-D
Brilliant!
Cheers! Hope you learned a thing or two :)
idk if you are using a motion capture suit or vr tracker on the first minute but i really curious about are your "Physical Animation" tutorial could be used to fix the collision problem?? when you accidentaly move the hand over the limit and penetrating to the body / arms happens. well i still trying to fix that issue and learn from your video tutorial and i hope i could find the answer. but
anyway, your tutorial is amazing 👏👏🔥🔥
Do you happen to do even more in-depth walkthroughs as I’m still new to this? Even if it is on the Patron side of things? Would love to be able to build something like this myself for the game I’m doing.
Amazing work by the way!
Hey hey! I have another video about reducing draw calls which goes over similar methods that are more applicable outside of this exact project, however all of my more involved tutorials require at least an intermediate knowledge of materials/shaders/UVs. If you'd like to learn more about the basics, I have a whole playlist of beginner tutorials called 5-minute materials :)
@@PrismaticaDev that is amazing to hear! I have an okay understanding and my friend is a lot more capable then myself. So between both of us we can definitely follow along. Seeing something like this that you have made is just incredible and would definitely help a lot in a number of areas to reproduce it even on a smaller scale. I really appreciate you taking the time to message back by the way :)
Looks fantastic man! Sorry I don't have time to watch the entire video, but I do have a question. You can equip different clothes meshes on your characters. Are those meshes just always loaded but invisible or something? So that you can just make them visible with your master-material whenever you want? Or do you actually have multiple meshes per clothing piece.
Hey Enrico! The meshes get merged together into a new SkeleMesh at runtime using some C+ stuff. If you skip to the very last timestamp there is a little explainer :)
So to answer the question, it's multiple meshes for each piece of clothing but they get compiled into 1 skeletal mesh, which means that it's just 1 draw call for the whole mesh once merged (super good for performance!)
@@PrismaticaDev Thanks so much!
You said in the video you used a plugin for merging the skeletal meshes, is that a plugin on the marketplace? And if so could you share it?
@@EnricoUniverse Yep, it's called SKmodular. Although if you know some basic C++ you could implement it yourself by following along at the bottom of this article docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/AnimatingObjects/SkeletalMeshAnimation/WorkingwithModularCharacters/
@@PrismaticaDev Thank you for the help. Will take a look at it since I'm working on a game with modular equipment myself. :D
This looks epic
Glad you think so!! I'm really happy with how it's all turning out :)
This shit is epic and I have no more words left.
This was a very good video
Just insane stuff
Haha when smoothbrain goes FULL CIRCLE!