Unreal Engine 3's Under The Hood Next-Gen Features

Wednesday 06th April 2011, 04:37:00 PM, written by Alex G

Epic continues to pimp Unreal Engine 3 in this latest video collating a number of features for DX11, current gen, and mobile platforms along with additions to the editor. That's not to say that all the features are particularly new in the world of graphics rendering (some have been around for years, like IBL or cascade shadow maps), but considering all these features are available and supported for current licensees, it's better late than never! Indeed, many of the items in the video have already been covered at GDC or in UDK, so this is more Epic just advertising themselves.

Featured in the video:

• DX11 MSAA Hair
• DX11 Sub Surface Scattering
• DX11 Deferred Rendering with proper MSAA support
• DX11 Image Based Reflections
• Enhanced Blooooooom
• APEX Clothing
  
• High Quality Shadows
  
• Bokeh Depth of Field
• Shadowed Point Light Reflections
• Colour Grading
• Cascade Shadow Maps
• Seamless Lighting Transitions
• Soft-Edge Motion Blur
• Landscape Terrain Editor
• Scaleform UI integration
• iOS/Android/NGP support
• UDK remote and mobile previewer

Improvements to the Editor including:

• Content browsing, transform tools
• Multi-channel Key Framing
  
• Exponential height fog
• Detail Lighting View Mode
• Navigation Mesh
• New front end for deployment

Perhaps the one thing that would be nice to get more details about are the "high quality shadows" of which there are so many implementations available.  And who knows what "Enhanced Bloom" is - HDR rendering with high precision framebuffers ought to already handle excessive blooming & saturation. Maybe better control?

Discuss on the forums

± epic, unreal, engine, dx11, bloom

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