Game Engines

For the past few months I have been working with the most recent version of cry engine, and to be honest I love it. Though importing assets can be quite complicated at first and it just doesn't make sense sometimes why objects don't seem to be importing, I quickly figured out efficient ways to import objects. Once in the engine I found it very easy to work out the interface and enjoyed that you can also play and edit their example maps to show you what you can actually achieve.

It has some clever terrain modifiers though I haven't truly had enough time to experiment the extent of what it possible with them. I was however able to create a randomly generated island. Yet I struggled to texture the terrain correctly as my textures would be far too large on the terrain and have been unable to work out how to scale my textures to the correct size to work. Though I have seen on video tutorial that the textures can blend very seamlessly and create very realistic terrains.











Of course I have also been using UDK this year but I still struggles to use the engine. I have trouble trying to compile my materials and I still don't know how to make my alphas semi transparent. It is also slightly more limiting with its lighting conditions from what I can tell unlike with CryEngine where date, time and location of the sun can be modified. However I find editing the terrain easier in UDK though some of the foliage features won't include collision within trees and other foliage that may require it. But here is a quick example of one of my assets in CryEngine and then in UDK.

        CryEngine screenshot                                                      UDK screenshot

Within UDK the normals became very strong from far away and would only render to a more realistic degree when the player is closer to the building. This gave the bricks and windows a very "pudgy" look which I didn't like and due to the complicated material editor I couldn't work out a way to fix it. Furthermore I was unable to make glossiness work as it would make things turn unusual colours and look wrong. 

The CryEngine screenshot feels a lot cleaner and closer resembles my original model. The normals work subtly and the added bonus of being able to customize my materials in engine by adjusting their specular, gloss levels and even the overall colours of the texture sheet makes using the engine very fun. 

For example here is another of my assets. On the left is it with its original unedited texture in generic lighting, whilst the screenshot on the right is with the colours tweaked to a more orange hue to fit in better with the surrounding buildings and with spot lights close to the building which help to show the normals on the building. This feature in CryEngine is so useful and means editing textures to work better in the scene is so much easier than having to redo them and re-import them into the engine. 

UDK has a much more editable shader technology in comparison to CryEngine and depending on what you want to create could determine what engine you will want to use. But for the time being I'm much more comfortable using Cry Engine.

Just look at some of the pretty lighting you can do