Things are pretty slow over here, so it’s going to be a short one.

Unreal news

Epic announced Unreal Engine’s new pricing model, which is a rather common seat-based system. The new EULA detailing all that is also out, and I was very glad to find the “Non-commercial exception”, which covers (most of) our uses of the engine. So no big change for us.

This change coincides with the 5.4 release. We’ve got a 5.4 branch of our project, though we have to wait for some third party dependencies updates before moving projects over (e.g., Varjo). Small internal milestone: with the release, I officially moved our master branch from 4.27 to 5.3, so I guess our Unreal Engine 4 days are now officially over! Well, kind of, we still have a 4.27 experiment running soon, so…

Unrelated: Epic publishes lot of learning resources on the Epic Dev Community, but sadly they’re not really well advertised. I bookmarked the page and regularly check for new interesting content, and I encourage you to do the same!

Research projects

NEWMOB

We’re deep into the development of the scooter-riding part of this project.

On the software side of things, we’re working on multiple scenarios each with a few complex situations. This is more or less following the same workflow as described before, so at this point we’re getting pretty good at this. But we decided to also include some Glow Path to help guide the riders, which is a lot of fun to work with.

On the hardware side, we’re in the process setting up the simulator, so that includes the actual scooter, the Buttkicker, the Varjo XR-3 and all the Mixed Reality configuration, the sound system, StreamDecks and all of the safety features to ensure everything goes well once the experiment starts.

Prévision

What’s new on this project? Well, that’s a good question. I’ll go find out and get back to you on that in 3 months 😛

BERTHA

New project alert! And it’s a big one. BERTHA is a Horizon Europe project, which also includes CARLA among its partners. We’ll work to develop a Driver Behavioural Model, and obviously that will involve Unreal things. People have already joined our team for this project, so expect more in the future!

Motion Capture

For (yet another) project, I needed a scooter rider fall animation. And you’ll have to believe me on that: there’s not a single one on the Marketplace.

However, I remembered that one of the two labs I work for (LBMC) ran an experiment a few months back to compare traditional and markerless motion capture systems. Not for gamedev or entertainment, but FOR SCIENCE (biomecanics and movement analysis, in this case). What does this have to do with falling scooter you might ask? Well, the motion being captured for that experiment was just that: falling scooter riders.

So a colleague was kind enough to export an animation from the Qualisys tool, which I then cleaned up in Blender, imported in Unreal and retargeted to the Epic skeleton.

The end result is… okay I guess. But since then Epic added Auto Retargeting (which includes Qualisys skeleton), so I’m guessing that their IK rig is better than whatever I managed to cobble together.

For the ground collision issue, I looked at Physics Control component, but that might be overkill for what is a rather static issue.

Marketplace

CityBLD is out! I didn’t really have the opportunity to work with it yet, but it looks very promising. Lots of features and kits coming.

Reallusion released BuildingGen, which is… weird, given that they specialize on character tools. But the plugin looks very interesting nonetheless, especially since they have a French Style pack, which is perfect for us.

Speaking of french things, check out this signs pack on the Marketplace, which also includes direction signs! One of the few things we were missing to make our environments even more realistic.

Thanks to all creators out there, making our work possible. We don’t have a single 3D artist on staff, so being able to just purchase all that is hugely beneficial to us.