I have not yet had the chance to do anything original in the Unreal Engine and I have a question about how it handles normal/specular maps. Every time I see a game that is built using Unreal it is immediately obvious, judging by the way the normal/specular maps handle lights. I guess my question is if this is caused by intense specular from the normal maps or if it is a bloom that has an intensity setting? I was just wondering how this will blend with the aesthetic you are going for?

Once again, this is looking amazing so far! You guys seem to be really motivated and I hope you all the best!

Normal and Specular maps are used to add finer detail to the way polygons compute lighting. The way unreal by default uses the normal map into the lighting equation is pretty standard.

However most of the Unreal and Gear of War games uses a heavy visual style where lighting parameters are adjusted to present a more extreme world. They had used lot of Rim lighting setups to provide a dramatic appearance to characters and shifting lighting weights so that specular terms get highly bloomed.

A side effect of those over-intensified Rim lighting setups has caused that no only the edges of the character get highlighted but also most of the normal map edges get boosted as well. While this gives a very characteristic and dramatic effect it also make the normal maps usage more visible.

Given that most games build using the unreal engine has followed the preset standards, the visual style of Unreal and GoW has become usual on those games. But that doesn't mean that a game build using unreal can't provide a complete different visual style as there are lot of graphic possibilities supplied within the engine.

For prelude we are targeting a very specific visual style that let you feel nostalgic about the good old games, with a great touch of realism. To handle that, we are severely reviewing the lighting and post processing setups to provide the most dramatic graphic battles without burden the environments, so that all blends nicely. We have already tweaked the Standard Post processing chains to provide softer Ambient Occlusion effects and currently we are prototyping several color grading setups to boost the feeling of our environments.

So get tunned and check the next releases as there will be very interesting changes on Orion graphics.

Thanks for the reply! I knew that normal/specular maps are used for per pixel/fragment lighting, I wasn't sure why every game looked really over-intensified. I have been pondering this question for quite some time now. Thank you for finally answering it!

Woops double post

I think frank hit the nail on the head with this one. I would like to add though, the unreal engine is extremely powerful and as developers we're in not really limited how we choose to have normals/specs are rendered out, or anything for that matter.

Unreal has an awesome material system that allows anyone to easily create a parallax effect if desired and/or adjust how powerful your spec is (among a massive amount of other possibilities). While Frank is able to adjust the rendering system through the code, artists have the ability to take it one step further utilizing the material system. Unreal defaults to the phong rendering shader and I believe thats one reason many games have similar appearances but there is nothing stopping you from say, making it look like Team Fortress 2 as I've already discovered and still in the process of getting the rest posted up.

Well, I would like to thank you guys for taking the time to respond to me. Its amazing that you're being so involved in the community and creating an impressive product. I hope to learn more about your game and see it in action.

Anything for you guys

You'll be the ones deciding if we survive or not - better take the best care of you.

You better not lie about the cake this time.....