Epic Pipeline Presentation
I saw this presentation about a year ago, talking about the pipeline Epic uses on their games. Maybe some interesting stuff for others here. The images are larger, you can right click -> view image to see a larger version.
45 days or more to create a single character… wow.
They don’t use polycruncher to generate LODs, they do this by hand. They just use it to import the mesh into max in a usable form from mudbox/zbrush.
They don’t care so much about intersecting meshes when making the high res, as it’s just used to derive the nMap, not RP a statue or anything.
They said they only use DeepUV for it’s ‘relax’ feature. They make extensive use of the 3DS Max ‘render to texture’ as well.
Their UT07 characters are highly customizable. Individual armor parts can be added or removed, or even modded. Their UV maps are broken down into set sections that can be generated on the fly. So there are still 2×2048 maps but all the maps can be very different. This is something I have also seen in WoW and other games.
They mentioned many times how they use COLLADA heavily to go between DCC apps.
They share a lot of common components accross characters