Epic Games Releases August 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta

Epic Games today has released the August 2010 UDK Beta, this beta is the latest version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides uncompromised access to the award-winning toolset used in blockbuster video games, 3D visualizations, digital films and more.

You can download the UDK beta for free at www.udk.com/download.

This month’s beta release includes many upgrades, such as:

• Scaleform pipeline improvements
• Improved motion blur
• New detail lighting view mode
• Recompile materials directly from Content Browser right-click menu
• New character indirect lighting controls
• Better hair lighting

Plus, new documentation like the Scaleform workflow, introduction to FaceFX and camera technical guide will be helpful to those getting started with UDK.

Check below for the full list of improvements in detail:

Scaleform GFx

• Scaleform GFx 3.3.85 is now merged in and all UDK UI is GFx-based.
• Made many improvements and fixes to the Scaleform import pipeline.

Point Light Shadows

• Whole scene shadows for point lights are now supported.

Precomputed Visibility

• Precomputed visibility allows occlusion on platforms that don’t support hardware occlusion queries.

Motion Blur

• The quality of Motion Blur has been significantly improved without a performance loss.

New Detail Lighting View Mode

• Replaces diffuse and specular color but keeps all other material parameters like normal map, opacity mask, two sidedness, etc.
• Useful for viewing lighting without material diffuse color influence.
• Lighting-only view mode is still useful for looking at lightmap artifacts and compression.

Character Indirect Lighting

• Added new controls for fine-tuning runtime indirect lighting settings on characters.
• Added distinct controls for both lit and shadowed environments.

Hair Lighting

• Implemented a new, single-pass technique for translucency lighting.
• Previous technique relied on multiple passes, which over-brightens on multilayered objects, such as hair.
• The single-pass technique uses about half the number of shader instructions as multipass lighting, so hair will be much cheaper.

Before

After

Normal Maps, Indirect Lighting & Lightmaps

• Normal maps are now taken into account for indirect lighting with simple lightmaps.

Before

After

Other New Stuff

• Can now recompile materials directly from the right-click menu in Content Browser.
• New texture streaming system saves memory and prioritizes textures more effectively.
• Added limited support for importing non-power-of-two (NPOT) textures into the editor. MIP maps are not allowed, and image dimensions must be divisible by four for DXT compression.
• Vertex normals are now correctly saved with static meshes exported as OBJ files.
• Terrain export now supports holes.
• New ContentComparison commandlet helps optimize content.
• Lightmass static shadows now have texture space filtering on by default, which smoothes out aliasing.
• Material editor Undo and Redo are now much faster.
• Added multiple camera offset support for particle modules and camera offset support for mesh emitters.
• Spawn at bone/socket now allows rotating mesh particles to the orientation of the bone/socket.