001: Falling Out With Friends

Welcome to Unreal Outpost. Each week we’ll be collecting the best stories, tools and inspiration for the people who work with Unreal Engine. We’ll aim to be your guide whether you are a developer, artist or even film maker within the Unreal Engine ecosystem. Every day amazing things are built with the engine, this newsletter will be your lookout for what matters.

Every Saturday you can expect a collection of stories on how things work, tools to help you build your next project and a healthy dose of inspiration.

The Latest

Is Unreal Really Ready For 2D

Unreal has been synonymous with photo realistic graphics and projects powered by large team. In this in-depth run down Cobra Code tackles a largely un-reported side of Unreal, building 2D games. Covering what’s been built and what needs to be implemented this is a great resource for getting a 2D project up and running.

Implementing Actual Glass Into Unreal

Joshua Kerr breaks down why Unreal’s Cine Camera’s ‘perfect’ approach to optics may not actually be the most helpful when you are chasing a more realistic effect. Kerr’s Virtual Glass reimplements the imperfections of real cameras back into the engine to help you find the effect you might need in your next game or film.

Fallout and Virtual Production

One of the newest projects to dive into using Unreal Engine for its Volume is Fallout. Since it's based on the popular game series, it had some cool opportunities to use existing game assets and even make the volume a part of the story. With more game adaptations on the horizon, I'm curious to see if we'll start seeing more asset sharing between interactive and linear media. Blurring the boundaries between development of both mediums could open up some opportunities for the two to interact in future, especially with Fallout having it’s own live service game.

Toolbox

unDaw

unDAW is a new project to build more audio tools into Unreal Engine. While Metasounds and third party tools like FMOD offer powerful options for controlling audio in Unreal, unDAW is providing in-engine tooling to help you actually modify audio itself within the engine. Whether that be tweaking an existing track or building something new, unDAW gives you the option to stay in engine to create your next soundscape.

Ethos (Birdie & Friendshipper)

The good people over at The Believer Company have put together a set of git based tools to help make operating a remote team of both developers and playtesters much easier. Their open source eco-system Ethos, allows developers to manager their git repositories with ease through a nice front end. Birdie makes working with art within git repositories a breeze and Friendshipper irons out some of the headaches associated with playtesting by building on Ethos’ continuous integration system

Pinboard

Check out the latest art on our pinboard for the week:

We’ll see you next weekend. If you are looking for your daily fix of Unreal news check out the shorts on our Youtube channel. Over and out from the Outpost.

Want to see your work featured in Unreal Outpost. Reach out to Ollie here.