Unreal Engine 4 is now Free

[6souls]

Epic Games announces that Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free.

Anyone can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When shipping a game or application, developers pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. Epic succeeds only when creators succeed.

This is the complete technology Epic uses to build their own games. Unreal Engine 4 scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports major platforms; and, it includes 100% of the C++ source code. Epic’s goal is to give developers everything, so they can do anything and be in control of their own schedule and their own destiny. Whatever is required to build and ship a game can be found in UE4, sourced in the Marketplace, or built and shared it with others.

Epic’s founder and CEO Tim Sweeney elaborates on the Unreal Engine blog.

“In early 2014, we took the step of making Unreal Engine 4 available to everyone by subscription for $19 per month. We put all of our source code online, available to all who signed up. We flipped the switch and crossed our fingers.

The past year has been a whirlwind for everyone at Epic Games. Our community has grown massively. The quality and variety of creative work being done has been breathtaking. When we asked people to submit their projects to be shown this year at GDC, we had the challenge of picking just eight from over 100 finalists that were all good enough to show.

The state of Unreal is strong, and we’ve realized that as we take away barriers, more people are able to fulfill their creative visions and shape the future of the medium we love. That’s why we’re taking away the last barrier to entry, and going free.

In Epic’s 25 years as an independent company, we have seen no time of greater opportunity for developers than today. Whatever your development aspirations, Epic stands with you, both as a technology provider, and as a fellow game developer counting on UE4 to power our own games.”

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free
https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

[Jaxzer]

Unity 5 and Source 2 as well. Quite a day for aspiring devs

[Corrderio]

Great now my friend will be on my ass about this.

[The Stig]

Anyone got the quickest and easiest way to create the next FFXV?

I'll settle for FFXIII-3

[6souls]

Paragon Assets released for Free

Epic Games today announced that Unreal Engine 4 developers now have access to a full array of assets from Paragon, the company’s high-end multiplayer online battle arena game. The assets, built at a cost of over $12 million, include 20 AAA-quality characters, with their respective skins, animations, VFX and dialogue, along with over 1,500 environment components from Paragon. This content is now available free of charge in the Unreal Engine Marketplace, where developers may download Paragon packs to use in their own UE4 projects.

For those interested in importing Paragon characters into their projects, Epic recommends starting with Shinbi, who comes with an animation Blueprint. This can be used as a framework for animating the other characters in the Paragon packs. Epic is also shipping a sample map that is handy for testing and can be used as a baseline for creating more customized environments.

Available Paragon assets include:

• Characters: 20 Paragon Hero characters will be initially available including all skins for distinct character variants. The release also includes base meshes, thousands of textures, VFX and animation cycles, and dialogue with hundreds of sound cues. The character Shinbi comes with an animation Blueprint which can be tailored to specific needs. Epic sends special thanks to OTOY and 3D Scan Store for granting permission to keep intact the high-quality character materials using their facial and body scanning technologies as part of this release.

• Environments: The Paragon release includes over 1,500 environment assets created for the Agora and Monolith maps, including a sample map for developers to use and customize as desired.

• More to Come: Epic will release millions of dollars worth of additional Paragon asset packs beyond the initial $12 million offering through spring and summer 2018.

For more information and to register for updates, visit unrealengine.com/paragon.

Visit the Paragon Asset Release forum thread for additional technical guidance on how to get started using the Paragon assets in Unreal Engine 4.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/b...ssets-for-free
https://www.unrealengine.com/paragon
http://epic.gm/paragonfaq

Real-Time Ray Tracing demo

Epic Games, in collaboration with NVIDIA and ILMxLAB, today gave the first public demonstration of real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine. Real-time ray tracing is considered to be a holy grail for those creating high-end cinematic imagery, and one that signifies a leap forward in the convergence of film and games.

During today’s “State of Unreal” opening session at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the three companies presented an experimental cinematic demo using Star Wars characters from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi built with Unreal Engine 4. The demonstration is powered by NVIDIA’s RTX technology for Volta GPUs, available via Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR). An iPad running ARKit is used as a virtual camera to draw focus to fine details in up-close views.

Epic built the computer-generated (CG) scene using assets from Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi featuring Captain Phasma, clad in her distinctive armor of salvaged chromium, and two stormtroopers who run into her on an elevator on the First Order ship. In the tech demo, lighting is moved around the scene interactively, as the ray-traced effects including shadows and photorealistic reflections render in real time. The stunning image quality of highly reflective surfaces and soft shadows has never before been achieved at such a high level of image fidelity in Unreal Engine.

Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:

• Textured area lights
• Ray-traced area light shadows
• Ray-traced reflections
• Ray-traced ambient occlusion
• Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
• NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising

“Ray tracing is a rendering process typically only associated with high-end offline renderers and hours and hours of computer processing time,” said Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. “Film-quality ray tracing in real time is an Unreal Engine first. This is an exciting new development for the media and entertainment linear content worlds—and any markets that require photorealistic visualization.”

"At ILMxLAB, our mission is to create real-time rendered immersive experiences that let audiences step into our stories and connect with cinematic universes that look and feel as real as the ones on the movie screen. With the real-time ray-tracing technology that Epic and NVIDIA are pioneering, we are a pivotal step closer to that goal," says Mohen Leo, ILMxLAB Director of Content and Platform Strategy.

Epic Games worked closely with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA RTX technology available through the DXR API. Running on an NVIDIA DGX Station, the demo was brought to life via a collaboration between Epic’s dedicated graphics and engine team, NVIDIA’s world-class ray tracing experts and the technical ingenuity and creative artistry of ILMxLAB.

“Real-time ray tracing has been a dream of the graphics and visualization industry for years. It’s been thrilling to work with the talented teams at Epic and ILMxLAB on this stunning real-time ray tracing demonstration,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. “With the use of NVIDIA RTX technology, Volta GPUs and the new DXR API from Microsoft, the teams have been able to develop something truly amazing, that shows that the era of real-time ray tracing is finally here.”

A one-hour deep dive of how this scene was created and rendered will be presented today at 11AM PT in the “Cinematic Lighting in Unreal Engine” at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater and livestreamed to /UnrealEngine on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch.

The scene is running in real time at NVIDIA’s GDC booth, South 223, where show attendees can observe the content in Playback, Lit, Ray Tracing and Wireframe modes.

Epic Games will make support for NVIDIA RTX technology using the DXR API available to Unreal Engine developers later this year.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/b...lab-and-nvidia