Unreal Engine 4.10 Release

Unreal Engine 4.10 Released!

[SUP][SUB]Not sure where it belongs, but there are game developers using Blender for assets in UE4, so I think it reasonable to mention. Mods feel free to move it wherever it suits BA best.[/SUB][/SUP]

This is a pretty cool release. Not so much because there is super glitzy features, but because a lot of the updates are coming from the community, being contributed back to the project. Also, as the code is open for perusal, there are some relatively simple features that perhaps people would like to bring to Blender, such as…

:slight_smile:

We have auto distribution in blender nodes :slight_smile: no need for a menu selection.

not shown in that gif, but in UE the ability to drag a noodle from a socket and release in empty space, and get the search bar and add a node is pretty neat and fast.

The distribution is the only thing we don’t have (you can align nodes by scaling them on X-Y axes), the new auto offset node though avoid these cluttering situations from the beginning…no fanboysm since i love what Epic is doing, but i honestly think it is Epic the one taking inspirations regarding Blender node tools.

And there are also experiments on fully auto alignment (Ton shared this via Twitter BTW)
[video]https://youtu.be/d0U0M0gnOl4?t=65[/video]

Or they are both taking inspiration from each other and other sources. I’m neither an Epic nor Blender fanboy and, let’s face it, they are far from the first companies/organisations to be doing this kind of thing. :wink:

Looks like something I did a some years back for a business consulting company looking to visualise company processes. They would collect everyone’s “inputs & outputs”, how long each of these took, and try to work out inefficiencies & bottlenecks in the process by graphing the process visually as links (the work done for other people) and nodes (the actual people). I used Graphviz for the organisation code. In the two years and three international companies I was supporting them through their consulting - there wasn’t a graph it couldn’t work out nicely & neatly.

ah sorry correct, distribution is not implemented, but auto offset.
yeah saw that twitter and checked out the github, didn’t download yet. but will do seems amazing.

One thing anyone can take from blender is the right-click any button/menu item in the gui and assign a hotkey there and then. no need for preference window and searching for that button you just looked at.

I’m sure there is an addon that will align nodes like that? Is it Node Wrangler?

I was looking for the auto-distribute functionality thinking I missed it (the auto-offset thing I’d seen). If they (BF devs) are seriously looking at doing that though, I would highly recommend using the Graphviz library. The code license is GPL compatible and I speak from experience when I say it does what it needs to both efficiently and with minimal effort.

gasp You mean right-click is bringing up a context-specific pop-up menu? That’s heresy! :wink:

@coljwood
node wrangler can probably do that (it has many cool features), but it is also very chortcut heavy.

if only they would fuse the features of both node systems u
I really like the auto-offset thing and the alt-drag funktion of Blender. Not to forget the Node Wrangler addon.
I like that I can drag from one pin of a node, release and get a searchbar to get another node in Unreal or get a node by holding a key an then right klick (like 1 for a single parameter, 3 for a 3d vector parameter and other keys…)

and sometimes I wish I could rightclick on a node and exchange it with a new node.
I think there are many tools to come that make it easier to work with nodes.

edit: oh and it would be nice if unreal could import blendfiles so I don’t have to play around with fbx and orientationaxes ^^

Something along the lines… blender script for vray in works by Juha Wiiala

+1 That looks awesome. :slight_smile:

I’m a fanboy of both!
To be serious, nodes are nodes. They aren’t copyrighted, so it is perfectly good to trade ideas!

Exactly my point and, more importantly, Epic has been open about people learning how to do things from their code so long as they don’t copy/distribute the actual code without following the license conditions.

I wasn’t meaning one company is better than another or who’s copying from who etc. I rememeber a thread on Epic forum where someone proposed to look at some of the functionality Blender nodes have, because honestly nodes in Blender have introduced some really fresh and super useful behaviours to interact with them.